Weekly Wrap: Millennials and saving, optimizing CPP, new Investing videos

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Millennial ESL teachers in Hong Kong: Tess from UK, Helen from Canada, Shane from USA (photo J.Chevreau)

A big furor over whether Millennials should enjoy their 20s and forget about saving money until later in life was tackled by the Motley Fool this week. You can find about ten links to the piece by clicking on my report Thursday for the Financial Post: Don’t bother saving in your 20s? Why millennials shouldn’t waste their gift of time.

The photo here by the way was taken by me recently in Hong Kong, and depicts three millennials who are posted there for a year under contracts to teach English as a Second Language. We won’t use their last names here but from left to right, they are from England, Canada and the United States. I think it’s safe to say that they’re enjoying themselves while they’re in their 20s, which is the point of the article being debated in the above link.

However, they are an example of balance that the Motley Fool’s Morgan Housel refers to in his article. In all cases, these young people are paying their own way: they’ve found a way to be paid while they travel and experience the world, not to mention make friends and lifetime contacts from around the world.  And unlike their parents when they travelled abroad before settling down, these kids have social media to keep them in touch for a lifetime.

Whether they also save a ton while doing so remains to be seen.

Optimizing CPP

Meanwhile, at the other end of the family spectrum, the parents of the millennials seem to have an insatiable interest in maximizing their income in retirement. The CPPOptimizer.com has attracted lots of attention after it was highlighted here at the Hub earlier in the week and in an FP article I wrote that appeared online Monday: Optimizing your CPP is no trivial exercise.

Hub readers will recognize Emeritus Retirement Income Solutions’ Doug Dahmer as a regular contributor to our Decumulation section.  He contributed a more detailed explanation of CPP Optimizer on the Hub, under the headline Optimizing CPP: How to avoid missing out on $100,000 of retirement income. We also ran this on the Hub’s sister site, FindependenceDay.com, under the headline How to maximize your CPP benefits. Continuing on the theme, we also a CPP primer from another regular contributor, Boomer & Echo’s Marie Engen: Understanding your Retirement benefits Part 1: CPP.

Empty nesters may spend more once the kids are gone

The Wall Street Journal this weekend questions the common assumption that once the kids have left the nest, parents may be able to save more: For Empty Nesters, Spending May Trump Extra Saving.

Hub and FWB TV running new investing videos

This week, the Hub also announced a new partnership with Financial Wealth Builders and its new FWB TV site, for a new series of videos that will run every week or two both at FWB TV and Findependence.TV. We kicked this off with a Q&A with FBW TV’s Paul Philip. The first video is entitled Who gets the Porsche: Your or your investment firm. Fees Matter!

Hub upgrades server capacity

While the Hub normally strives to provide content at least six days a week, we did run into a glitch early in the week because of capacity problems on our server, which is good news to the extent it reflects rising levels of traffic. It’s taken most of the week to make the transition but we have now moved to a full server and I’m assured it won’t be necessary to go through this again as usage rises. One casualty of the transition is that the daily email notices of new blog postings did not happen: we hope to restore that service shortly.

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