My latest MoneySense Retired Money column looks at the question of whether almost-retired or already-retired Baby Boomer parents should provide financial assistance to their Millennial children seeking to get their first steps on the increasingly expensive housing ladder.
That is, is it wise for parents to cut into their own Retirement savings in order to become the BOMAD: the Bank of Mum and Dad?
It’s been said that 50 to 75% of millennials expect to tap the BOMAD for help coming up with a down payment.Click on the highlighted headline to retrieve the whole column: Should you help your adult children to buy Real Estate?
Francey is a seasoned entrepreneur and real estate investor who is CEO of REIN of the Real Estate Investment Network (REIN). These days, most REIN members who have at least one “door” (real estate investment property above and beyond a principal residence) are almost by definition millionaires. I appeared despite the fact our family owns no investment real estate, apart from REIT ETFs in a purely electronic portfolio: “clicks instead of bricks,” as I explained on the show.
REIN’s Patrick Francey, host of The Everyday Millionaire podcast
Interestingly, while he has helped his own kids with housing, Francey does not necessarily think parents should provide financial assistance to kids trying to break into the housing market: not if it jeopardizes their own retirement, and not if it means the kids will miss out on the character-building exercise of doing it on their own.
A similar stance came from retired mortgage broker and author Calum Ross, who also recently appeared on the podcast. Ross, of Toronto-based The Mortgage Management Group, has some experience with BOMAD as it relates to his two daughters. “As a divorced Dad, BOMAD was restructured and now runs as a privately held entity BOD [Bank of Dad.],” Ross quips.
Ross says his parenting priorities are identical to how his parents raised him: 1) I taught them to be thoughtful, 2) I raised them with a work ethic, and 3) I taught them to save money and not spend it.
Adrian Mastracci, portfolio manager with Vancouver-based Lycos Asset Management, says BOMAD may be a great deal for the kids but Mum and Dad need to first ensure they have sufficient funding to see them through their retirement years. “Ensure that they can incur all expenses, health costs, effects of inflation, rising costs of providing for in-home services, a retirement home facility and rehabilitation costs of the current home.” Continue Reading…
Kornel Szrejber’s Canadian Financial Summit 2021 is a virtual event that will go live next Wednesday, Sept. 22. There are dozens of financial speakers featured, including many well-known financial bloggers, including Yours Truly.
My 45-minute Zoom interview with Kornel was pretty wide-ranging but focused on Retirement Income, as opposed to Wealth Accumulation. The working title for the discussion was Semi-Retirement: the Halfway House between Employment and Full Retirement. Or as Doug Dahmer and other retirement gurus have dubbed it, the “Work Optional” phase of our working careers.
Certainly our chat was informative and entertaining: I certainly revealed a lot of how our family’s own personal finances are handled and I learned that Kornel — like Michael James and Robb Engen — has long been a “pure” indexer as opposed to a hybrid investor who mixes core ETFs with a bit of dividend investing and speculation in individual stocks.
We will reprise the full interview and supply a link once the event goes alive. In the meantime, check out Robb Engen’s preview of the event that ran on the Hub earlier today.
As this link published at MoneySense.ca on Sept 3rd indicates, I will be giving a half-hour virtual presentation on September 21st on how the annual MoneySense ETF All-stars package can help retirees and near-retirees build their nest eggs and then draw income from them. (i.e. Accumulation and Decumulation).
The World of ETF Investing Canada Virtual Expo talk is on Sept. 21. Registration is free.
Here’s how MoneySense describes it:
Jonathan Chevreau, a longtime personal finance journalist, former Editor-in-Chief of MoneySense and the creator of our perennially popular Best ETFs in Canada package has said there’s only one free lunch for investors—and that’s the kind of broad diversification you can get from a low-cost, broadly diversified portfolio “core” based on exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
ETFs have become so popular that there are now roughly 1,000 listed on Canadian exchanges alone, with thousands more on US and international stock exchanges. Now in its 9th annual edition, I write up the feature each spring after conferring with an all-star panel of eight investing professionals and specialists. Together, we narrow the field to the very best options across five categories: Canadian, U.S., International, fixed-income and all-in-one asset-allocation funds.
In addition individual panelists provides their unique “Desert-Island Picks” that they are particularly passionate about and that may merit consideration, but don’t achieve the full-consensus vote otherwise required to make the cut. Continue Reading…
The podcast has been going since 2017, and sports the slogan “Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
It was a wide-ranging and surprisingly personal interview. Most of Francey’s guests are real estate millionaires: given the bull market in Canadian residential real estate it’s not surprising that most of Francey’s guests are technically millionaires: even starter homes in Toronto are going for a million dollars.
REIN’s Patrick Francey
Patrick Francey is the CEO of REIN, the Real Estate Investment Network, with which I have long been familiar: my daughter Helen once worked there. Sadly, as you will discover on the podcast, I confess that our family never made the plunge into investment real estate beyond owning a principal residence in Toronto. We discuss the fact that while real estate is an excellent way to achieve Financial Independence, some of us are more comfortable with investing in financial assets like stocks and bonds: in so-called “clicks” rather than “bricks.”
The foundation of Financial Independence
As I say in the interview as well as the recently updated US edition of my financial novel, Findependence Day, job one is to purchase a principal residence and pay down the mortgage as soon as possible; hence the saying “The Foundation of Financial Independence is a paid-for home.” Continue Reading…
Sadly for democracy, the summer of 2021 has seen yet another flurry of books about former US president Donald Trump. The three main ones are shown in the photo above (taken from the Toronto Sunday Star’s reprint of the New York Times Book Review that appeared on August 15th, referencing late July sales).
And two more may shortly join them on the list, both by authors who have tackled this terrain at least once before: one by Bob Woodward, Peril, coauthored with Robert Costa, and Mary Trump’s sequel, The Reckoning, which came out this week, more on which below.
While we did publish a version of this blog earlier this summer I have revised it to reflect the fact that the three books already published make up three of the top six bestsellers .
Notice that all three titles originated with words originally from Trump’s mouth. I have now read or listened to all three of I Alone Can Fix It (number 1 on the adjacent list), Landslide (number 3) and Frankly, We Did Win This Election (Number 6). Thank you for the sympathy.
In the case of the three books already out and flagged above, I borrowed ebooks or audio books from the Toronto Public Library’s excellent Libby service and/or a paid service called SCRIBD: a paid service that has a 30-day free trial. Not being a Trump fan, I really don’t relish the idea of actually paying for these books, although you could also argue the authors are performing a public service in reminding American voters of the folly they committed in 2016 and may yet repeat in 2024.
I certainly hope that these five books will be the last batch but fear that we’re not even close. 45 — as I prefer to call him — grabbed an outsized share of the world’s attention during his ill-fated first term and it’s well within the realm of possibility that he will continue to do so in what may prove to be a mere interregnum of the Joe Biden presidency.
If, God forbid, 45 also becomes 47 by winning in 2024 then all told the world would be subjected to more than 12 years of his commanding the media’s attention and that of the publishing world, like it or not. The implications for the global economy and by extension the stock market are not, I think, pretty, should the worst happen.
True, 2024 may seem like a long shot, given 45’s age (75), obesity and poor dietary and exercise habits, not to mention the multiple criminal and civil legal cases unfolding against him. One hopes that eventually all this will catch up with him and that the American electorate will finally wise up to the conman/would-be dictator. You can fool some of the people all of the time but are there really 74 million Americans who are blinded to 45’s obvious faults?
So far, he’s got away with everything
CNN.COM
Apparently so. As Mary Trump wrote in the closing pages of her book on her uncle, Too Much and Never Enough, “So far he’s gotten away with everything.” He’s dodged every bullet fired at him during his checkered career as real estate mogul, reality TV star and twice-impeached US president.
In her followup book, Mary outlines her ideas on how America can cope with the aftermath of her uncle’s chaotic four years.
Again, I read a library e-book and found the 205 pages of The Reckoning to be a fairly quick read. Roughly half the content reprises the first book and its focus on Uncle Donny. The other half, including the opening chapter, covers perhaps more American history than most Canadians will be interested in: especially its native origins and early days of slavery of Black Americans and/or a lot of analysis and recommendations for how America can emerge from the “trauma” that psychologist Mary Trump hypothesizes afflicted her and many other Americans following her uncle’s 2016 electoral victory.
Certainly, she has not dialled down her rhetoric about her uncle. A few sample passages:
She concedes that 74 million people voted for Donald, who she describes as “the least worthy person I can imagine.”
“…. despite, or because of, the four years of incompetence, cruelty, criminality, grifting, unconstitutional behaviour, treachery, treason, and most breathtaking of all, the fact that almost there hundred thousand Americans had died by Election Day as a direct result of Donald’s willfully malicious inaction.”
Or:
“Donald wasn’t just incompetent, laughable, and cruel — though he was all of those — he was actively laying the groundwork, through his rhetoric, his policies, and his perversion of democratic norms and institutions, for autocracy.”
What has this to do with Financial Independence?
What has all this got to do with Financial Independence? At first blush, not a lot. See for example this Hub blog I wrote from 2018: The glut of books about Trump and prospects for Boomers’ retirements. If he actually wins back office from 2025 to 2029, many of his generation will be retired if they’re not already.
The last time we looked at Trump books was last fall, as we steeled ourselves for the possibility of his reelection: apart from the Mary Trump book cited above I reviewed Michael Cohen’s Disloyal and Bob Woodward’s Rage. Again, note that Woodward is about to publish Peril, another book about Trump’s last year in office, coauthored with the Washington Post’s Robert Costa.
Which brings us to the three bestsellers flagged in yellow in the list at the top of this blog. Apart from them, hose interested in the Covid aspect of the Trump presidency might also want to read Nightmare Scenario. I enjoyed it, although anyone paying attention to the news throughout 2020 will be familiar with the story arc: 45’s initial and ongoing denial of Covid, his attempt to keep the stock market from being spooked by it, and on through Operation Warp Speed and Pfizer’s announcement of its successful vaccine scant days after the election, which of course infuriated 45. Mary Trump’s The Reckoning also spends a lot of time on Donald’s negligence with respect to the pandemic
Landslide
This is Michael Wolff’s third book on Trump, which in itself should be cause for pity for this author. The New York Times favourably reviewed this along with I Alone Can Fix It. Continue Reading…
Posted By 
