In this article we will turn our attention to TFSA, or Tax-Free Savings Account. Don’t let the name deceive you, though. It is important to understand which parts of TFSA are indeed tax-free. When you allocate your assets to TFSA, the initial deposit is “after-tax”, so, unlike RRSP, it does…

It is said that the reason for buying your life insurance young it the unbeatable price. This may be true, but the problem is that it is hard to map out future potential requirements for the money. And even with the unbeatable prices, you still don’t want to overpay, so…

Quite often personal finance becomes synonymous to retirement. And it is no surprise. Retirement, with longer life expectancy and active retirement lifestyles, is a significant part of a personal financial plan. Funds in retirement can come from many different sources, and employer-sponsored pension plans are some of them. In the…

I like to think about RRSP as one of the ways of allocating assets. Other ways to allocate assets could be: to keep cash on hand, to keep money in a chequing account at a bank to cover day-to-day needs, to buy an asset (such as a house) and many…

When I started getting interested in personal finance, I wondered if I could apply my years of experience in corporate financial planning to my personal financial planning. Companies create plans or forecasts for a number of reasons: giving management and investors confidence in the company’s progress, identifying detailed functional plans…

This is a cautionary tale about the importance of understanding the terms and the fees when you are working with a financial advisor selling you financial products. In short, run away as soon as you hear “front-load fees”. When our kid was born, we got contacted by a financial organization…

For many people, life insurance is not a usual subject for a conversation. It is something that people find hard to think about, or to discuss with their families. And yet, abstract from the fears and emotions, life insurance is an extremely important component of the personal financial independence plan. …

RESP is Registered Education Savings Plan, and, like RRSP or TFSA, it is one of the tax-advantaged accounts available in Canada. Like other such accounts, RESP has its own benefits and limitations, and so it may work for some goals but not for others. The largest benefit of allocating assets…

Using self-directed accounts to manage your investments requires a bit of maintenance, but it can be successfully done with a few useful tools at hand. Various parts of markets grow and decline at a different pace. So occasionally you need to rebalance, or bring your portfolio back to your desired…