To all readers of the Financial Independence Hub, we wish a very happy — and Findependent! –2016. If you count the last few month of 2014 when the Hub launched, then 2016 will be the third calendar year for the Hub and we look forward to many more.

A reminder that as of today, you can contribute a further $5,500 to your Tax-free Savings Account or TFSA. That’s the first thing they remind you of at RBC Direct Investing, one of the main two financial institutions our family uses.

I have to admit that personally I’ve made no formal list of New Year’s Resolutions, although I have declared that I’d like to take my stress levels down a tad, perhaps by using the word “No” a little more often. We’ll see.

In the meantime, for a good formal list of financial New Year’s Resolutions, the Financial Post’s Angela Hickman recently published a good starting point. Click on Five financial resolutions for 2016, and how to (really) make them happen.

Below, I’ve taken the liberty of summarizing the 5 points. Again, click the red link above for the full piece.

1.) I resolve to figure out my finances

2. I resolve to stick to a budget

3. ) I resolve to get out of debt

4.) I resolve to save more

5.) I resolve to stop wasting money

These are all valid suggestions and especially useful for younger folks for whom financial independence is still a faraway goal.

7 eternal truths can also become New Year’s Resolutions

For more ideas, see my series of 7 “Eternal Truths of Personal Finance” that ran in the FP the past summer. Continue Reading…

As the Tuesday papers reported, the middle-class tax cut and lower annual TFSA contribution limits kick in as of Jan. 1 2016. As the FP’s Garry Marr wrote Tuesday I suppose we can be grateful the Liberals didn’t cut the TFSA program altogether and it could have been worse: they might have cancelled out the “bonus” $10,000 TFSA room we received in 2015. A truly churlish move might have been to allow only $500 in 2016, although the administration nightmares and hordes of angry voters — 11 million of them have TFSAs and more than half liked the higher limits — would surely have created a backlash.

The other tiny bit of silver lining is that the $5,500 limit is again linked to inflation (the $10,000 limit was not), so we can at least hope that the limit will eventually rise to $6,000 and beyond if inflation rises in earnest. Of course, that will be another problem.

In any case, as the Hub showed on Tuesday, the Working Canadians petition is now live at  https://petitions.parl.gc.ca, after Conservative MP Peter Kent (Thornhill) sponsored Catherine Swift’s petition. It will be up until early April. After just a week, it has just under 3,000 signatures, on top of the 7,000 from the earlier Working Canadian petition. See also my FP piece that day: TFSA cancels out benefits of ‘middle class’ tax cuts, critics warn.

I find it interesting that those of us who support the petition all tend to be 60-plus and still working. That applies to Catherine and Peter, though I’m not sure about Bill Tufts, who also wrote a Hub blog on the topic as it relates to pension parity.

The two-tiered society

I actually had a bad cold all week and had to force myself to continue working. It occurred to me that this was a stark contrast to recent news stories about how many extra sick days public-sector workers take, especially on Mondays and Fridays in the summer.

Couple that phenomenon with the disparity between public-sector and private-sector pensions and it’s clear we have a two-tiered society: those in the public sector who take plenty of paid vacations and sick days and who can retire in their late 50s; and those in the private sector who keep toiling well into their 60s and are reluctant to stop working even when they’re sick. (which is what I am as I write these words: hope it doesn’t show!). Continue Reading…