While I’ve written about investing in the past, a lot of it is geared for active investors who want to maximize the return on their investments. However, many people want to be very safe in their investments – either not risking their capital at all, or putting it to very low risk. Moneyville, part of the Toronto Star, highlights two investments that give better returns than GIC’s and money funds and are worth looking into if you want to play it very safe.
Tags: investing, safe
Posts Tagged “investing”Over the years, a number of people have asked for advice on investing. While investing as a topic is large enough in itself, I find myself repeating some “pre-investing” advice before going into any actual investing advice. Here’s what I usually recommend: Pay off expensive debt. Credit card debt usually costs people double-digit interest. This is far higher than what most investors earn on their portfolios so a good “investment” would be to pay down this debt right away so that the funds can be divered to savings and investing after it’s gone. If you’re carrying a balance from month-to-month on any credit card, pay this down before saving or investing. Lower Your Expenses Saving and investing is often difficult because you don’t have funds available to put into your accounts. One of the ways to free up some cash flow is to cut down on your expenses. Where can you look for lower expenses? Take a look at your monthly recurring bills, they’re a good spot to shave some costs. Looking at my own just my Rogers bill, I can lower it by $50 a month just by getting rid of extra services like Visual Voicemail, speciality HD and movie channels, and moving to a slower internet plan. That’s $600 a year (more if you include taxes) that can be put into a savings account from adjusting just one monthly bill! Other places where you can cut is when you pay other poeple to do things that you can do yourself – housecleaning, dry cleaning, eating out, etc. Start Saving Saving is probably the hardest part to investing. The free cash flow from lowered expenses and extra money in your accounts is awfully hard to save instead of spend. This will require a lot of personal discipline, however there are some tricks you can use to force yourself to save. If you have an investing account or savings account, consider an automatic withdrawal that puts the funds into the account every month. Other options include payroll deductions from your employer – but these usually go into specific investments like your company’s stock plan or a limited set of mutual funds. Open an Investing Account Open an investing account. Many do not know this, but investment accounts are almost always free of charge to open. This is because the brokerages make money off trading fees, not account fees. Most even pay a very limited amount of interest if you just leave the savings there as cash. I often recommend getting a brokerage account where you bank, as the ability to move money in-and-out of the account is simplified and expedient. Stay tuned for part 2 – how to invest Tags: investing, rrsp, savings, tfsaFive years ago, when friends asked me about how to start investing, I usually suggested getting a discount brokerage account and buying a good mutual fund. However, over the past few years, exchange-traded funds (ETF’s) have exploded and now give people a much better option to start investing. The Toronto Star highlights some advantages to investing in ETF’s. Tags: etf, investing, rrsp, tfsaI’ve always wondered about this. The Globe and Mail just reported on the cost for foreign exchange transactions at the discount brokers. Turns out TD Waterhouse is the cheapest. They based their findings on buying 100 shares of a $25 stock, which would cost:
The Globe and Mail released a ranking of Canada’s online brokers. Qtrade ended up on top, with Royal Bank the top-rated large back with 2nd place.
Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world, however it’s amazing how it makes most of it’s money on just a few products. The Office and Windows products far outweigh any contribution by all their other services, including all of their online ventures, mobile ventures, hardware and gaming.
Google Finance recently announced Google Investing Indexes. It’s an index based on keyword searches of the Google engine tied to an economic activity. For instance the Auto Buyers Index graphs the search terms “car, blue book, toyota, kelly book”. What’s funny is how pervasive Yahoo Finance is. In the Google Finance and Insurance Index, “Yahoo” is one of the search terms. In the Google Investing Index, “Yahoo Finance” is used as a search term. Yahoo still dominates the financial aggregation portals, with Google Finance lagging quite a bit. At least Google doesn’t try to hide this fact.
I haven’t been an investor for long, but long enough to see the TSE change to the TSX change to the TMX. I wonder what name they will adopt next year? When I used to work at a bank, the amount of money they spent on adopting new corporate logos was staggering. I wonder how much these two changes have cost them. At least they have been getting some competition, some players in alternative trading platforms in Canada have started recently:
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