As I mentioned in an earlier post (See The Wealthy Barber is Returning Soon, July 6, 2011), I thoroughly enjoyed David Chilton’s The Wealthy Barber Returns (listed at $19.95 and available from Chapters). Instead of a regular review, I’m just going to list the ten reasons why I really liked this book: #10. Dave ditches [...]
I first read about The Investment Answer by Daniel Goldie, an investment advisor and Gordon Murray, a Wall Street veteran in a New York Times article (see A Dying Banker’s Last Instructions, NY Times, November 26, 2010). The book was billed a sort of investment Last Lecture for Mr. Murray, who was dying from brain [...]
The MoneySense Guide to Retiring Wealthy, edited by Duncan Hood, Dan Bortolotti (a.k.a. Canadian Couch Potato) and David Aston, is an excellent, concise 130-page guide to saving for retirement in every decade of one’s life. Featuring columns that appeared in MoneySense magazine over the years and packed with fact-filled sidebars, the book attempts to answer [...]
Compared to Registered Retirement Savings Plans (RRSPs) or even the relatively new Tax-Free Savings Accounts (TFSAs), Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs) are a low priority for the mainstream financial institutions. The reason is quite simple: relatively speaking RESPs are small fry for the big financial institutions. While Canadians hold more than $600 billion in their [...]
I have to confess that a new book called 10 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Retirement by Rein Selles, Jim Yih and Patricia French did not leave me gasping. But I did find the book to be very impressive because it contains the kind of straight talk that you usually don’t hear [...]
Traditional defined-benefit pensions in which an employer promises and guarantees an employee’s retirement income are becoming scarcer these days. As very few Canadians outside of the public sector being covered by DB plans, the vast majority of us now bear the risk of saving enough for retirement and investing those savings wisely. Unfortunately, the challenge [...]
Many Canadians have a debt problem. A recent report titled Where is the Money now: The State of Canadian Household Debt as Conditions for Economic Recovery Emerge by the CGA Canada showed how bad the debt situation is in many households. It found that even with the temporary relief afforded by a credit card or [...]
Jonathan Clements’ personal finance column Getting Going for The Wall Street Journal used to be a weekly must-read for many years until he left the Journal to work in financial services. His column ran for 14 years and touched on a wide variety of topics — everything from coping with bear markets to divorcing the [...]
The Big Short is Michael Lewis’ engaging tale of a handful of investors who saw the madness in lenders offering toxic mortgages (such as, and I’m not making this up, the interest-only negative amortizing adjustable-rate subprime mortgage) and rating agencies handing out triple-A rating on these mortgages like candy on Halloween Eve. The subprime mortgages [...]
The authors of this slim volume need no introduction. Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street is a classic that was first published in 1973 and is still in print. Charles Ellis is a legendary portfolio manager and author of Winning the Loser’s Game (I reviewed it here). They have combined forces to boil [...]
