Short Takes: Low-Income Retirees, Not for Profit Credit Counselling Debt Collectors, and more

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

Emotional Money Choices

CPP and OAS Breakeven Ages

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Preet Banerjee and Liz Mulholland appear on TVO to discuss financial realities and strategies for low-income retirees. Preet also interviewed the team from Passiv who offer a service to keep your DIY portfolio at a discount brokerage balanced for only $5 per month.

Doug Hoyes and Ted Michalos say that not-for-profit credit counselling agencies are now just debt collectors funded by lenders. I’d be happy to read a rebuttal, but they make a very compelling case.

Canadian Couch Potato gives us a new Excel spreadsheet for rebalancing portfolios of ETFs. The new feature is that it handles ETFs that consist of more than one asset class, such as the new all-in-one ETFs. This spreadsheet will certainly help DIY investors, but I prefer to use Google spreadsheets because they can look up stock prices. I just have to record changes in the number of ETF units rather than enter dollar amounts every time I want to rebalance.

Andrew Hallam makes the point that the currency an ETF trades in doesn’t affect the performance of its underlying investments. I’d go even further. If you buy Canadian stocks, you’re making less of a bet on the Canadian dollar than it seems. Same applies to buying stocks in other countries.