Short Takes: Driving Undercover in Uber and Lyft, and more

Before launching into this biweekly roundup, our friend the Blunt Bean Counter played a role in a BDO Canada survey of business owners and non-business owners about retirement and wealth. Here are some of their findings:

1. Business owners plan more for retirement than non-business owners but feel less on track.
2. Almost one-third of business owners plan to work part-time after retirement – compared to 12 percent of the general population.
3. More than one in three business owners plans to retire in the next five years.
4. Financial support for children was more common among the business owners than among non-business owners.

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

The Dividend Puzzle

Portfolio Optimization

The Annuity Puzzle

The High Cost of Paying Property Insurance Monthly 

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Mr. Money Mustache describes his experience driving for Uber and Lyft. He has a number of suggestions for making the system exploit drivers less.

Canadian Couch Potato interviews Nobel Prize winning professor of economics, Robert J. Shiller. I found Shiller’s remarks on real estate to be particularly interesting.

CBC Marketplace reports that car dealerships push long-term loans and disguise “negative equity,” which means the debt that results from owing more on your car loan than your car is worth.

Jason Zweig explains that not all index funds are run well and sometimes investors suffer.

Garth Turner found a real estate agent who makes it sound like the mortgage rule changes will make you lose money.

Big Cajun Man found that while he was ill, he let parts of his personal finances slide.

The Blunt Bean Counter explains how Canadian CPP/OAS and U.S. Social Security are harmonized with a “Totalization Agreement” between the two countries. See the first post on this topic as well.

Boomer and Echo review Dollars and Sense by Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler. It’s worth taking a chance on any book written by Ariely.