If you follow investment information on social media, you’ve seen a variant of the following chart many times: U.S. stock prices are very high (as measured by the Shiller CAPE in this case), and we are near the right side of the chart today.  The intended message is that we are sure to have terrible U.S. stock returns for the next 10 years.  The R-squared value of 79% means that the correlation is strong.  All the points are close to the line that’s been fitted to them. But what’s the reality here?  Are we doomed?  The first thing to observe is that the chart covers 39.5 years.  That's close to 4 decades.  Doesn’t that mean there should be only 4 dots?  What they’ve done is collect monthly data so that there are 475 points.  But that means that one point overlaps with the next in 119 out of 120 months. With so little data, statistics are completely unreliable.  It could be that the correlation is much weaker and we just happen to be in a...

David Chilton, The Wealthy Barber, asked me on his podcast how people should make sure they can get elder care when they need it.  There are no great answers here, but maybe some hope. There just aren’t enough young people to help all the aging baby boomers who will need care in their homes or in a long-term care facility.  To be one of the people who doesn’t get left out, there are two major solutions: reserve some money for this purpose or cultivate good relationships with your children, or other younger family members, or possibly neighbours. This is as far as I got on the podcast.  It’s a gloomy picture.  But there is some hope: technology.  We may be a long way from fully humanoid AI bots that do our bidding, but lesser technology may come along to ease the burden of taking care of elders. We can imagine improvements in automatic vacuums for cleaning up messes, or better automation of a bed to move people to or from a wheelchair or a standing position....

Another great question David Chilton, The Wealthy Barber, asked me on his podcast is what big financial mistakes I see people making.  I’ll discuss two mistakes I see mainly among working-age people and two more specific to retirees. Buying expensive cars and trucks Paying $1000+ per month on car loans for the rest of your life isn’t a sensible financial move for most people.  You might need a car, but you don’t necessarily need such an expensive car.  In a moment of weakness and excitement, you sign the papers on that great car.  That sets up a cycle that’s hard to break.  You’ll be rolling one car loan into another.  The debt will keep growing and last for decades. I used to tell people to pay cash for cars.  I still think this is good advice, but people just blink now when I say it.  At the very least, think about the life burden your car payments will create and choose a car that fits your budget. Buying a house that is too expensive This is ...

A reverse mortgage is a loan against your home where you don’t have to make mortgage payments.  The lender gives you a lump sum or regular payments that are limited to a percentage of your home’s value, typically 20-60% depending on your age, and you get to stay in your home.  The mortgage balance grows until you die, leave your home for some other reason, or choose to pay it off. In a typical case, you or your estate pays back the lender from the proceeds of selling your home.  For most reverse mortgages, you get to stay in your home even if the debt grows to more than the home’s value.  The best information I could find is that this happens less than 1% of the time, which is hardly surprising given the extended real estate boom in Canada. House prices have been appreciating fast enough to keep ahead of the debt. The number of reverse mortgages held by Canadians is still just a tiny fraction of all mortgages, and even fewer reverse mortgages have run to completion....

One of the contentious questions David Chilton, The Wealthy Barber, asked me on his podcast is whether people should invest in real estate.  This is an emotional subject for many, and all of us come to the discussion with different experiences and skills. We are really asking three different questions here: 1. Should you own your home or rent? 2. Should you own rental properties? 3. Should you invest in REITs (real estate investment trusts)? Should you own your home or rent? There are many factors to consider.  Let’s focus on money first.  Are you better off from a purely financial point of view to own your home or rent a comparable home?  If you’re an emotionless robot when it comes to investing and saving, and you understand low-cost index investing, then the answer is usually that renting is better financially.  In rare markets, this can flip, but renting wins most of the time. But people aren’t emotionless robots.  They often invest their savings terri...

The subject of FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) has captured the imaginations of many.  Some love it and some hate it, because it’s a good strategy for some and not others.  Many variants of FIRE have evolved over time to suit people’s different needs and desires.  This makes it hard to speak generally about FIRE, but there are principles that we can use to judge a particular FIRE plan. Here is a general personal finance principle: Don’t cheat your future self by indulging your present self. The fact that we tend to discount the future too much makes this principle difficult to follow for some.  Roughly speaking, this principle means you should plan for your future consumption to match your current consumption.  In some cases, a carefully thought out plan can have some higher consumption in the present than in the future.  The key here is having a sensible plan rather than just living for today and ignoring the future. FIRE enthusiasts don’t have ...