Short Takes: Car Loans, Big Spenders, and more

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

Pension Rip-off

Tangerine Credit Card Changes

The Undoing Project

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Preet Banerjee reports that “car loans have quietly emerged as one of the major risks to Canadians’ household finances.” He goes on to give a practical example of how to get off the treadmill of car debt.

Kurt Rosentreter has some entertaining tough words for high-income people living it up. Apparently, he deals with a lot of boomers with big incomes who handle their money as badly as anyone else.

Finance Blog Zone has a long list of bloggers discussing how to manage debt (including yours truly). Seven of them caught my eye either because I found the ideas interesting or because I disagreed. I may write about the details next week.  (The address of this article seems to cause web crawl errors for my blog but still works: http://www.financeblogzone.com/advice-for-managing-debt/).

Tom Bradley at Steadyhand tells you who your best friend is when you’re worried about the markets.

The Blunt Bean Counter explains the budget’s measures aimed at professionals who use work-in-progress deductions and use private corporations.

Canadian Couch Potato takes a look at some new mutual funds from TD that hold broadly diversified index ETFs in percentages that change based on active investment decisions. While this is interesting news, I’ll stick with indexing that includes as little human discretion as I can achieve.

Robb Engen explains why he doesn’t invest in non-registered accounts. The dominant reason most people avoid non-registered accounts is that they never use up all their TFSA and RRSP room. In some cases, people have investments that aren’t allowed in TFSAs and RRSPs. In other cases, people have income too low to bother with an RRSP, but somehow managed to fill their TFSA. A commonly used reason is the desire to take advantage of the dividend tax credit. However, in most cases, this is misguided and people would be better off using their TFSA.

Big Cajun Man applauds rule changes that make it easier to apply for the disability tax credit.

My Own Advisor interviews Sean Cooper, author of Burn Your Mortgage.

Million Dollar Journey discusses how to deal with big banks trying to sell you products you don’t need and refusing to help you index your portfolio to reduce MER costs. He observes that if his “friend can reduce his portfolio drag from 2% to 1%, it can lead to a 30% larger portfolio after 30 years.” I assume this is just using the estimate of 1% for 30 years adding up to 30%. The actual increase is 35% taking into account compounding effects.