Investing and Personal Finance
From the monthly archives:
Welcome to the August 28, 2009 Edition #104 of the Carnival of Financial Planning.
The Carnival of Financial Planning takes a long-term view of personal financial planning for individuals and families. We focus on efficient and sustainable personal financial planning practices that can lead to lifetime financial security.
This edition is arranged by subject heading, so that [...]
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Light Usage
7-Eleven SpeakOut Wireless is one of the best pay as you go deals available in Canada. You pay $100 + tax and it is 20 cents a minute and 4 cents a text message incoming and outgoing. The airtime expires in 365 days. Here is the catch: they charge you 79 cent a month [...]
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Scott Adams writes some of his business ideas on his blog, and he says people react in one of two ways, they tell him either: it’ll never work dumbass or someone’s already doing it dumbass (and they provide a link). Both are valid reactions to any of my business ideas .
A few years ago [...]
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I’m a big fan of inline skating – or “roller blading” as I like to call it. I got my first pair of skates which were the original Rollerblades back in the mid-80s. Rollerblade was the original inline skate company and I had to order them from somewhere in Quebec. It wasn’t until probably the [...]
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This post is part of our scam category. With scams the best defense is often to discuss them and let people who haven’t run into them know how they work. Unfortunately, talking about scams can seem like a “how to” for scam artists, which IS NOT my intention here. I always love reading about scams [...]
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I mentioned in a recent post how stories influence public policy. Social supports are sold on the idea of a poor downtrodden individual who has a run of bad luck, and putting a system in place to catch them before they hit bottom. It may be a woman with children trying to escape [...]
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Mike and Trent are in Las Vegas and Mike has just lost a hand of blackjack after Trent advised him to double down.
TRENT: I’m telling you, baby, you always double down on an eleven.
MIKE: Yeah? Well obviously not always!
TRENT: Always, baby.
MIKE: I’m just saying, not in this particular case.
TRENT: Always.
MIKE: But I lost! How can [...]
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Confucius says “Man without smiling face should not open store”
When I lived at Bathurst and St. Clair, in Toronto years ago, there was a steady stream of new businesses opening and closing. It was great for me, as I loved to try new restaurants, but it got to the point where I could tell when [...]
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Everyone loves a nice vacation – whether it involves driving a short distance to visit family for a couple of days or flying to the other side of the globe to go snowboarding. The big problem with vacations however is the cost – most of us have budgets that are limited in some way and [...]
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Some time ago Mike’s post on the Toronto Garbage Strike struke a cord with readers and generated 85 comments. A large amount of the discussion focused on unions (from a philosophical perspective more than that specific union or strike). One comment that had a particularly interesting part to it (from semi-frequent commenter Brendan) focused on [...]
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As I mentioned recently, I got my 1% rebate from RBC and want to come crawling back transfer my money back to my favorite broker – Questrade. There is one huge reason why I’m such a fan of Questrade and that is money – their $5 trades are the cheapest in the business and that [...]
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Manulife Financial cut its dividend by a whopping 50%. They still made $1.8 billion in Q2 so if anything it’s probably a good buy since the stock dipped 15% today. The company hasn’t done a good job managing the risk of its variable-annuity products over the last few years so this move was made to [...]
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The Bag Lady recently posted about Daniel Suelo, a man who has “quit using money like a bad drug“. I always find people, like Charles Long, Don Schrader or the Freegans to be interesting in their ability to opt-out of the Western economic and social system and chart their own course, living how they [...]
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Valuation of real estate properties is quite difficult – in fact it can really only be done within a fairly broad range since in my opinion it is just too hard to try to accurately predict the sale price of a house. The title of this post should have been “How to guess at real [...]
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“Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert provides an accessible overview of Dr. Gilbert’s work at Harvard in the field of psychology. It is written in a style similar to that of Malcolm Gladwell or Steven Levitt, taking interesting concepts and playfully exploring the consequences and justifications of them.
Gilbert’s central idea in the book is [...]
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Please note that this post is very Toronto-centric, very rant-like and also contains a fair bit of fantasy. Your challenge will be to determine what is truth and what is fiction.
I read in the Star today that apparently one of the negotiated items in the City of Toronto outside workers strike (aka “The Garbage Strike”) [...]
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