All posts by Jonathan Chevreau

Can RRSPs ever get too large?

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | February 18, 2016

Can a Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) ever get too large? From time to time, you’ll hear certain financial advisors say so and propose “melting down” RRSPs in a tax-effective manner.

The Financial Post just ran a piece by me on this topic, entitled The Pros and Perils of making early withdrawals from your RRSP. One of the sources cited is a familiar one to Hub readers: Doug Dahmer of Emeritus Financial Strategies often writes guest blogs in the Hub’s Decumulation section.

RRSP primer for millennials

Can’t cope with market volatility? Try embracing your inner ostrich

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | February 12, 2016

My latest Financial Post Investing Pro blog is titled Feel Free to Embrace Your Inner Ostrich, as long as you do your homework first.

Seems a common reaction to watching a sea of red on financial terminals is simply not to look at the carnage. And, depending on how you set up your portfolio, this may not be as bad a thing as it may seem.

So says The Stingy Investor’s Norman Rothery. The blog also features a couple of occasional Hub contributors, Steve Lowrie and Aman Raina, both of whom look at the behavioural finance aspects of such “ostrich” behaviour.

Beware out-of-the-blue phone calls and emails from fraudsters posing as Taxman

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | February 9, 2016

Now that employer T4s are being issued, tax time is officially under way, and with it there seems to be a rising incidence of telephone scam attempts from fraudsters purporting to represent the Canada Revenue Agency, or CRA.

The warnings have been out there for months in various media outlets and via the CRA itself, as a quick Google search will reveal.

However, the problem hit home for me last week when I received two disturbing phone calls in two consecutive days. The voices were foreign-sounding in both instances and both insistent and aggressive: the gist was that unless I sent them money immediately, that the CRA would commence legal proceedings against me.

Coming as they did out of the blue, I didn’t think to take notes or string them along: the first call I hung up almost instantly, the second time I briefly tried to engage the perpetrator in a dialogue that went nowhere. “I don’t think so,” were my last words.

On January 16, 2016, the CRA’s web site revealed most of what you need to know about these phone scams. The first step is to recognize that a particular phone call, email, text message claiming to be from the CRA and requesting certain personal information is unlikely to be what the perpetrator claims.

Don’t provide personal info over phone

Time to repatriate US dollar gains back into loonie?

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | February 4, 2016

The Canadian dollar or loonie is under pressure amid weak oil prices and a strengthening U.S. currency. Today, the loonie dropped to 78.39 cents for a U.S dollar the lowest in a many years. — The Canadian dollar is under pressure amid weak oil prices and a strengthening U.S. currency.

My latest Financial Post blog is titled It might be time to repatriate your US$ investments and book those currency gains.

Actually, the C$ has strengthened of late, so the timing isn’t as opportune as a few weeks ago. After a long period of strength, the US$ has slightly weakened against various global currencies, even against the loonie.

Even so, we’re still a long way from par and it may make sense to book some of the gains, and if the loonie starts to sag further, repeat the process every time it falls 3 cents or so.

See also the following mid-January Hub blog by Adrian Mastracci: Falling Loonie Strategies.

The Abundant Retirement Summit and Victory Lap Retirement

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | February 3, 2016

As readers may know, Hub blogger Michael Drak and I have just finished co-authoring a book about life after Financial Independence. It’s titled Victory Lap Retirement, and describes a new post-corporate lifestyle that combines work and play, much like the illustration to the left.

The book has just gone through its second editing pass. Next we’ll be sending out pre-release PDFs to media and influencers, looking for testimonials: if you’re interested please let me know at jonathan@findependencehub.com or Michael at michael.drak@yahoo.ca.

The finished product should be in book stores and available online by mid-summer.

Half-hour interview will be at Abundant Retirement telesummit