Smith Manoeuvre Portfolio – Feb 2009

For those of you just joining us, this is my portfolio that is leveraged with money borrowed from my home equity line of credit (HELOC). As the money borrowed is used to invest, the interest charged is tax deductible. For more details, check out my modified smith manoeuvre strategy. It’s been a couple of months…

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Holding a Mortgage within an RRSP

A reader wrote me last week very excited about the prospects of holding your own mortgage within an RRSP.  Yes, that’s right, under the right conditions, you can use your own RRSP to fund the mortgage owing on your house and pay yourself back on a monthly basis. As this sounds great on paper, after…

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RRSP Tip: Carry Forward Your RRSP Tax Deduction

With the RRSP deadline right around the corner (March 2, 2009), this is a strategy that I’ve mentioned in passing a couple times, but never in great detail. That is, providing that the situation is right, you should consider carrying forward all or a portion of your RRSP tax deduction to a future year to…

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How to Get Free HDTV (in Canada)

This is a guest post by Tomasz who is a manager of systems engineering at AMD Inc. in Markham, ON. He is a technology enthusiast with his latest project on getting free HDTV over the air (OTA). He has been doing research for months and is looking to install his own OTA system in May…

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RESP Portfolio Update – Feb 2009

A few readers have requested that I do a blog post about the performance of my Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP) portfolio based on the TD e-series low cost mutual funds.  As I’ve written before, I chose the TD RESP solution as it provided a low cost way to index the bambinos education fund.  In…

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How to Take Advantage of the Market After the Crash of 2008

“It’s never happened in the World Series history – and it hasn’t happened since.” – Yogi Berra 2008 was a difficult year, producing results not seen in recent history. In past bear markets, some sectors and significant groups of investors still made money. In 2008 only 4 of 3,438 equity mutual funds showed a profit.…

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Protect Your Savings: CDIC and CIPF Explained

Protect Your Savings

Since the inception of this blog, I’ve received numerous emails from readers asking where to put larger deposits.  Most know about CDIC (Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation) and how it protects most accounts up to $100,000, but what about amounts greater than $100,000?  What do you do then?  What exactly happens to your money if a…

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January 2009 Net Worth Update (+2.94%)

Welcome to the very first net worth update of 2009! The most notable update this past month was that I took a portion of our savings ($20k) and put a lump sum payment on our mortgage.  I’m hoping to do this again later in the year to meet one of my financial goals.  However, the…

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