Short Takes: Readers Vote, Hating Debt, and more

Jeremy at Modest Money hosted a poll of the best Canadian financial blogs. Thanks to all who voted for this blog.

Preet Banerjee did a very interesting TED Talk about changing the way we think about debt.

Tom Bradley at Steadyhand sees risk and valuation problems with dividend-based portfolios.

Money Smarts believes open houses are useful for selling your home even if some real estate agents don’t think so.

My Own Advisor tackles the question of how big a portfolio needs to be before it makes sense to go from mutual funds to ETFs. The answer depends on your costs and trading patterns. The time to switch is when ETF MERs and trading costs add up to less than the MER costs of the mutual funds. This will depend on how much you pay for trades, how often you trade, and other factors.

Big Cajun Man has been writing about his TD RDSP troubles long enough that TD tracked him down to talk about it.

Million Dollar Journey takes a look at how to optimize your split between RRSP and TFSA contributions. A good starting point is to just save something somewhere. Once you get the saving habit you can worry about optimizing where you’re saving the money.