Canadian Personal Finance News | March 2015

March 1st, 2015 by Potato A reader writes in, asking about a particular mutual fund manager. They've read The Value of Simple, but aren't sure if they should switch to DIY index investing considering their particular funds have outperformed net of fees the past few years, and have won Lipper and Morningstar awards.

I always like to apply the process of elimination when making financial decisions because figuring out what to avoid is where most of the value can be found in a long-term process.

was convincing investors that volatility and risk were the same thing. This idea that risk cannot truly be measured by looking at volatility (as measured by standard deviation) is well-trod territory in the financial blogosphere so I won't go into it at length again.

I still am embarrassed by this memory. Five years ago I walked into an office on the twenty-fifth floor of the Manhattan headquarters of Time Inc. (which owns Fortune.)

Many people claim they don't earn enough to contribute the maximum amount to their retirement accounts, but the year leading up to retirement is the perfect time to stash away as much cash as you can. Or you could put the money in a Roth account and pay the tax now so that you can take tax-free withdrawals later on in retirement.

Asset allocation: why bother? Investors have long grasped that diversification between different sectors and asset classes is far more important to their ultimate returns than stockpicking - a choice of individual stocks. Many have offered new and

The cost to invest in mutual funds is often couched in terms of expense ratios and commissions. These are important structural costs and certainly worthy of your consideration. However, other costs are not so obvious that can eat deep into your investment return.

I made my first real investment in the markets around age 22. I was fresh out of college, newly married and had gotten my first "real job," which happened to be in the financial industry. I knew little, but I knew enough to know that an early start was going to be to my advantage many years down the road.

Earlier this month the Federal Reserve released the complete transcripts of all 11 policy-making meetings that took place in 2009. The financial media dissected every line item of the nearly 2,000 pages from these meetings.

Welcome to Year Seven of the post-financial crisis period. Or perhaps we should say that we are now firmly in the pre-crisis period given that, statistically speaking, the next calamity is probably right around the corner. It's been so long since the last major market event that investors have returned to one of their time-honored traditions-denying the link between higher risk and higher reward.

This post is the first in a series exploring common myths and misunderstandings about dividend investing. Dividend Myth #1: Companies that pay dividends are inherently better investments than those that don't. The goal of the series is to argue that many investors following a dividend-focused strategy may be better off with broad-based index funds.

Q: I would appreciate it if you could write an article contrasting the advantages and disadvantages of holding bond funds versus GICs. - A.R. All of my model Couch Potato portfolios include bond funds, and I'm frequently asked whether a ladder of GICs would be a good substitute.