Short Takes: Financial Advisor Knowledge, EI, and more

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 to do with the merits of the travel. I’m not surprised to learn that EI does similar things. It’s hard work to reject only those who deserve to be rejected. It’s much easier to reduce costs by making arbitrary rejections.

Luke Alexander has some useful tips for air travelers. One concerns how airlines manipulate you using information about past searches for flights.

A Wealth of Common Sense tells the story of people who gamed lotteries for millions in profits. This is a case of government lottery designers failing miserably. I’d like to think that some lottery executive lost his job over the mistakes, but that’s probably too much to hope for.

Tom Bradley at Steadyhand reminds us that the important battle over mutual fund trailers rages on. We need to bring the costs of investing out into the open where investors can see them. In another interesting article, Tom explains that low interest rates and high debt can’t last forever. His assessment of the timing of higher rates: “Slow moving train wreck.”

Big Cajun Man explains the ins and outs of RDSP grants.

Preet Banerjee interviews Cait Flanders, author of the book The Year of Less.