I came across yet another case of a furious investor whose advisor had promised a minimum return, but the portfolio lost money.  There is a lot wrong with this picture.  On the client side, they often believe that advisors have some meaningful level of control over returns and that advisors can somehow steer around bear markets, which is nonsense.  Advisors can choose a risk level.  The only way to guarantee a (low) return is to take little or no risk.  On the advisor side, I can only assume that many advisors are under so much pressure to land clients that they make promises they know they can’t keep unless they get lucky.  All the while, the management above these advisors know full well what is going on. Here are my posts for the past four weeks: Giving With a Warm Hand The Case for Delaying OAS has Improved Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Robb Engen at Boomer and Echo sings the praises of Vanguard Canada’s Asset Allocation ETFs....

Canadians who collect Old Age Security (OAS) now get a 10% increase in benefits when they reach age 75.  The amount of the increase isn’t huge, but it’s better than nothing.  A side effect of this increase is that it makes delaying OAS benefits past age 65 a little more compelling. The standard age for starting OAS benefits is 65, but you can delay them for up to 5 years in return for a 0.6% increase in benefits for each month you delay.  So, the maximum increase is 36% if you take OAS at 70. A strategy some retirees use when it comes to the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and OAS is to take them as early as possible and invest the money.  They hope to outperform the CPP and OAS increases they would get if they delayed starting their benefits.  In a previous post I looked at how well their investments would have to perform for this strategy to win .  Here I update the OAS analysis to take into account the 10% OAS increase at age 75. This analysis is only relevant...

I expect to be leaving an inheritance to my sons, and I’d rather give them some of it while I’m alive instead of waiting until after both my wife and I have passed away.  As the expression goes, I’d like to give some of the money with a warm hand instead of a cold one. I have no intention of sacrificing my own retirement happiness by giving away too much, but the roaring bull market since I retired in mid-2017 has made some giving possible.  Back then I thought stock prices were somewhat elevated, and I included a market decline in my investment projections to protect against adverse sequence-of-returns risk. Happily for me, a large market decline never happened.  In fact, the markets kept roaring for the most part.  As it turned out, I could have retired a few years earlier.  A large market decline in the near future is still one of several possibilities, but the gap between our spending and the money available is now large enough that we are quite safe.  ...