Canadian Capitalist

Though many of my fellow bloggers have already reviewed this hot new book by Lee Eisenberg (check out these reviews by The Wealthy Boomer, All Financial Matters, Money and Investing, Consumerism Commentary, MyMoneyBlog and Free Money Finance), I will add my two cents and explore if some of the insights can be applied to [...]

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Growth in Value is written by a 20-something journalist who is a recovering growth stock-addict with a new focus on value investing. He promises to write about stocks, ETFs, countries and sectors he finds interesting and also about home ownership and makes a few posts every week.
Investorial, which stands for Investments + Editorials, is written [...]

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Last week, Tim Hortons (TSE: THI, NYSE: THI) went IPO at $27 and opened trading at $36, though there were rumours about bids for as much as $70. The stock has mostly been falling ever since, trading at just over $31 today. The people who got hurt are most likely retail investors who bought into [...]

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Since Google refers people searching for “Canadian Tax Brackets” to my website, here are some resources to help with our tax system:

Ernst & Young Canada Tax Calculators page offers personal tax calculators (though not for 2006 so far), RRSP Savings calculator and a handy one page summary of the tax brackets (which includes marginal tax [...]

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Just like the debate on RRSPs versus mortgage paydown (check the comments to the previous post), the debate on whether a personal residence is an asset or liability pops up every now and then. The reason the debate endures is that both sides have valid arguments:
Asset:

Everyone needs a roof over their head and a house [...]

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Remember the brouhaha over the cost of natural gas mere months back? Fortunately, we had a relatively mild winter, natural gas prices tumbled and Enbridge (TSX: ENB) announced recently that starting April 1, 2006, it will charge 33.8 ¢/m³ down 18% from the previous quarter. Natural gas has now fallen back to the price range [...]

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Jonathan Chevreau, writes in his blog about the single best investment that most people can make:
And it’s not Tim Horton’s or any individual stock. Instead, it’s an investment with a GUARANTEED high return and highly tax efficient. And it’s nothing fancy. It’s simply paying off your home mortgage as quickly as possible.
Mortgage pre-payment is especially [...]

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I read in the papers today that March has been designated as fraud prevention month. Here are the steps I take to prevent fraud in general and identity theft in particular:

Shredding all credit card receipts, debit card receipts or personal documents.
Not carrying my SIN card in my wallet.
Not giving out my SIN number unless it [...]

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Thanks to a post on Sitting Pretty Financially, I found an interesting article that talks about personal financial ratios that we could use to analyze our financial standing.
The three ratios that the article talks about are:

The savings to income ratio would be familiar to readers of The Millionaire Next Door. Savings is defined as [...]

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I am in the process of doing our taxes using QuickTax and the good news is we are getting a big fat refund from the Canada Revenue Agency. The bad news is we have given the government an interest-free loan. Sadly, the tax refund is an annual occurence as we use up the entire RRSP [...]

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