All posts by Jonathan Chevreau

Virtual talks this week at Financial Summit and MoneyShow [continued & updated]

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Yesterday, Wednesday, Kornel Szrejber’s all-virtual Canadian Financial Summit kicked off,  running until Saturday, Sept. 25. As the image above shows, you can register free. Here is the main link for info on the more than 35 presentations.

Now that Day One of the Summit has taken place, the organizers issued this update:

Good morning. If you couldn’t make it to the kickoff webinar last night, feel free to check out our recording here and then let me welcome you to the Canadian Financial Summit!

A special thank you to those of you that took the time to help us spread the word on social media, and who emailed us encouraging messages about the Summit Kickoff.

We’ve received hundreds of emails from attendees this week, so if you submitted a question, I promise that we’ll get to it, we’re just working through them in chronological order. If you don’t want to wait, then definitely check out the kick-off event video that I posted yesterday, as there’s a 90%+ chance that your question is answered in that video.

Today [Sept 23] we’re super excited to feature the following speakers (free for the next 48 hours):

Rob Carrick
Can Renting a Home Actually Make More Financial Sense for Some Canadians?

Ellen Roseman
How to Protect Yourself as a Canadian Consumer in 2021-2022 + Retirement Strategies for Canadians

Ed Rempel
Self-Made Dividends – Better than Ordinary Dividends in Every Way

Bridget Casey
What Role Should Cryptocurrency Play in Your Portfolio?

Kyle Prevost
Want an Unlimited TFSA? Move to These Countries and Build a Portfolio Tax-Free!

Ben Felix, Brendan Wood, Tim Nash
FAQs and Misconceptions about DIY Investing

Alanna Abramsky
Understanding Credit and Managing Debt

Jonathan Chevreau
Semi-Retirement: The Halfway House between Employment and Full Retirement

Mike Heroux
Are Dividend Stocks In a Bubble?  What Market Is Safe?

Andrew Hallam
Balance – How to Invest and Spend for Happiness, Health, and Wealth

Ben Felix
What is Factor Investing, Why Do Smart People Like It, and Can It Make You Money?

Robb Engen
Don’t Let FOMO Rule Your Investment Decisions

Click here to see your Day 1 Summit Sessions.

If the link doesn’t work, please try copy and pasting the following into your browser:
https://canadianfinancialsummit.com/2021-day-1/

My presentation is the one titled Semi-Retirement: the Halfway House between Employment and Full Retirement.

It consists of a 45-minute Zoom interview with Kornel is pretty wide-ranging but focuses on Retirement Income, as opposed to Wealth Accumulation. That’s Semi-retirement: or as Doug Dahmer and other retirement gurus have dubbed it, the “Work Optional” phase of our working careers.

Here’s the formal description for that talk:

September 23:
Semi-Retirement: The Halfway House between Employment and Full Retirement

Should you transition into a semi-retirement instead of a full-stop retirement? What if doing so allowed you to ‘retire’ many years earlier?

Join us as we speak to someone who has done exactly that: Jonathan Chevreau, professional writer and former Editor-in-Chief of MoneySense Magazine takes us through his real-life lessons learned from transitioning to the decumulation phase and actually living off the investment portfolio. 

To access the video, click the highlighted title above and scroll down to Jonathan Chevreau, then click on the highlighted name.

We cover:

  • How Jon ensures that he doesn’t run out of money in retirement
  • The investment withdraw strategy that he prefers
  • How he withdraws from his investments in a tax efficient way
  • Important lessons to know before transitioning to semi-retirement or full-stop retirement 
On Friday, Sept 24, the MoneySense ETF All-stars are the focus of a three-way chat between myself, Kornel and PWL Capital’s Ben Felix (who is also an ETF panelist for the All-stars). Here’s the formal Summit description:
September 24:

MoneySense: Jonathan Chevreau, Ben Felix, Kornel Szrejber
The Best ETFs in Canada for 2021

In this video presentation, we’re going to cover the top ETFs in Canada, specifically for Canadian investors. 

These findings are based on 8 experts in this field who are part of the Best ETFs in Canada Guide which is published annually on MoneySense and written by the one and only Jonathan Chevreau.

In this interview and presentation, we’re going to talk about what the findings were with the creator of the guide, and one of the top Analysts from the panel (Benjamin Felix, Portfolio Manager at PWL Capital). Continue Reading…

Retired Money: Can retired Boomers afford to be the BOMAD to their kids?

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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?

A couple of the column’s sources arose after I appeared on Patrick Francey’s The Everyday Millionaire podcast.

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…

Canadian Financial Summit 2021 next week

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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.

 

My virtual MoneyShow talk on MoneySense ETF All-Stars and Financial Independence

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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…

Flying the Findependence Flag: My appearance on Patrick Francey’s The Everyday Millionaire podcast

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The Everyday Millionaire podcast starring REIN’s Patrick Francey has just released its one-hour-plus interview with me. You can find it (audio) on the regular podcast channels by clicking this title: Flying the Findependence Flag.

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…