I managed only one post in the past two weeks: Biggest Mistakes Retirees Make with Their Investments Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Robb Engen explains one of the many predictable errors we make: the illusion of wealth. Preet Banerjee interviews Scott Terrio about the ins and outs of consumer proposals and bankruptcy. Scott has some crazy stories of how far people can get into debt. Canadian Couch Potato discusses robo-advisors with Professor Pauline Shum-Nolan. One of the themes is the fact that current robo-advisors aren’t very adaptable to the desires of clients in the types of stocks included in portfolios. I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, it’s good to give people what they want. On the other hand, when most of us act on our ideas about investing, it costs us money. Big Cajun Man appeals to people to apply for the Disability Tax Credit (DTC). There is a lot of money at stake.

I was reading an interesting article by Jason Heath titled Here are the six biggest mistakes retirees make with their investments . It made me think, but one of my thoughts isn’t what you might expect. I don’t want to pick on Jason because he’s a good guy who provides solid information in his articles. Like other Certified Financial Planners, Jason works primarily with wealthy people. Now, the definition of wealthy is different in each person’s mind. A person with a million dollars in investible assets might say the threshold of wealthy is $3 million. Someone with $3 million might say the threshold is $10 million. However, the typical Canadian would call the clients of CFPs wealthy. Jason’s thoughtful list of the most common mistakes he sees is based on his client base and not the typical Canadian. To be fair, it’s unlikely Jason wrote his own headline, and it’s the headline that I think is wrong. Here are a few of the biggest financial mistakes Canadian retirees have made...

Here are my posts for the past two weeks: Finance for Normal People Should You Delay Taking CPP and OAS? Leaving a Spouse to Pick up the Pieces Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: New securities will make it possible to short bitcoin . This is very tempting, but I have to consider the possibility that some government or major set of banks might choose to back bitcoin. I certainly don’t think this is likely, but it’s enough to stop me from shorting bitcoin. Jason Zweig interviewed Peter L. Bernstein. An important quote: “Survival is the only road to riches. You should try to maximize return only if losses would not threaten your survival and if you have a compelling future need for the extra gains you might earn.” John Bogle offers 7 rules of successful investing. Dan Bortolotti answers a question about fees for moving assets out of a brokerage. Will the new online brokerage cover these fees? Ted Rechtshaffen explains “two major [conflicts of in...

I’ve been helping an elderly relative sort out her finances and other matters since her husband died. I’ll call them Carol and Bob. This experience has made it very clear to me that both spouses need to at least be able to locate a record of account numbers and institutions, including banks, insurance companies, and utilities. For the first year or so after Bob’s death, a friend of Carol’s tried to help. They found a few paper bank statements, and wandered into branches asking for help locating all accounts. They were ultimately able to find several accounts and were able to get some of Bob’s accounts into Carol’s name. By the time I took over, I still had to get one of Bob’s TFSAs into Carol’s name, cancel some of Bob’s monthly automatic bank account payments, and get titles on the house and car fixed. It’s been months now and this is still ongoing. Of course, there have been many other things to sort out, but the most painful tasks involve doing battle with large organizat...

The default age to start collecting Canada Pension Plan (CPP) payments is 65. However, you can start anywhere from age 60 to 70. Less well known is that you can delay collecting Old Age Security (OAS) payments until age 70 as well. There are incentives for delaying these payments, and it’s not easy to decide whether to take lower payments early or wait for larger payments. Here I do an analysis that helped me make up my mind. OAS Let’s start with OAS because it’s simpler. The default starting age is 65. However, your payments increase by 0.6% for each month you delay starting to take OAS before age 70. So, if you wait until age 70, you’ll get $1.36 for every dollar you would have received when starting at 65. It’s important to understand that these amounts are indexed to inflation. Some people mistakenly believe that someone starting to collect at age 65 would have his payments catch up to the amounts received by someone taking OAS at age 70. This is not true. Consider...