We review books that deal with everything from financial independence topics to politics, and anything in between. We may sometimes stray into films and music if there is a “Findependence” angle.
As I posted on Twitter a few days ago, Elon Musk’s ownership is causing a lot of Twitter regulars to rethink their commitment to the platform. Personally, I have invested a lot in the Bird since joining in 2009 and so I am reluctant to storm out of there merely out of sheer petulance. Better, I think, to take a wait-and-see approach and give Elon a chance to salvage it or to burn it to the ground.
But it does behoove regulars to have a contingency plan or Plan B. Once upon a time, I viewed Google Plus as an alternative but it proved to be a virtual ghost town until Google pulled the plug on it. If Twitter keep imploding, perhaps the folks at Google will think of giving it a go again. But in the meantime, there are still LinkedIn and Facebook.
While in Spain this month, I started to experiment with the platform that seems most likely to accumulate disaffected Twitter users: Mastodon. (spelt with the letter o in two places, NOT the letter “a”!
Unlike the centralized Twitter platform, Mastodon is decentralized and that’s the first thing you need to know about it when signing on. First you have to pick a server, which is run by volunteers around the world. I picked one of the few (or only?) Canadian ones: mstdn.ca. It’s also called Mastodon Canada and bills itself as being run by Canadians for Canadians
A new meeting ground for Canadian finance Tweeters and bloggers?
Perhaps it’s too early to say, or that it’s wishful thinking, but it seems possible that a critical mass of disaffected Canadian Twitter users may be building there, including a subset of Canadian financial tweeters; I mean tooters!
For me, Truth Social was never an option, for reasons that should be obvious, given its ownership. If there are other Canadian Mastodon servers and there may be, Google Canadian Mastodon servers.
Mastodon takes some getting used to and the learning curve seems steeper than Twitter was in its heyday. At the same time, it’s fun to give one’s atrophied social media little grey cells a new workout, and it’s a learning experience to see new networks and patterns of networks evolve almost from the ground up.
It was helpful to be fairly early with Twitter and in the same way Mastodon has that pioneering feeling here in November of 2022, the first full month of Elon’s Twitter ownership. Mastodon has been around much longer but there’s little doubt there is now a wave of Twitter users descending on the place. Most of the new arrivals admit they’re looking for a possible alternative, or don’t really know why they are there, and most either need a bit of help or encouragement or are a bit more experienced and willing to offer assistance to the newbies.
In fact, mstdn.ca is so new they are still asking for volunteers to moderate and assist with the technical side for those who have the skills. They’ve also just set up a PayPal account to accept donations to offset the server costs. Continue Reading…
It’s been awhile since I reviewed any political books here on the Hub. The last time was this time a year ago when I surveyed what were then the latest books on the Trump presidency (at one point in 2021, 3 of the top 6 New York Times bestselling books were on Trump: see here).
I occasionally wade in on this topic on the grounds that investors need to be on top of this seemingly unique political situation. That’s despite the fact that when Trump first won his shock victory in 2016, markets briefly cratered, only to quickly recover.
The particular pair of mini-reviews below has no real financial angle but you can see I explicitly covered that a few years ago in a MoneySense column that evaluated the implications of the Trump presidency for the Boomers’ collective retirements: see here.
Over the long weekend, I finished reading two recently published books that some may find of interest, whose covers are illustrated on this blog. One is Thank You for Your Servitude, Mark Leibovich’s entertaining summary of all the Republican enablers who made the Trump presidency possible in the first place, and may yet facilitate a dreaded second term. The other is This Will Not Pass [Simon & Schuster) by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, subtitled Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future. The co-authors are both New York Times writers and CNN political analysts, neither known as MAGA-friendly outlets.
Save your money and borrow these from the library
I might add that, despite being an author myself, I generally refuse to buy any of these US political books: I either read ebooks from the Toronto Library’s excellent Libby app, or download ebooks or audio books from the paid SCRIBD service. Libby often involves waiting a few weeks or months for popular bestsellers; however, if you can read quickly, you may be able to luck into the occasional Skip the Line service, which lasts only a single week. SCRIBD sometimes has books not yet on Libby, often in audio format, and unlike the library, you can keep them beyond the normal three-week limit.
There’s been a fair bit of press and YouTube clips on both these books. Formerly with the New York Times, Leibovich is perhaps best known for his bestselling This Town, about 21st century Washington. Thank You for Your Servitude [Penguin Press, New York, 2022] is subtitled Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission. While the author admits that many of the anecdotes will be all too familiar to anyone following the daily press, he manages to provide a fresh perspective on them while simultaneously apologizing for making readers relive the worst of these moments. Many of them center around Trump’s Washington-based Trump Hotel, which is where the book begins and ends. There you meet such familiar characters as Rudy Giuliani, Reince Priebus, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch O’Connell, William Barr, Jeff Sessions, Lindsay Graham, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kellyanne Conway and the whole sordid collection of Trump toadies and sycophants, or the so-called MAGAts.
One early chapter is entitled “The Joke,” which apparently is how even how Trump’s closest enablers seem to view his rise to the top of the political pyramid:
It would be risky, obviously, for a Republican member of Congress to declare, explicitly, that “Donald Trump is a complete ignoramus,” even though that’s what they really believed. But none of this had to be spoken because the truth of this scam, or “joke,” was fully evident inside the club …. Everyone … got the joke.
Covers Ukraine invasion but not January 6th hearings
The book is recent enough that it includes an epilogue about the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. The book ends on a despairing note of pessimism about the prospects of anyone stopping Trump in 2024. Of course, it was published months before this summer’s high-profile January 6th hearings, nor does he spend much time addressing any of the other multiple investigations into Trump’s businesses and political shenanigans.
The following telling snippet is one of many that may not be widely known. I was struck by the revelation in the epilogue that within a day of Trump’s “Be there, will be wild” tweet promoting the January 6 rally, the cheapest room in the Trump Hotel immediately jumped from US$476 to US$1,999.
Donald Trump didn’t just inspire the Jan. 6 riot … He seems to have made money off it.
That pretty much says it all. Leibovich ends with an ominous foreshadowing of Trump’s possible triumphant return in 2024. His final sentence is “And who’s going to stop him?” A few sentences earlier, he quotes a former Republican congressman who confessed that the party’s only real plan for dealing with Trump in 2024 involved a darkly divine intervention: “We’re just waiting for him to die .. That was it, that was the plan. He was 100 percent serious.”
Can Joe Biden extract the US from its “political emergency?”
Simon & Schuster
Those who are thoroughly sick of Trump — as I am — may find This Will Not Pass more to their liking, as roughly half the content is devoted to Trump’s successor, Joe Biden. The focus is what it describes as the “political emergency in the United States: the story of how the country reached and survived a moment when carrying out the basic process of certifying an election became a mortally dangerous task.”
It recounts how the country “sort of” survived but like Leibovich, leaves readers pretty nervous about what may yet occur in the 2022 mid terms this fall and ultimately in 2024. As Martin and Burns remind us (as if we needed it!):
Donald Trump has not been banished from national life, but instead remains the dominant force in his party and is bent on purging those few Republicans who won’t bow to him … The former president’s delusions about a stolen election … have lingered with corrosive force, warping his own party and catalyzing a wave of red-state voting restrictions aimed at cracking down on election fraud that did not happen. The fantasies of a Trump restoration have only deepened since his departure from the White House.
The book is arranged in three parts: the year before the 2020 election and Trump’s mismanagement of Covid; the tumultuous months between the contested 2020 election and Inauguration Day, and everything that has transpired since:
… As President Biden attempted an acrobatic feat of leadership: pushing a liberal policy agenda of titanic ambition with the thinnest of majorities … Far from quickly erasing the Trump era, leaders in both parties have found the shadow of the last presidency has been longer and darker than they anticipated, colouring every major political decision and legislative negotiation of the Biden administration and shaping even the perceptions of American democracy overseas.
Ambitious, yes: One chapter nicely summarizes the dominant question before Biden as “How Big Can We Go?”
Unlike Servitude, This Will Not Pass was published too soon to cover much of the events of 2022. Oddly, for an American book, it closes with an observation by a Canadian, Bob Rae (at one point Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations.) He calls Trump an “authoritarian … I don’t believe the Republican Party believes in democracy.” And he warned that the threat to American democracy was far from defeated: “America,” he said, “is a very important battleground.”
They Want to Kill Americans
(Added subsequently). There’s a third and even scarier book that I only began to read the day this blog initially was published. They Want to Kill Americans by Malcolm Nance, describes Trump’s brownshirts and the ongoing assault on American democracies by Americans. Here’s a link to Goodreads’ entry on it. And here’s a Kirkus review.
Jonathan Chevreau is Chief Financial Officer of the Financial Independence Hub, author of the financial novel, Findependence Day, co-author of the non-fiction Victory Lap Retirement, and columnist and Investing Editor at Large for MoneySense.ca.
My latest MoneySense Retired Money column is a belated review of Dan Bortolotti’s recently published ETF book, Reboot Your Portfolio. You can read the full review by clicking on the highlighted text: The Canadian Book about ETFs that will have you saying eh-t-fs.
The book has already been well reviewed by prominent financial bloggers: for example, early in December the Hub ran this blog by Michael James on Money’s Michael J. Wiener: Do as I say, not as I do.
As the column notes, MoneySense readers should find the book a nice complement to the MoneySense ETF All-stars feature that I used to write each spring, and which was initially a collaboration between myself and Dan back when we were both full-time MoneySense editorial staff. The 2022 edition ran last week and is now written by Bryan Borzykowski.
Dan’s book is an excellent primer for any aspiring do-it-yourself investor who wants to buy ETFs at a discount brokerage, or someone wanting to create an ETF portfolio with or without the help of a financial advisor like Dan or his employer, PWL Capital.
Since the dawn of Asset Allocation ETFs early in 2018 (starting with Vanguard, soon matched by iShares, BMO and Horizons), it’s now possible to have an entire portfolio consisting of a single ETF. Those who like the traditional pension fund allocation of 60% stocks to 40% bonds could choose VBAL, XBAL or ZBAL, or Horizon’s slightly more equity intensive, HBAL (with a slightly more aggressive 70/30 stocks/bonds mix).
One-decision funds and automatic rebalancing
Bortolotti is quite enthused with these Asset Allocation ETFs, as are most of the other ETF experts in MoneySense’s ETF All-stars feature. One thing he particularly likes about such funds is the automatic rebalancing between asset classes, or at least between the stocks and bonds that most of them hold in varying proportions. As he says in chapter 8 (Keep it in Balance), “There’s a lot of research suggesting that people do better when the rebalancing decision is taken out of their hands.”
The book takes a holistic approach to financial planning and ETF portfolio creation. In fact, he makes a point of not even addressing ETFs until chapter 5, after first covering the need to cease trying to beat the market, set financial goals, determine the right asset allocation and then fine-tuning.
Like most indexing enthusiasts, Bortolotti takes a dim view of such investing sins as market timing and stock picking. In his chapters on Asset Allocation, Bortolotti does not restrict his readers to strictly ETFs: there may be a place for GICs and high-interest savings accounts. He says many could put half their fixed-income allocation in GICs and use bond ETFs for the other half.
But he does believe that even very conservative and very aggressive investors should have at least some exposure to stocks and bonds; conservative retirees should still have at least 20% in stocks and aggressive stock investors should have at least 20% in bonds. For those between, he is comfortable with their holding the traditional 60/40 portfolio, which has returned between 6 and 7% a year since 1990.
Beyond stocks and bonds, however, Bortolotti is less enthused. He doesn’t recommend commodities like gold and other precious metals, collectibles like rare coins, fine wine and artwork, or even REITs, preferred shares or Real Return Bonds: whether held directly or via ETFs.
When it comes to ETF portfolios, Bortolotti is primarily focused on broadly diversified low-cost ETFs that use traditional market-cap weighting, although he also sees the case for equal-weighted ETFs. But he does not recommend what he calls “narrowly focused” sector or “theme” ETFs. He covers the pros and cons of “smart beta” ETFs, which usually cost more than plain-vanilla ETFs but will at least be cheaper than actively managed mutual funds.
All in all, any MoneySense reader will probably find the combination of Reboot Your Portfolio and the ETF All-Stars as a nice one-two punch for their portfolio.
As an everyday person taking a fast read of the title of the new book – Promoting the Health of Older Adults: The Canadian Experience– you wouldn’t exactly get the sense of what to be surprised by or expect what content would be covered within. In the first place, unfortunately, it’s not likely that this book will make it into the hands of everyday people any time soon.
You might ask, what are we promoting, what’s so specific for older adults – eat a nutritional diet of foods, exercise to stay fit, keep your brain active and get your proper sleep? Isn’t that what anyone through their life course should be doing? Yes, maybe. But that’s not at all exactly what you will get here.
Appreciating focus, as the writers in the preface state, the book’s main purpose is for knowledge building on issues related to older adults and their care, primarily for target audiences such as, “undergraduate and graduate students in gerontology and aging, health promotion… and other fields….” and the five groups identified include, educators, learners, policy makers, researchers and practitioners and leaders working with older adults in civic society organizations.
While that may sound too academic, after reading this book my belief is that the general public of everyday people, older adults and others younger, will also benefit greatly from an education presented here on this important subject. If you do flip through this 600-plus page tome, you might think of it at first as “insider dialogue” on health promotion; but not so fast, don’t put the book down.
Serving to heighten knowledge & awareness to engage in social health dialogue.
Choose as many words as you want; for me, Promoting the Health of Older Adults is a social health dialogue, inclusive for all Canadians – interconnected subject areas, holistic, comprehensive, diverse. The arrival of this book is timely, to promote conversation with friends and family, considering our collective journey through the COVID world to date has heightened our awareness of the workings of our own health and our social and healthcare systems.
Briefly, on the structure of this book; it certainly is more of a study text book on over thirty topic areas in seven well laid out parts. However nothing I’ve read talks over the heads of readers, and if facilitated well in a real time group discussion format, there is a set of critical thinking questions at the end of each chapter that would further serve to heighten knowledge and awareness of readers, enough to make you want to be a more engaged in this social health dialogue. Continue Reading…
Retirement planning used to be easy: you simply applied for your government benefits and your company pension at age 65. So, when did it get so complicated?
Things started to change in 2007 when pension splitting came into effect. While we did have Canada Pension Plan (CPP) sharing before that, not too many people took advantage of it. Then Tax Free Savings Accounts (TFSA) came along in 2009. At first you could only deposit small amounts into your TFSA, but in 2015 the contribution limit went to $10,000 (it’s since been reduced to $6,000 per year). Accounts that had been opened in 2009 were building in value, and the market was rebounding from the 2008 downturn. Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) dollars were now competing with TFSA dollars and people had to choose where they were going to put their retirement money.
In 2015 or 2016 financial planners suddenly started paying attention to how all of these assets (including income properties) were interconnected. There were articles about downsizing, succession planning, and selling the family cottage. This information got people thinking about their different sources of retirement income and which funds they should draw down first.
Of course, there is more to consider, such as the Old Age Security (OAS) clawback. When, where, and how much could this affect your retirement planning? People selling their business are often surprised that their OAS is clawed back in the year they sell the business, even if they’re eligible for the capital gains exemption. Not to mention what you need to do to leave some money behind for your loved ones. Even with all this planning, the fact that we pay so much tax when we die is never discussed, although the final tax bill always seems to be the elephant in the room. We just ignore it, and hope it’ll go away.
Income Tax doesn’t disappear at 65
Unfortunately, income tax doesn’t disappear at age 65, and you need time to plan ahead so you can reduce the amount of tax you pay in retirement. A good way to do this is to use a specialized software that takes all your sources of income and figures out the best strategy to get the most out of your retirement funds.Continue Reading…
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As I posted on Twitter a few days ago, Elon Musk’s ownership is causing a lot of Twitter regulars to rethink their commitment to the platform. Personally, I have invested a lot in the Bird since joining in 2009 and so I am reluctant to storm out of there merely out of sheer petulance. Better, I think, to take a wait-and-see approach and give Elon a chance to salvage it or to burn it to the ground.
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