By: Allan Schieman
Friday, September 10, 2011
I just got off the telephone with a client who asked me several questions about investing in gold. While I’ve been preaching the importance of including gold in your investment plan for a few years now, I’ve received more question about gold in the last few weeks [...]

Retiring in this new financial world order requires a new approach to financial planning. An old world plan in the new world is a recipe for disaster.
Life expectancy for Canadians has increased steadily; this is a good thing. A Canadian male born in 1930 had a life expectancy at birth of 60 years; a female, [...]

Your financial planner doesn’t want you to know this: investments are just financial products.  The financial industry has been successful in convincing you that you’re ‘investing’ when you’ve just been buying products.
A mutual fund is a classic example of a financial product.  Like other products, mutual funds are manufactured and then distributed. They aren’t made [...]

I think the most overlooked and underrated strategy for funding retirement is the Systematic Withdrawal Plan (SWP).  If done right, a SWP is an excellent tax planning tool and can provide loads of tax efficient cash flow.  Not only is a SWP a great way to slash your retirement tax bill, but it can help [...]

Here’s a question for you.  If you were retiring tomorrow, what would you rather have: $1 million in your RRSP, or $1 million in your non-registered account?
Hopefully you picked the $1 million in your non-registered account.
Ideally, when you retire you want all of your money to be non-RRSP money.   Every dollar you take out [...]

Everyone who’s approaching retirement asks this question. It’s a question without a simple answer because it depends on several variables.
How much tax you pay. The more tax you pay, the bigger your nest egg needs to be. The less tax your retirement cash flow attracts, the smaller your retirement nest egg can be. Accounts like [...]

Early in my career I made a habit of asking the best-producing advisors I met the secrets to their success. One guy was all too happy to share his tactics with me, and I’m all too happy to be sharing them with you.
I’ll call him Shawn.
What Shawn told me to do was invent a fake [...]

Have you ever had the feeling you should sell your investments and hold cash in your investment accounts? Have you ever actually done it? Ever wished you had?
Most people don’t move to cash, or money-market funds, even though they really want to do so. Too often their advisor talks them out of it. I’ll bet [...]

If you don’t completely understand how your financial advisors are paid, you’re not alone. It’s a subject that your advisor doesn’t want to talk about and very seldom does. After all, if you really understand how he gets paid, it might trigger other difficult questions from you as you begin to learn of his biases. [...]

Most of the time when rates of return get distorted, the distortion exaggerates the upside and makes an investment appear more attractive than it really is. This is not always the case, however. Sometimes a distortion makes the investment look less attractive. This can be the case with individual stocks that pay dividends.
Barry is evaluating [...]