Recent proposed changes to TFSAs are creating a bit of a stir in the media and blogosphere. What’s all the fuss about?

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise, was a successful writer in the 1920s and 1930s who earned $500,000 (U.S.) a year in today’s prices. Yet he and his family could never seem to save despite concerted efforts to budget and “accumulate capital.”  William J. ...

In the previous post, I had linked to an article by a financial advisor who had painted a rather bleak picture in regards the level of service provided by financial advisors remunerated through trailer fees and other embedded commissions. It suggested that financial plans were performed at even lower rates than ...

A reader sent in an email with an interesting supplementary to the claim that trailer fees represent the cost of financial advice (in Part I). As you may recall, MacKenzie Financial’s publication claimed that an apples-to-apples comparison of ETFs to mutual funds required that the ETF orange be converted into an ...

Here is the second part of the post on the ETF vs. mutual fund debate ….

Oh my! Mackenzie Financial, the biggest mutual-fund family  in Canada, has fired a broadside at exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Financial columnists Ellen Roseman and Jon Chevreau have recently commented on the critique, which can be found on the Mackenzie Financial website under the title ‘I thought I wanted an ETF.’ Here are ...

With the Canadian dollar rocketing upward by 25% against the U.S. dollar since March, the benefits of foreign diversification are to be had with less gnashing of teeth. That is, if a long-term Canadian investor were to begin diversifying outside the country now, their U.S. assets will likely spend more ...

It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Superman! No wait…. it’s the loonie, a.k.a. the Canadian dollar. It’s closing in on parity with the U.S. dollar and by the looks of it, might blow past this psychologically important milestone before you finish reading this post. 

Bedtime reading for my 6-year-old son last week included a children’s book on space exploration by Mary Kay Carson. As I read out loud to him, one thing that caught my attention in this nicely done tome was the similarities in the childhoods of two pioneers in space rocketry, Konstantin ...

A previous post on bond ETFs elicited requests to explain why it is important to look at the yield to maturity instead of the yield quoted on financial portals like Yahoo Finance. Just why, for example, is it misleading to use Yahoo Finance’s quote of 4% on the iShares Canadian Short-Term ...