I got some good news for this blog: https encrypted connections are now working. Presumably, this means Google will stop punishing me in its page-ranking system. Time will tell. Here are my posts for the past two weeks: Replies to Emails I Usually Ignore Worry-Free Money Self-Interest or Bleeding Heart Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Rob Carrick has an excellent take on banks, how we should view them, and their influence on financial literacy efforts. Canadian Couch Potato interviews author John Robertson to discuss his book The Value of Simple . John is very knowledgeable about the complexities you can run into with the mechanics of investing in different ways. Trying to minimize these headaches is important. BDO Canada has a good summary of the 2018 Ontario Budget. This BDO web page has a link at the bottom to a pdf of the entire report. John Robertson takes on the false analogy that handling your own taxes and investments is like trying...

I don’t mind if the banks mistreat their customers because it just means I’ll get bigger dividends. I’ve heard comments like this from several people over the past decade. With stories swirling about bank employees up-selling customers on accounts and loans they don’t need and steering customers to expensive investment products, some bank investors just cheer on fatter dividends. In the short run, letting the banks do as they please may well make investors richer. But I’m doubtful that this is a good idea for the long run, even for people focused solely on self-interest. I’ll argue that you don’t need to have a bleeding heart to want better behaviour from banks. This issue is part of the larger trend toward bigger disparities in incomes and wealth. If these disparities keep growing, the masses will continue to call for (and vote for) higher taxes on the rich. To date, higher taxes have applied to incomes, but a day may come when we start applying direct taxes on levels of we...

People do a lot of worrying about money whether they are doing well financially or not. The truth is that most people just don’t know if they’re on the right financial track. Certified financial planner Shannon Lee Simmons offers solutions to this problem in her book, Worry-Free Money . I think her methods could help many people feel more in control of their finances. “If you don’t know what you can and cannot actually afford, every purchase feels terrifying.” It must be difficult to feel vaguely guilty every time you spend even small amounts of money. I’ve seen this guilt in some of my extended family members. Simmons is adamant that budgeting “is not the answer. Budgeting makes you feel truly broke, which leads to overspending, under-saving and general anxiety about the future.” Despite her repeated criticisms of budgeting, her approach looks superficially a lot like budgeting. But there are important differences. We all have moments when we abandon our usual spending r...

I get a lot of great feedback from my readers. I get other email as well. Here is another installment of replies to emails I usually ignore. Dear Mike, Leah, Kathy, Samantha, Nate, Thomas, Julia, Brent, Ray, and many others, Thanks you for sending unsolicited advertorials related to your employers. I suggest you try a little harder to disguise this “content” as news. I particularly enjoyed your repeated impatient follow-up emails demanding some sort of reply. Here is my reply. I’ve got a bunch of worthless old household items for sale. I demand that you head to my house immediately and overpay me for them. Sincerely, Michael -------------------- Dear George, Adam, Melissa, Ronnie, Ryan, and others, Thank for offering your crypto expertise or to put me in touch with a crypto expert. As it happens, this is an area I understand well. Your analysis is mostly irrelevant or wrong. Perhaps you should stick to guessing why the Dow went up or down today. Sincerely, Mic...

I managed only one post in the past two weeks, but it’s of significance to me: Why I Retired Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Robb Engen at Boomer and Echo gives the results from a study showing that financial advisors who give poor advice to their clients tend to act on this advice in their own portfolios. This suggests they don’t know that their advice is bad. This makes sense. I expect that most advisors’ financial knowledge is limited to whatever they learn from their employers’ training and sales materials. Gail Vaz-Oxlade says our Employment Insurance (EI) system is broken (in a post no longer online). She has a number of examples of people encountering senseless denials and delays. This reminds me of working for a large company that had periodic “travel freezes.” This just meant it was harder to get approval for travel, but not harder in any sensible way. You just got hit with a time-consuming process and arbitrary rejections that had nothing t...

Although I’m younger than the typical retiree, I retired about 8 months ago. It may seem obvious why someone would want to retire, but I’ve been reflecting on what caused me to take the plunge when I did. There were a number of factors that influenced my decision. 1. Adequate savings I wouldn’t have retired if I didn’t have enough savings. The thought of running out of money makes me conservative about my savings. But my best effort at analyzing my future spending and investment returns shows I have more than enough buffer. Even my wife seems (mostly) convinced we’ll be okay. 2. Autonomy I’ve never been very good at doing what others want me to do instead of working on whatever interests me at the moment. As I age, my desire for autonomy has been increasing. My employer gave me tremendous freedom to work on just about anything that might help the company. Even so, work chafed me when I wanted to do other things. 3. Taxes I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for me th...

Here are my posts for the past two weeks: Foreign Withholding Taxes on New Vanguard ETFs Measuring Returns in Different Currencies . I’m guessing this article bounced off most people, including any investment professionals who read it. The way we measure relative returns between countries if often wrong. Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Ahmed Kabil has an interesting article on Warren Buffett’s bet against hedge funds as well as other types of long-duration bets. Tom Bradley predicts a lean future for closet indexers, a term referring to mutual funds that charge fees as though they invest actively but are actually very close to being index funds. In Canada, such funds collectively hold hundreds of billions of dollars. Ellen Roseman explains how vendors can get your new credit card information when you get an updated card. Tom Spears goes through the things CRA auditors look for as red flags. Robb Engen at Boomer and Echo wrote an interesting “...