Short Takes: Bank Misdeeds, Investing Simply, and more

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 to perform your own root canal. I particularly liked the part where he says that some aspects of taxes and investing are more like brushing teeth than doing a root canal.

The Irrelevant Investor looks at a list of investment options offered in his friend’s retirement plan and says “I wouldn’t wish this lineup on my worst enemy.” Sadly, this list of options is better than the one I had to choose from at my former employer. Costs are much higher in Canada.

The Blunt Bean Counter discusses the types of CRA information requests he is seeing for corporate and individual tax filers.

Robb Engen at Boomer and Echo analyzed some of his readers’ portfolios and found investment fees to be a big problem.

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