Close Friend:  My wife and I are just a year away from being able to start our CPP benefits when we turn 60.  I’m not sure if we should start them right away or wait until we’re older to get bigger benefits. Michael James: I don’t usually get involved with giving this kind of advice about people’s specific situations, but you’re a close enough friend that I’ll try to help.  Let’s go through a standard checklist of questions to help you decide. CF:  Fire away! Do you need the money? MJ:  The first question is “Do you need the money?” CF:  Of course I need money.  What kind of question is that? MJ:  Hmmm.  You’re right.  That question isn’t very clear.  I think the idea is whether you need CPP benefits to be able to maintain your standard of living. CF:  Well, I’m retiring in a few months, and I don’t really know what standard of living I can afford. MJ:  Another good point.  Let’s try to make the question more precise....

Recently, I had some trouble getting a sensible limit on my new credit card because I wasn’t given a chance to properly explain my capacity for making payments .  I finally got to speak to a human at BMO who eventually increased my credit limit.  She told me that valid sources of income include investment income.  However, she seemed to be reading a script and couldn’t expand on whether that only meant taxable income, or if it includes any type of investment return (such as unrealized capital gains).  So, I just presumed that unrealized capital gains were fine and got my credit limit increase. The larger lesson here is that getting credit after retiring can be challenging.  So, be careful about giving up a high-limit credit card until you’re sure you can replace it.  My efforts to tell BMO the size of my portfolio (mostly held by their bank) fell on deaf ears.  An eccentric person with $20 million in a chequing account at BMO couldn’t get a credit card...

With each passing year I’ve been spending more time in the U.S. during Canada’s winter.  When I was young I embraced winter, but not so much now.  I guess I’m becoming a snowbird.  Over the years I’ve paid a lot in currency exchange fees, but I’ve finally done something to cut these fees. Until recently, I just used a Canadian credit card to pay amounts charged in U.S. dollars.  This has felt painless, because the credit card company automatically applies an exchange rate so I can pay my bill in Canadian dollars. Hidden in the exchange rate my credit card company uses is an extra 2.5% fee.  Most people, myself included, don’t know the exact fair exchange rate between Canadian and U.S. dollars at any given moment, so it’s easy to forget about this extra fee.  However, almost all Canadian credit cards charge this extra 2.5%. So, when I recently spent a little over US$6000 to rent a nice place and was charged nearly CDN$8000 on my credit card, roughly CDN$200 ...

Over the past decade or so, I’ve read many articles about Tesla that confused me.  It took me a while to figure out that a lot of the nonsense originated from oil “boosters” and supporters of competing car companies.  But, even after filtering out these “stories,” I still found some articles confusing.  I realize now that many writers discuss Tesla the stock instead of Tesla the technology company.  I’ve never cared about Tesla stock, but I’m fascinated by Tesla the technology company.  They were incredibly ambitious, and failure was all but certain.  Yet they succeeded.   Tesla remains dedicated to excellent engineering and technology.  As a Tesla car owner, I know that their cars have some issues like any other car, but they seem committed to correcting their errors, as I can see from the frequent software updates I get.  Overall, my Model 3 has been the best car I’ve ever owned.  That said, I would buy a competing electric car if a be...

Recently, I applied for a new credit card.  Among the questions I had to answer was ‘What is your income?’  Before retirement that was an easy question; I’d just tell them my salary.  But now that I’m retired, I’m not sure how to answer it. I have no salary.  I have no workplace pension.  I’m not drawing from CPP or OAS yet.  There’s nothing I can point to that is the rough equivalent of a salary. I chose to answer the question with my previous year’s taxable income.  However, that number has little relationship to what I can afford to spend.  A big chunk of my spending comes from non-registered accounts that contain savings that have already been taxed. I do draw from my RRSPs, but this is only for lifetime tax efficiency.  Late in the year I withdraw the right amount to manage my income up to the top of a particular tax bracket.  I could just as easily have an income near zero and collect the HST rebate. So, my taxable income for the y...