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Short Takes: CRA Accounts, Asset-Allocation ETFs, and more

I enjoyed Nassim Taleb’s take on Bitcoin (below).  He doesn’t hold back.  There’s a huge difference between pricing Tesla cars in Bitcoin vs. asking for the Bitcoin equivalent of the car’s price in U.S. dollars.  He also says those who believe Bitcoin is a store of value are “ignorant.”  In a different tweet, he says that if you return your car, Tesla has the option to refund you the Bitcoin you paid or the dollar equivalent Bitcoin amount (whichever is less, presumably).  This doesn’t sound like much of a commitment to Bitcoin by Tesla.

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

Pre-Construction Deals Create a Dishonesty Option

How to Account for High Stock Prices in Retirement Spending

TurboTax Gets Medical Expense Optimization Wrong

Mutual Fund Deferred Sales Charges are Designed to Hide Bad News

How Much Savings Do You Need to Delay Starting CPP and OAS Pensions?

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Rishi Maharaj has a sensible take on the security problems with online CRA accounts that have left nearly a million Canadians locked out.  “The CRA should be commended for surveilling which usernames and passwords are being sold by fraudsters and proactively freezing those accounts. But that’s where the plaudits end.”

Boomer and Echo answers reader questions about asset allocation ETFs and their fees.

Ben Felix explains the elements of good financial advice on the latest Rational Reminder podcast.  Spoiler: it’s not picking stocks or investment managers.  As usual, his ideas are well thought out, but the hard part is quantifying the value of the advice, which will be different for each investor.  Even if Ben’s advice is superior to your own choices in more ways than just portfolio size, the question is whether his advice is enough better to overcome its cost.

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