Short Takes: Private Car Sales, Faulty Investing Assumptions, and more

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

How Much Do You Need to Save to Retire?

The Overconfidence Gap

Value of a Public Service Pension

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Ellen Roseman explains the trouble you can get into if you sell a car privately but the buyer doesn’t transfer ownership.

A Wealth of Common Sense brings us an excellent list of faulty assumptions about investing.

Dan Hallett gets riled up about income funds that trick investors with unsustainable monthly payments. It’s sad when people count on regular income that is certain to drop eventually.

Big Cajun Man got an answer from CRA about whether his son continues to be eligible for the Disability Tax Credit.

Kerry Taylor meets Sean Cooper, the millennial with a paid-off house, to find out if his critics are right about whether he received financial help from family and whether he lives an intolerably cheap life.

Preet Banerjee explains how the new Canada Child Care Benefit works. My main takeaway is that these benefits are way more generous than anything I ever got when my kids were young.

Boomer and Echo explain how they turned a blog into a profitable business. He says “bloggers shouldn’t have to apologize for advertising.” I agree with this, but I have a different objection. I don’t like it when a blog tricks me into reading what appears to be a useful article but is actually advertising. I don’t mind advertising if I can clearly see the difference between it and a real article.

My Own Advisor says that when it comes to “fools with tools,” it’s not the credit card tool that is the problem but the fool who wields it. I’d say banks, credit card companies, and retailers play a role as well when they use sophisticated methods to encourage people to live beyond their means.

The Blunt Bean Counter clarifies a complex tax issue: Capital Cost Allowance (CCA) on rental properties.