There are a few retirement income planning steps you and your spouse can take to lower your taxes.
These steps work especially well if your spouse makes a lower income than you do.
There are lots of ways to shift investment capital and income to the lower-income spouse. This lets you lower your overall tax bill right now. It also ensures that each spouse gets roughly the same amount of income in retirement. That will cut taxes later, as well.
We’ve discussed other retirement income planning techniques like paying your spouse’s bills, setting up a spousal RRSP and swapping assets for cash or shares. Here are more ideas:
Vanguard Investments Canada Inc. has launched four new actively managed ETFs that began trading on the TSX on June 22. In a press release, the company said they are the first actively managed Exchange Traded Funds it provides in Canada.
In the U.S., and despite its strong image as a provider of low-cost “passive” index-tracking strategies, The Vanguard Group Inc. has had a long track record with actively managed strategies and, with almost US$1 trillion in global actively managed assets, is one of the world’s largest active managers.
The new “active” products are managed by Vanguard’s Quantitative Equity Group (QEG), which has existed since 1991. Each of the new ETFs will have a management fee of 0.35%. (Final MER may be slightly higher after fees and expenses).
The four new ETFs are:
Vanguard Global Minimum Volatility ETF, ticker VVO.
“If a monkey can be taught to salt away money by sticking it in a sock, so can we.”
That’s what my partner and I told each other the day we decided to start saving for a home. Real estate can be tough, so we started our plan early. In some ways, it was madness. We still had to pay monthly rent and a first baby was on the way. It meant cutting back on activities we enjoyed, little extras and big extras.
But what we had going for us were the four D’s: the dream, the drive, the discipline, and a deadline.
Eventually we hit our target and moved to a small town where houses still cost less than they do in a city. Ours was a modest, century-old farmhouse that would require work, just right for my partner’s creative outlet. It was a cozy fit for our two additional children, but it was home and has been for 28 years.
How a person or couple saves for their first home is not a question of doing it one way, but of having knowledge of the options to make informed choices and a solid plan.
As a millennial, it’s important that we begin to create good financial habits to govern our lives, starting with budgeting.
From a healthy morning routine, to being grown-up about money, as we get into this new stage in our lives, we need to make sure to put ourselves on the right track, or risk ending up in serious financial trouble.
From the blog Making Sense of Cents comes a new post that touches on some common bad money habits that are extremely easy to fall into. Whether you’re of the “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” or the “it’ll-never-happen-to-me” mindset, or any of the other bad money habits mentioned, this post is here to help you change your ways before it’s too late.
Now, Not Later
Along the same lines, it seems that the bad habit of paying down debts more slowly to reap the rewards of ‘more cash in hand how’ is springing up, and Bridget Eastgaard of ‘Money After Graduation’ is here to tell us why that’s such a terrible idea. Continue Reading…
Index mutual funds can provide a low-cost way to invest in the stock market. However, they have disadvantages and there are better alternatives.
Index mutual funds are among the better financial innovations to come along in the past few decades. These are specialized mutual funds that invest so as to come close to equaling the performance of a market index, such as the S&P/TSX 60.
Index mutual funds do show better long-run performance than more than half of all actively managed mutual funds with long-term track records. That’s partly because index fund fees run around 1.0% of assets per year, compared to 2.5% or more on many broker-sold mutual funds.
One big advantage of index mutual funds is that they can help you avoid the risk of choosing a fund with a management style that virtually guarantees below-average long-term performance.
For example, mutual funds that pursue a trading or sector-rotation approach to investing belong in this can’t-win category. Managers of these funds try to out-perform the market by betting on relatively short-term trends, rather than putting their investors in a position to profit near automatically from long-term growth in the economy. This can work, but only for limited periods.
In any one year, the top fund is often run by a market timer who is having his or her proverbial “day in the sun.” In any one decade, however, the top funds are generally run by conservative managers who focus on long-term growth in the economy.
Spread investments across five main economic sectors
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By Pat McKeough, TSINetwork.ca
