All posts by Financial Independence Hub

Buying a House in Canada: Why I couldn’t wait to NOT be a Homeowner

Posted By Financial Independence Hub | March 10, 2023

By Kyle Prevost, MillionDollar Journey

Special to Financial Independence Hub

By the end of the summer of 2021 I was no longer a homeowner.

In many countries that statement would be a simple matter of personal finance. Selling an asset, paying off a loan (mortgage) and moving on to another living space.

But not in Canada.

No, in Canada selling our house means that my wife and I are making a massive change to our identities. A core shift in our very essence.

Many would say we are taking a careless step backward on the path to living a fulfilled “real adult” life.

Several friends and family will likely believe that we are crazy for tossing away “the best investment one can ever make.”

The absolute obsession with homeownership in Canada continues to astound me. The emotional connection between Canadians and their real estate has been well documented, but that doesn’t make it any more logical! Even though my wife and I have owned a home for years, this was much less because we subscribed to the traditional “own at all costs” mentality, and more due to the fact that rural Manitoba housing vs rent decisions are quite different than most places in Canada.

We’ll certainly miss some of the small luxuries (goodbye big garage) of our old home, but here’s some of the reasons why we believe selling our house will be a weight off of our shoulders.

1.) Endless Fear of Hearing a Strange Noise

Is that the furnace taking its last breath?

Perhaps it’s the water treatment system deciding to spring a leak?

Is that rain I hear – is it possible our septic system is backing up?!

My dad loves fixing stuff. His day is not complete until he has improved the physical world around him.

I am not my dad.

My lack of handyman skills has now become a joke that I’m comfortable laughing at, but for years I was incredibly self-conscious about possessing nearly zero masculinity-affirming fix-it ability. You want someone to work hard doing menial chores such as cutting lawns, raking leaves, shovelling snow, or lifting heavy things from Point A to Point B – I got you covered.

Anything that requires technical skills or mechanical problem-solving ability… not so much.

Because my father’s handyman-dominant brain was not passed down to his oldest son, I lived in perpetual fear of things breaking when I owned a home. I never really got this “pride of ownership” thing. For me it was definitely more of a “fear of ownership”. I had so much of my net worth tied up in this one asset – that required constant maintenance – and I really had no idea what it was doing. “Learning by doing” constantly scared me as errors were quite costly.

Hiring any specialized help on something like an air conditioning unit always seemed to cost triple what was estimated, so that just exponentially added to my anxiety levels around maintenance.

Renting = not my problem!!!

2.) Renting is Simply a Better Financial Decision Than Buying – in 2021 Canada.

I know … that’s a big statement.

It’s probably worth an article all on its own.

It will probably lead to crazy comments (as all real estate articles in Canada do).

But it’s quantifiably true.

We’ll get into the “fringe” elements of why owning can be so expensive in a second, but for now let’s just look at the direct dollars and cents comparison.

Before we get too deep into this, I don’t want to argue with you unless you have viewed the following content by some of Canada’s smartest personal minds.

i) Preet Banerjee compares renting a house and renting a mortgage and then explains why he is a renter.

ii) John Robertson (my vote for most underrated personal finance philosopher – and it’s not even close) tells you why he is a renter and presents the best r ent vs buy calculator that I’ve ever seen.

iii) Here’s Ben Felix’s 5% rule in action. I personally believe that Ben is shooting a bit high on real estate estimates (today’s giant houses are not comparable to historical returns data he quotes), and a bit low on property taxes + maintenance costs. He also isn’t factoring in closing costs (which are a pretty big deal when you move the number of times the average Canadian does), nor the difference between renters insurance and home insurance. I do like his methodology, but the 5% rule of thumb for non-recoverable costs is pretty badly slanted towards real estate due to the factors mentioned above. I could probably live with a 6% rule – but find a 7% rule to be a much more true measure (speaking as a soon-to-be former homeowner of ten years).

iv) I’ve talked to many real estate experts who claim “the 1%” rule of thumb is a great filter for a potential landlord looking to add a revenue-generating property to their real estate portfolio. That means that if you can’t get at least 1% of your purchase price in monthly rent, then it’s not really worth considering the property. The flip side of that is that if you’re renting for substantially less than 1% of the purchase price of a comparable home – then you’re getting a good deal. Bryce over at Millennial Revolution explains his rule of 150 which comes to similar conclusions.

Those are all great looks at accurately comparing financial costs vs benefits of purchasing a house to live in.

So, let’s use them to look at a few options across Canada at the moment.

Toronto Real Estate

The average price of a property sold in the GTA in May of 2021 was $1,108,453 (a massive 28% gain over a year earlier) while the average rent is closer to $2,100 (down 14%).

Our 1% rule of thumb says that a $1,100,000 house better get you $11,000 per month in rent – or it’s not a good buy.
Using John’s or Preet’s calculators we see that renting is WAY ahead given these parameters.
My modified Ben Felix 7% rule tells us that if we can rent for $6,466 – then it’s a pretty good deal to rent. If we stick to his original 5% rule, we need to rent for less than $4,618 to be a good deal.
Bryce’s preferred rule of 150 means that the $2,100 rental average, would dictate a mortgage payment of $1,400 as a good measuring stick for if they should buy. A $1,400 mortgage (HAHA – good one) would correlate to a purchase price of roughly $350,000 (depending on a few variables.

Conclusion: By any measure… this makes no sense.

Buying a House in Calgary

Maybe this is just a Toronto thing. Let’s go to a city that has seen its housing market really fall on tough times as a result of the oil collapse, PLUS rent has actually gone up over the last year.

The average rent in Calgary is roughly $1,200 and the average cost of a property is $510,000. Those stats might be skewed a bit by average home type in the rental world vs average home type in the purchase world. Let’s say average rent for comparable might be $1,500.

Our 1% rule of thumb says that a $510,000 house better get you $5,100 per month in rent – or it’s not a good buy.
Using John’s or Preet’s calculators we see that renting is substantially ahead given these parameters.
My modified Ben Felix 7% rule tells us that if we can rent for under $3,000 – then it’s a pretty good deal to rent. If we stick to his original 5% rule, we need to rent for less than $2,125 to be a good deal.
Bryce’s preferred rule of 150 means that the $1,500 rental average, would dictate a mortgage payment of $1,000 as a good measuring stick for if they should buy or not. A $1,000 mortgage would correlate to a purchase price of roughly $230,000.

Home Prices in Halifax

Ok, enough of these “big city places”. We all know that house prices are way cheaper on the East Coast, so let’s run the numbers for Canada’s semi-hidden gem of a city.

The average rent in Halifax is about $1,600 per month and the average cost of property is $465,000.

If we adjust upward to $1,800 in allowing for comparable properties (I checked, you can rent a solid single-family unit for 1,800 in Halifax – even better in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia) then we get the following analysis.

Our 1% rule of thumb says that a $465,000 house better get you $4,650 per month in rent – or it’s not a good buy.
Using John’s or Preet’s calculators we see that renting is substantially ahead given these parameters.
My modified Ben Felix 7% rule tells us that if we can rent for under $2,700 – then it’s a pretty good deal to rent. If we stick to his original 5% rule, we need to rent for less than $1,937 to be a good deal.
Bryce’s preferred rule of 150 means that the $1,800 rental average, would dictate a mortgage payment of $1,200 as a good measuring stick for if they should buy or not. A $1,200 mortgage would correlate to a purchase price of roughly $280,000.

…that’s why I’m not afraid to be a renter the rest of my life and why I’m not worried about “hopping off” the property ladder.

If you’re still not convinced, here are a few more stats for you.

Canada’s current price-to-rent levels are 574% higher than they were in 1970.
Since 1970, Canada’s price-to-rent level has risen at roughly 21x as quickly as the USA’s.
Canada’s current price-to-rent levels are substantially higher now than the USA’s was before their 2008/09 housing crash.

3.) Opportunity Cost of Being Rooted Into Place

I grew up in a single house – owned by a homeowner. (My parents were unique in that my dad built his own house on a very cheap piece of rural land and never took out a mortgage. Feel free to try and copy that strategy in 2021.)

It was really nice. I get that there can be some very pleasant reasons to own the house/condo that you live in.

But let’s be honest about the big picture here – there are some large trade offs involved.

Buying a home makes you much less likely to move in order to accept a promotion or career opportunity. That’s impossible to quantify, but it’s a really significant consideration. One of the quickest ways to climb in any industry (or even make an advantageous jump to a new industry) is to be willing to move to where the opportunity is. The cost to your career of feeling as if you are anchored to the house you worked so hard to get into could be massive!

4.) Our Brains Work Differently When We Think About Renting a Place to Live vs “Buying a Forever Home” – Lifestyle Inflation is Almost Inevitable.

Funny things begin to happen as we approach the leap from renter to homeowner. Suddenly, cost-benefit calculations we were doing about third bedrooms or fancy kitchens fly out the window… only the best will do for our “forever home” after all.

Weird mantras like, “We’ll grow into it,” begin to creep into our heads and suddenly we’re looking at fancy countertops, upgrading bathrooms, etc. Continue Reading…

Living the Dividend Dream

Posted By Financial Independence Hub | March 9, 2023

By Mark Seed

Special to Financial Independence Hub

Incredibly, there are some investors out there truly living their dividend dream.

Today’s post highlights one of those investors for investing inspiration…

But let’s back up a bit …

Some time ago … yours truly wrote a controversial post about the intent to live off dividends and distributions from our portfolio.

Indexers gasped and likely unsubscribed to my site!

Well, even though some considerable time has passed since that post my thinking and income goals remain the same – as least in part for semi-retirement planning:

I continue to believe “living off dividends” (and/or distributions) should work out well for us.

And I’m not alone.

For today’s post, I’m profiling a very successful investor …. who not only dreams of dividends but is living the dividend dream right now.

Living The Dividend Dream

Welcome to the site for this latest investor profile, The Dividend Dream.

I look forward to sharing this interesting new investor profile below but first up, a recap about why dividends and distributions continue to matter to me/us on our income journey.

Yes, my approach to live off dividends remains alive and well in 2023!

My dedicated page including many of the stocks I own.

Here are some reasons why some investors couldn’t care less about dividends:

The trouble with any “live off the dividends” approach is that you’d need to save too much to generate your desired income. Fair.
Dividends are not magical – there is nothing special about them. Sure, of course they are not magical or free!
A dollar of dividends is = a one dollar increase in the stock price. True.
Stock picking (with dividend stocks) is fraught with under performance of the index long-term. I’m not convinced about that.
You can never possibly know long-term how dividends may or may not be paid by any company. Fair.

You do need a bunch of capital to generate meaningful dividend income.

Dividends are part of total return.

Stock picking to some degree opens opportunities for market under performance.

However, my responses and approach to some of these items are as follows, since I believe dividend investing offers far more good than harm:

While market underperformance may occur (that is subjective and up to personal investment success, luck, and other factors that are very difficult to substantiate), dividend investing offers up some essential long-term investing discipline, for me at least, to stay the investing course, including when markets tank in any given year. If anything, I buy more!
This way of investing provides HUGE motivation and inspiration – to keep investing, in any market climate. The way I see it: money that makes money can make more money.
Dividend investing, seeing the tangible money flow into our accounts month-after-month, reinforces my belief that nobody cares more about my financial well-being than I do (except for my wife!). Ha.

All kidding aside…dividend investing and having a plan associated with building ever-growing income offers something that some other ways of investing just can’t readily offer: support for the emotional discipline to execute this strategy, come heck or high water, or even until the end of all capitalism as we know it!

But that’s just me and our plan.

Your mileage might vary and that’s OK.

There are many ways to invest and many reasons that folks invest in what they do.

That said, dividend investing is far from any local phenomena.

I reached out to The Dividend Dream for her to share her reasons for investing in dividend paying stocks, including why dividends matter (or not!), and any considerations she has for any investors at any age on their investing journey. [Editor’s note: for now, “she” wishes to remain anonymous, as explained below; hence there is no photo-JC]

Living The Dividend Dream – Dividend Dream – welcome to the site!

Hey hey … thanks for having me. I appreciate the invite!

Before we dive into your investing thesis, why you own what you own, and much more – tell us a bit about yourself.

Well, what can I say. People call me The Dream, Dream Girl, aka Dreamer.

I’m anonymous for now as I’m still working a bit, although I entered into a “freestyle” work optional state this year (2023). I’m a businesswoman, living in the southern United States. My field is strategy and marketing, and I went to a top MBA school. I’m in my mid-40s and am married to a wonderful woman who is a professor. I am the breadwinner in the family – by far – so I feel financially responsible for our future. And yeah … that’s the skinny, essentially.

Interesting!

I feel personal finance is personal – a constant refrain on this site. What I mean by this is: everyone’s financial situation is different, and they have personal reasons to invest the way they do, to realize their individualized goals.

How did you get started with investing?

I actually have been thinking about “retirement” ever since I was a teenager. Really, it’s always been more about being financially secure and independent. My family fell on some hard times and it scared me. I didn’t really have any choice but to rely on myself. I held several jobs in high school and throughout college. So … long story short, after college I started like everyone else with a 401(k) at work, trying to max that out every year. But when I started getting into my 30s that’s when I started to really breakout out of the mold, rolling past 401(k)s into investment accounts where I had complete control and could pick to hold whatever assets I wanted, not just the choices provided by an employer.

Awesome. OK, let’s get into it. Why dividend investing? Why do you invest the way you do? Continue Reading…

When Women Succeed, we all Succeed. We just need to “Embrace Equity”

Posted By Financial Independence Hub | March 8, 2023

By Christine Van Cauwenberghe

Special to Financial Independence Hub

Today is International Women’s Day (IWD), an opportunity to mark the social, political, economic, and cultural achievements of women.

The day also serves as a global call-to-action to promote gender parity. This year’s theme – embrace equity – is pertinent as equity is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have.

Over the years, we’ve come to better understand the impact of gender bias and discrimination, specifically in finance where women are traditionally overlooked and underrepresented – as advisors and as clients. By investing in gender equity, we can unlock economic growth and lay the groundwork for generations of women to take greater control of their financial futures.

Stereotypically and historically, financial planning has largely been viewed as a man’s job. While progress has been made to change this narrative, we need to see a greater shift away from monolithic thinking around traditional gender roles. Now more than ever, Canadians are seeking financial advice – this is creating an exciting opportunity for women to break the gender bias and get certified as a financial planner to catalyze representation in financial services. Relationship-building, intuitive insight, emotional intelligence, and trust are all traits that differentiate a good financial planner from a great one. These are skills that many women inherently hold and could further hone, making them well-suited to excel in an advisor role. They just need an entryway.

Canadian women will soon control half of accumulated financial wealth

Today, women are playing an active role in financial decision-making – for themselves and their households. Research shows that by 2026, women in Canada will control almost half of all accumulated financial wealth, pointing to a probable surge in demand for financial advice among females. Not to mention, women, on average, live longer than men, meaning that at some point in their lives they will take on the role of sole financial decision-maker. Despite this need, many women are unable to find a financial planner they connect with and 70 per cent change their advisor within one year following the death of their partner or spouse. Continue Reading…

Book Review: Bullshift

Posted By Financial Independence Hub | March 6, 2023

By Michael J. Wiener

Special to the Findependence Hub

In his book Bullshift: How Optimism Bias Threatens Your Finances, Certified Financial Planner and portfolio manager John De Goey makes a strong case that investors and their advisors have a bias for optimistic return expectations that leads them to take on too much risk. However, his conviction that we are headed into a prolonged bear market shows similar overconfidence in the other direction. Readers would do well to recognize that actual results could be anywhere between these extremes and plan accordingly.

Problems in the financial advice industry

The following examples of De Goey’s criticism of the financial advice industry are spot-on.

“Investors often accept the advice of their advisers not because the logic put forward is so compelling but because it is based on a viewpoint that everyone seems to prefer. People simply want happy explanations to be true and are more likely to act if they buy into the happy ending being promised.” We prefer to work with those who tell us what we want to hear.

Almost all advisers believe that “staying invested is good for investors — and it usually is. What is less obvious is that it’s generally good for the advisory firms, too.” “In greater fool markets, people overextend themselves using margin and home equity lines of credit to buy more, paying virtually any price for fear of missing out (FOMO).” When advisers encourage their clients to stay invested, it can be hard to tell if they are promoting the clients’ interests or their own. However, when they encourage their clients to leverage into expensive markets, they are serving their own interests.

“There are likely to be plenty of smiling faces and favourable long-term outlooks when you meet with financial professionals.” “In most businesses, the phrase ‘under-promise and over-deliver’ is championed. When it comes to financial advice, however, many people choose to work with whoever can set the highest expectation while still seeming plausible.” Investors shape the way the financial advice industry operates by seeking out optimistic projections.

“A significant portion of traditional financial advice is designed to manage liabilities for the advice-givers, not manage risk for the recipient.”

“Many advisers chase past performance, run concentrated portfolios, and pay little or no attention to product cost,” and they “often pursue these strategies with their own portfolios, even after they had retired from the business. They were not giving poor advice because they were conflicted, immoral, or improperly incentivized. They were doing so because they firmly believed it was good advice. They literally did not know any better.”

De Goey also does a good job explaining the problems with embedded commissions, why disclosure of conflicts of interest doesn’t work, and why we need a carbon tax.

Staying invested

On the subject of market timing, De Goey writes “there must surely be times when selling makes sense.” Whether selling makes sense depends on the observer. Consider a simplified investing game. We draw a card from a deck. If it is a heart, your portfolio drops 1%, and if not it goes up 1%. It’s not hard to make a case here that investors would do well to always remain invested in this game.

It seems that the assertion “there must surely be times when selling makes sense” is incorrect in this case. What would it take for it to make sense to “sell” in this game? One answer is that a close observer of the card shuffling might see that the odds of the next card being a heart exceeds 50%. While most players would not have this information, it is those who know more (or think they know more) who might choose not to gamble on the next card.

Another reason to not play this game is if the investor is only allowed to draw a few more cards but has already reached a desired portfolio level and doesn’t want to take a chance that the last few cards will be hearts. Outside of these possibilities, the advice to always be invested seems good.

Returning to the real world, staying invested is the default best choice because being invested usually beats sitting in cash. One exception is the investor who has no more need to take risks. Another exception is when we believe we have sufficient insight into the market’s future that we can see that being invested likely won’t outperform cash.

Deciding to sell out of the market temporarily is an expression of confidence in our read of the market’s near-term future. When others choose not to sell, they don’t have this confidence that markets will perform poorly. Sellers either have superior reading skills, or they are overconfident and likely wrong. It’s hard to tell which. Whether markets decline or not, it’s still hard to tell whether selling was a good decision based on the information available at the time.

Elevated stock markets

Before December 2021, my DIY financial plan was to remain invested through all markets. As stock markets became increasingly expensive, I thought more about this plan. I realized that it was based on the expectation that markets would stay in a “reasonable range.” What would I do if stock prices kept rising to ever crazier levels?

In the end I formed a plan that had me tapering stock ownership as the blended CAPE of world stocks exceeded 25. So, during “normal” times I would stay invested, and during crazy times, I would slowly shift out of stocks in proportion to how high prices became. I was a market timer. My target stock allocation was 80%, but at the CAPE’s highest point after making this change, my chosen formula had dropped my stock allocation to 73%. That’s not much of a shift, but it did reduce my 2022 investment losses by 1.3 percentage points.

So, I agree with De Goey that selling sometimes makes sense. Although I prefer a formulaic smooth taper rather than a sudden sell-off of some fraction of a portfolio. I didn’t share De Goey’s conviction that a market drop was definitely coming. I had benefited from the run-up in stock prices, believed that the odds of a significant drop were elevated, and was happy to protect some of my gains in cash. I had no idea how high stocks would go and took a middle-of-the-road approach where I was happy to give up some upside to reduce the possible downside. “Sound financial planning should involve thinking ahead and taking into account positive and negative scenarios.” “Options should be weighed on a balance of probabilities basis where there are a range of possible outcomes.”

As of early 2022, “the United States had the following: 5 percent of global population, 15 percent of global public companies, 25 percent of global GDP, 60 percent of global market cap, 80 percent of average U.S. investor allocation, the world’s most expensive stock markets.” These indicators “point to a high likelihood that a bubble had formed.” I see these indicators as a sign that risk was elevated, but I didn’t believe that a crash was certain.

When markets start to decline

“If no one can reliably know for sure what will happen, why does the industry almost always offer the same counsel when the downward trend begins?”

Implicit in this question is the belief that we can tell whether we’re in a period when near future prices are rising or falling. Markets routinely zig-zag. During bull markets, there are days, weeks, and even months of declines, but when we look back over a strong year, we forget about these short declines. But the truth is that we never know whether recent trends will continue or reverse.

De Goey’s question above assumes that we know markets are declining and it’s just a question of how low they will go. I can see the logic of shifting away from stocks as their prices rise to great heights because average returns over the following decade could be dismal, but I can’t predict short-term market moves.

Conviction that the market will crash

‘In the post-Covid-19 world, there was considerable evidence that the market run-up of 2020 and 2021 would not end well. Some advisers did little to manage risk in anticipation of a major drop.”

I’ve never looked at economic conditions and felt certain that markets would drop. My assessment of the probabilities may change over time, but I’m never certain. I have managed the risk in my portfolio by choosing an asset allocation. If I shared De Goey’s conviction about a major drop, I might have acted, but I didn’t share this conviction. Continue Reading…

PWL Capital: Model Portfolio Returns for 2022

Posted By Financial Independence Hub | March 3, 2023

By Justin Bender, CFA, CFP

Special to Financial Independence Hub

Unless you were literally born yesterday, you’re probably already aware that 2022 was an extraordinary year for investing … extraordinarily bad, that is. It hardly mattered which asset mix you invested in. Both stock and bond markets experienced double-digit losses, so even conservative investors with bond-heavy holdings saw their portfolio values plummet.

That’s investing for you. We may not like it, but we actually expect some years to serve up heaping helpings of realized risk, sometimes across the board. It’s the price we pay to expect these same markets to deliver longer and stronger runs of future returns.

From this perspective, we hope you’ll keep your eyes and your asset allocations focused on the future as we review the 2022 performance for the Vanguard, iShares, BMO, and Mackenzie asset allocation ETFs.

Before we look at the 2022 returns for our asset allocation ETFs, let’s check out the year-end results for their underlying holdings, starting with the equity ETFs.

2022 Equity ETF Returns

Canadian equity ETF returns were similar across the board, with losses of around 6%.

Disappointing, for sure, but their performance was still better than that of global stock markets, which lost 12% in Canadian dollar terms. That’s in large part due to the Canadian stock market’s overweight to energy companies. The energy sector happened to have a stellar year, returning over 50% during 2022.

U.S. equity ETFs also ended 2022 on a low note, losing around 20% in U.S. dollar terms. During this time, the U.S. dollar appreciated by 6.8% against the Canadian dollar, reducing the loss for unhedged Canadian investors. Once we factor in the return bump from U.S. dollar exposure, our selection of U.S. equity ETFs lost around 12%-14%, in Canadian dollar terms, net of withholding taxes.

BMO’s trio of U.S. equity ETFs had noticeably higher returns than the others. This is largely due to the methodology used to construct the S&P indexes tracked by BMO’s ETFs. For these indexes, an S&P index committee selects which companies to include in each index. The indexes tracked by the Vanguard, iShares, and Mackenzie ETFs have a less subjective process. This means there is more active decision-making going on in the three S&P indexes tracked by BMO’s ETFs, which led to a wider short-term return difference between BMO and the rest of the more passive index-tracking providers in 2022.