Death. Not the most uplifting topic but one that should be considered in any financial plan. Whether it be due to inertia, or maybe not understanding the importance of having a Will, the majority of Canadians, don’t have one. Below I discuss some of the risks of not having a Will and how it can impact your loved ones:
Investing in the index is when you seek to replicate and hold a broad market index such as the S&P 500 or the S&P/TSX Composite Index. These indexes are a collection of stocks/companies. For example, the S&P 500 holds the 500 large-cap U.S. companies in proportion to their size (market cap). In index investing, you are looking to match the returns of the broad market rather than trying to beat the market.
The equity markets were up almost across the board in 2019 so anyone invested in index funds had a great year. For example, if you had an 80% equity, 20% fixed income type growth portfolio of ETFs you would likely have achieved over a 17% return in 2019! However, whether our portfolio did great (like last year) or poorly (like the year before), our perspective should be the same.
Passive investing refers to the method of buying and holding investments over the long term. In addition to minimizing costs due to frequent trading, the overall effort to manage the portfolio is low, thus the term ‘passive investing’. The most common form of passive investing is investing in the stock market indexes, or ‘index investing’.
In Canada, married couples have the opportunity to use income splitting strategies. The idea is to minimize taxes your family pays by moving income from one spouse (who is at a higher tax rate) to the other spouse (who is at a lower rate).These audit-friendly strategies can help you avoid paying unnecessary taxes!
Death. Not the most uplifting topic but one that should be considered in any financial plan. Whether it be due to inertia, or maybe not understanding the importance of having a Will, the majority of Canadians, don’t have one. Below I discuss some of the risks of not having a Will and how it can impact your loved ones:
With the acquisition of Kawhi Leonard to the Toronto Raptors, this has become an unexpected piece of household terminology: Load Management. If you’re anything like the fans in my house, you’ve probably mumbled to yourself more than once, “What does that even mean??”. Well, I don’t have answers regarding Kawhi’s play time, but I will offer a primer on another type of ‘load management’ that could help your portfolio make it deep into the post-season!
A retirement projection can be the basis for your own "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. Should I take some nice vacations with my kids now? Should I buy that sports car? Will I have enough when I am 65 to travel? The only way to really answer these questions is to take a look at your finances NOW and how they project out to the FUTURE.
We are almost in 2019! Here are 5 financial planning tips as we head towards the end of the year to help optimize your situation. While some actions should be done by the end of the year in order to qualify for this year’s taxes, there are some actions that are good practice to do once a year. The end of the year (and the beginning of next year) is a great time to look at it.
TFSAs are greatly overshadowed by the RRSP as a retirement account. The RRSP program has long been the default retirement program for most Canadians but is it the best retirement solution? Although it has been around since 2009, the TFSA program, with a 2019 limit of $63,500, is sizeable enough to be given serious thought as a retirement or long-term savings plan.
