If you’re investing in mutual funds you should learn how to do it as economically as possible. By reducing the cost of investing, you automatically increase the return the investments deliver to you. If you reduce the cost by 1%, you’ve increased your return by 1%.

Management Expense Ratio (MER)
This is the fee that every mutual [...]

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. [...]

Whether you are building a new back deck or a financial plan, you will need tools to do the job properly. If you have the right tools and know how to use them, you can defend yourself against lousy advice and misleading information.
The most important tool – knowledge.

The fact that you are reading [...]

Tax-Free Savings Accounts are an excellent way to build wealth. Like RRSPs, they grow tax-free. Unlike RRSPs, the withdrawals will never be taxed. This is one example where the government got it right. If you are 18 or older, you can put $5,000 per year into their TFSA. In five years, you can be sheltering [...]

All mutual funds that are sold on a deferred-sales charge basis allow investors to withdraw up to 10% of their investment annually without triggering any DSC fees. This allows retirees to purchase DSC funds in their RRIF or in their systematic withdrawal plans (SWP) and be able to make withdrawals of up to 10% without [...]

This is Theodore and Linda Jensen’s Story.
Theodore spent many years working for a large oil and gas company in Calgary.  He had a senior position, a corner office and he was well paid.  Like a lot of his counterparts, Theodore could have worked his whole career there and retired with a nice pension at about [...]

If you like some of the benefits of mutual funds but still don’t like the cost, then index funds might be a good way to go.
An index fund is a mutual fund that invests passively in a particular market index. It is not like a typical mutual fund, where a money manager researches and then [...]

Advice is cheap and plentiful, especially lousy advice.  Good advice, while hard to find, can be extremely valuable for your financial plan.  How can you tell if the advice you’re getting is good or bad?   You need to understand the source.  Meaningful, unbiased advice is out there.  Asking your advisor these 12 questions will help [...]

Most people don’t understand the difference between average rate of return and actual rate of return and become easy targets.  They end up buying bad investments because they are misled by posted performance numbers.  If you don’t understand the numbers, you might make mistakes when investing your money.
Your advisor knows the difference between average and [...]