If you don’t already know what you are doing, you need to learn before managing your own investments. Take courses on invest- ing and read several books on the subject first. This isn’t an activity to be learned as you go along. The potential damage you can do to yourself is catastrophic.
Financial planning and investment [...]

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 [...]

Ever heard of a DRIP?  Chances are you didn’t hear about it from your advisor.  This is a subject that investment advisors and financial planners don’t want to discuss.  They’re worried that if you find out about Dividend Re-Investment Plans, they’ll lose business.
A dividend re-investment plan or a DRIP is a plan that allows you [...]

Exchange Traded Funds are an investment that many advisors don’t want you to know about. They would rather sell you mutual funds. You see, ETFs have almost all of the same benefits of mutual funds, but at a fraction of the cost. Less cost to you, the investor, means less compensation to your advisor. Therefore, [...]

There is a common belief among investors that the secret to building wealth lies in your ability (or your advisor’s ability) to hit home runs with your investing – and it is complete nonsense.  I’m not exactly sure who started this myth, but I know that it has been kept alive by some in the [...]

Value investing is a process of selecting stocks that trade for less than their intrinsic value. “What does that mean?” you might ask. Well, if you think about the earnings of a company in relation to the price of its stock, you start to get an idea whether the stock is cheap or expensive.
If the [...]

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 [...]