I found my blog in a searchable list of over 2000 personal finance blogs . Apparently, I’m number 112 in Canada. I assume this is for several reasons. I don’t know how to set the blog up properly for viewing on phones. I’m not on Facebook. I use too many numbers and charts. The writing level is too high. Sometimes I take unpopular positions if I think the common wisdom is wrong. I don’t know much about SEO. I don’t fix broken links often enough. I have no idea why my Google PageRank got dropped to zero. I’m unwilling to pay anyone to fix some of these things. No doubt others could add to this list. I appreciate all my readers who fight through these problems and give me a reason to keep blogging. I managed only one post in the past two weeks: Seniors Staying in their Homes I was pickier than usual recently. Here are a couple of articles worth reading this weekend: Shawn Langlois has a funny chart overlaying predictions of economic doom on top of a steadily rising...

Rob Carrick says realtors and family members should stop pushing seniors to sell their homes . He portrays both groups as greedily seeking money. No doubt there are family members out there looking to get access to an early inheritance, but there’s no shortage of delusional seniors who won’t move but haven’t been able to properly maintain their homes in years and whose ability to care for themselves is in doubt. As it happens, my wife and I have been living through a period where four seniors in the family are having difficulty managing in their homes. In one case there was no sign of dementia, but she wouldn’t leave a rural home even after requiring 24-hour nursing care at a cost that would have drained her savings in a couple of months. In two other cases, dementia is an issue, but they insist on staying in a home they can’t maintain without constant help from overworked family. In a fourth case, she is already in an apartment, but often can’t even open her front door. We fo...

Here are my posts for the past two weeks: Powerless Employees The Year of Less Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Justin Bender pulls his asset location rules together in an excellent post where he goes through an example of allocating your money across a TFSA, RRSP, and a taxable account. The calculations may seem complex, but I use a spreadsheet that does them automatically for me. That way, I only have to figure it all out once. Justin is right that DIY investors may do well to just keep the same allocation within each account for simplicity, but if you’re paying someone else to manage your money, you should expect them to get post-tax asset location decisions right. Potato says that doing what you think adults are supposed to do is “cargo cult adulting.” It’s better to decide for yourself what being an adult means. I liked his example of some young people thinking they have to own a house before having kids. It’s true that I owned a house before h...

I don’t have to look far into my circle of family and friends to find compulsive shopping. This isn’t a problem I understand very well myself; I don’t like shopping and have many excuses for why I haven’t replaced old clothing. In her book The Year of Less , Cait Flanders gives us insight into shopping addiction as well as addictions to alcohol, other drugs, food, and television. Fortunately, she also describes her path away from the pain that drives these addictions. The centerpiece of Flanders’ solution to her addictions was a self-imposed yearlong shopping ban. Her rules were quite strict. For example, she banned herself from shopping for take-out coffee, clothes, shoes, accessories, books, magazines, candles, furniture, and electronics. She did allow herself to replace things that she needed but had worn out. During this yearlong shopping ban, she also got rid of most of her stuff. Her goal was to reduce her belongings to just the things she really used. This is one asp...

I’m used to bank branch employees having almost no power to overrule procedures enforced by their computer systems. Even branch managers can do little to override computer rules other than send requests to centralized bank departments. A recent stay at a Comfort Inn in Laval showed me that this way of running a business has made it to at least some of the hotel industry. We wanted to stay at the same hotel as others who were attending the same event as we were. We booked online and chose to pay extra to get a king-sized bed instead of a queen-sized bed. When we arrived, they said they had no rooms available with a king-sized bed. This isn’t too surprising. I’ve encountered this at even some high-end hotels when they juggle reservations trying to keep as many rooms booked as possible. What happened next surprised me. I accepted their apology for not having the room we booked, and I asked that they reduce our room rate to the queen-sized bed rate we were offered online. But t...

I managed only one post in the past two weeks: Serving as an executor Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Justin Bender analyzes asset location decisions between a TFSA and taxable accounts. These types of decisions are very easy to get wrong. Justin approaches these analyses in the right way. CBC tells a cautionary story about trying to send money to someone in the U.S. and having it seized at the border. The few times I’ve sent large amounts to another country, I did it by wire transfer rather than sending bank drafts. Canadian Couch Potato explains that short- and long-term interest rates don’t always move together. This is why bond funds haven’t been hurt much so far by rising short-term interest rates. A Wealth of Common Sense has interesting definitions of 3 levels of wealth based on your attitudes about spending. I’d say I’m just shy of level 2. Robb Engen at Boomer and Echo makes some excellent points about why you can’t count on today’s...

I haven’t been writing much lately because I’m serving as executor for an estate. If you’re considering serving as an executor, try to be realistic about how much work is involved. So far, I’ve found that everything is at least 5 times more work and takes 10 times longer than I expected. Even with the advantages of no longer working full time and having had a year or so to prepare, I’ve felt overwhelmed at times. The seemingly simple task of finding contact information for the beneficiaries took me a week and several calls to wrong numbers in Europe. I also have the advantage that the biggest beneficiaries get along well. But even so, we don’t see eye-to-eye on the best way to sell the largest asset, a home. Lesser assets like furniture, crystal, silver, and art cause more work than strife. It takes time to figure out how to sell these items for more than just pennies on the dollar in an estate sale. This experience has made me more determined than ever to do what I can to...