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Never budget again!

OK, does any of this sound familiar to you...  You accept that having a budget will help you spend more wisely and help you save more to meet the financial goals you have set for yourself, so you've tried to make and track budget for about two weeks... Maybe you've even used one of those budget tracking apps. You know, the ones that automatically downloads and categorizes your transactions, but you just can't be bothered to double check the data or add the handful of missing/wrongly categorized transactions. Or maybe you haven't  ever made a budget.   You always mean to, but it just stresses you out every time you think about it. Or  the idea just seems like too much work, so you have resigned yourself to never even trying. Well, you're not alone.  Less than half of Canadians budget and even fewer Americans do .  There's lots of reasons for this from simple tedium/boredom to lack of discipline to  more complex reasons and attitudes such as a restrictive mindse
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Optimizing RRSP withdrawals with CPP

Dan and Kate McGlovin are both 60 years old and have just retired.   They each have exactly $500,000 in RRSP savings and both of them will receive 85% of their CPP and 100% of their OAS at age 65. They own a house worth $700,000 that is mortgage free.  They have no other savings, no pensions, no debt, and no kids.  Their RRSPs are invested in a low cost balanced asset allocation ETF which consists of 60% globally diversified equities (stocks) and 40% bonds.  The expected return on this ETF is 5.22% less management expense fees of 0.25% for a total annual return of 4.97%.  Inflation is assumed to run at 2.2% per year and we have set their life expectancy at 95. They plan to take OAS at age 65. Also, Dan and Kate want to live in their house until they die and want to pass the proceeds of their estate to their favourite charity upon their death.  In other words, they do not want to use their home equity to fund their retirement. How Much can Dan and Kate Spend Each Month? They want to kno

Where can I get financial advice?

There was a very interesting question posted on our local community Facebook page the other day.  The original poster was looking for a financial advisor recommendation.  Specifically, someone that could help with retirement planning and to help answer big questions like paying down a mortgage versus saving.  In this case, the poster also made it clear they were not looking for commission-based help that would “push products”. The comments section of the post was quite lively and largely civil.  I reviewed all the responses and most of them fell into four main categories: Specific advisor recommendations (i.e. precisely answering what the original poster had asked).  Good job to those posters! Suggestions to use “free” advisors such as big bank or institutional advisors Suggestions that advisors were not needed and that you can just “do-it-yourself”.  This was often accompanied by a suggestion to watch Youtuber “X”, read book “Y”, or consult website “Z” Specific, some good but most bad