Investorial

Welcome to the readers from the Carnival of Personal Finance!

2Million, the host for the 48th Carnival of Finance, was kind enough to accept my submission to the carnival. This was actually my first submission to any carnival. I won’t be submitting an article every week because I’d rather submit quality posts and stay on topic. But every once in a while, I feel a need to share!

For new readers to Investorial, this is a blog whose mission is about exposing media influences and discussing their effects on its audience. We’ll touch on media figures like Jim Cramer, investing manias, and not forgetting to have a few laughs along the way!

I’d like to invite you to stick around and check out what Investorial has to offer! Grab the RSS feed or subscribe to email updates! Stay tuned as I’m currently working on busting/explaining a very basic financial myth in the next few days!

Here’s wishing all the mother’s out there a very happy mother’s day! Special thoughts are also going out to my mum this day and every other day of the year. I have not blogged much about my personal life and how it related to my views on finance, but today is a great day to share with you how my mother influenced my financial perspectives.

My mother has been the epitome of frugality and financial sensibility. The first important thing she would advice is to start consistently saving for your future. She also understands that you cannot avoid risk, but should instead strive to learn about it so that you can manage risk. When I was young, (more…)

Let me preface the remainder of this article by saying that calling this study inept is indeed generous. Does anybody feel like they are being fattened up for the slaughter like those brokers that screamed “tech stocks forever” in late 2001?

I read a recent Financial Post article that is helping to keep the well oiled financial marketing machine running. What’s selling like hotcakes off the shelves? One only has to look at the artificially propped up TSX composite index to realize that trusts (especially oil income trusts) are the ’special du jour’. First the article attempts to provide damage control.

The recent headlines generated by business income trusts cutting payouts have led some investors to a simplified view of the world of payouts: Trusts’ distributions bad, common-share dividends good. Right?

Wrong, according to Scotia Capital’s trust analysts. They compared the payout history of business trusts against common equities since January, 2002, using the members of the Scotia Capital business trust index and all stocks in the S&P/TSX composite index.

First, have you ever known trust analysts to signal that trusts are bad during its boom? Second, that’s only 4 years worth of data! If we looked at the stock market narrowly from 1997 to 2001, everything was smelling like roses too! Using trending data to glorify study results means that the underlying fundamentals are disregarded; thrown out the window in favour of what’s looking good. (more…)

Today, we are putting the finishing touches on the series, Rich At Any Age - A LifeCycle Guide To Personal Finance, by taking a look at financial living in your 60s. I can hear you already - why not go beyond the 60s? That’s a question you have to ask MoneySense.ca, who originally organized the series. This is also a perfect time to challenge other PF Bloggers out there who feel they can collect together articles that are relevant to people living in their 70s, 80s and beyond! Without further delay, I present …

Freedom At Last!
Congratulations — you’ve made it to retirement, the Holy Grail for people still hauling a nine-to-five workload. After decades of socking away money in your RRSP (or IRA/401K) and watching your paycheque get skimmed by pension contributions, you’ll finally get to enjoy that money in your 60s. Before you do, though, you’ll still have to (more…)

It has been a while since our last housing bubble update! For the people living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), you may want to file this under believe it or not, but I didn’t believe it until I read about this $45 million dollar home listed for sale on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) in the papers this morning.

[...] in Oakville is not only the most opulent property ever offered for sale in Canada, it is the most visible symbol of a real estate market gone ballistic [...]

A quick search on mls.ca for the Oakville region yielded not one, but TWO houses for sale at $45M and one for sale at $21.9M. Here are the stats and pictures on both the $45M estates: (more…)

We are getting closer to the end of the series, Rich At Any Age - A Life Cycle Guide To Personal Finance. So you made a decision on how to live your financial life in the 40s. But that’s nothing compared to crossing the big FIVE-OH. Living half a century is something to be proud of, but are you planned and ready for the next half? What do you need to know? Let’s find out!

Show Time
By the time you reach your 50s, you’ve got a lot to look forward to. Suddenly retirement, which once seemed as far away as Pluto, is coming within reach. It’s time to start thinking about when you can stop working — or at least when you can slow down and ease into retirement. If you’re no longer supporting (more…)

Day 3 of the series Rich At Any Age - A LifeCycle Guide To Personal Finance puts you at a fork in your financial path. You’ve dug yourself out of the crammed life of your 30s. But how would you react to the next decade of your life? It’s no wonder that mid-life crisis usually begins at the beginning of your 40s! Remember to supplement this article by reading the related MoneySense.ca articles!

Prime Time
Your 40s are the years when you finally begin to see the fruits of your hard work. But not everyone reacts in the same way. On the one hand, you may find yourself becoming more cautious as retirement draws closer. On the other hand, you may feel that after two decades of working hard to advance in your job, you deserve a year away from the office. Maybe you’re (more…)

After my previous blog on Jim Cramer, you may feel that I have a strong opinion of the person and the show. I thought I should perhaps sit through an entire show of Mad Money to justify my decision, and guess which show I saw? It was funny watching the students at the University of Michigan egg on Jim; turning the show into a financial version of Jerry Springer with all the hooting, hollering and let’s not forget the booyahs.

Obviously my opinion has not changed regarding Cramer. But I realized that Cramer is like a durian. For those who don’t know, the durian is a tropical fruit I loved eating as a child. You won’t find anybody without a strong opinion of it. Fans will call it the king of fruits, while others will call it the stinkiest thing they’ve ever smelled. There are simply no middle-ground opinions.

If I’m blogging negatively about Cramer, some people must be liking him right? I searched and found Frank Barnako’s blog about 3 Cramer fan sites. For those who don’t know Frank, he is a CBS MarketWatch editor/exec. I am a long-time reader of Frank’s MarketWatch columns and was one of the first bloggers to (more…)