You should be lowering your MERs, i.e. management expense ratios whenever it makes sense to do so. In short, the MER is the price that you pay for the investment product that you’re buying. It’s a percentage of your investment that is paid to the company that put the product on the market. MERs can […]
As a non-expert financial person, my advice to nearly everyone is to adopt a buy and hold strategy because it works over the long-term. When the pandemic was declared in March 2020, the stock market took a dive. And it wasn’t a sweet, gentle decrease either. It was a stomach-churning drop that saw me lose […]
I’m going to take a leap of faith and assume that, if you’re reading this, then you also wish that you made more money. You work hard – you’ve got bills – there are things you want to do with your money. However, it seems like there’s never enough money to go around. You’ve applied […]
When I started investing, I had no idea what I was doing. It’s true. I was in my early 20s, and my local newspaper had a column about personal finance. I’m older than the internet, so I grew up reading newspapers. I’ll never forget a column about David Chilton’s book The Wealthy Barber. That book […]
The management expense ratio (MER) is the percentage of your portfolio that you pay to the company that sells you the index fund, exchange traded fund (ETF) or mutual fund that you hold in your portfolio. The fees for these products must be disclosed to potential buyers. Thanks to the wonder that is the internet, […]
It’s been 4.5 months since the World Health Organization declared that the globe was in the grips of a pandemic. Since then, there has been much upheaval in people’s lives due in no small part to the financial impacts of lost jobs, the inability to travel, and social isolation. What are we supposed to do […]
How are you doing today? I hope that you’re ignoring the gyrations of the stock market and going about your business of self-isolating, washing your hands, and self-distancing. They might not be the most exciting activities, but they will flatten the curve and help to avoid overburdening our hospitals. As I approach my golden years, […]
One of my life’s goals is to build a nice, solid flow of passive income without getting a second job. The way I decided to do this was by building an investment portfolio using a dividend-paying exchange traded fund (ETF). I think of the individual units in my ETF as Little Money Soldiers whose sole […]