My blog today in the Financial Post looks at the critical distinction between being “cheap” (universally condemned as being not a good thing), and “frugal” (generally acknowledged as a good thing and the key to living within your means and building financial independence. You can find it here under the headline Jonathan Chevreau: How being Cheap is causing Canadians wallet pain.

Next week Capital One Canada and Credit Canada Debt Solutions will be kicking off Credit Education Week with a Twitter-based social media campaign that challenges readers to divulge their own happy stories of being frugal and not-so-happy tales of being cheap.

Sounds like fun!

FP Comment has run a guest article by Working Canadians’ Catherine Swift about the campaign and petition to save the $10,000 annual contribution limit for Tax-free Savings Accounts.

You can find it here, headlined Save our $10,000 tax-free savings accounts.

The Hub focused on this issue on Tuesday, linking to a piece I wrote on the petition in the Financial Post that day: Save our TFSA: Working Canadians launches petition to preserve $10,000 limit.

That piece also includes a short video by me on this topic, which you can also find housed here at Findependence.TV.

Here again is the direct link to the petition.

The numbers signing it are rapidly rising but if you feel strongly about the issue, the more you can use social media and e-mail to spread the word, the better!

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As my online piece in the Financial Post this morning reports, Catherine Swift and her Working Canadians group are releasing an online petition urging millions of Canadians with Tax-free Savings Accounts (TFSAs) to ask the incoming Liberal administration to keep annual contribution levels at $10,000.

You can find the Save our TFSA petition here.

As we noted last Thursday in Working Canadians’ Catherine Swift to Liberals: Retain $10,000 TFSA contribution limit,  one of our readers actually suggested such a petition be launched. I reproduce the email below:

There would be an enormous protest from many individuals if this comes to pass. Is there an organized petition to fight this plan, please? As a needing widow retiree, I wish to join one. — VB

Well there is an organized petition now and the Hub urges readers to sign it. Continue Reading…

We have just posted the latest in the Evidenced-based Investing series of videos courtesy of FWB TV: Why couples need to talk about investing. You can also find it and the rest of the series housed at sister site Findependence.TV.

The 3-minute video features renowned indexer and author Charles Ellis, author of Winning the Loser’s Game. (Link is to the latest or sixth edition).

Citing UBS research, the video notes that most high-net-worth couples do share responsibility for major financial decisions, although men and women tend to focus on different aspects of their finances. For the most part, women take more of a role in dealing with day-to-day household finances and charitable giving; men take more of an interest in investing: in fact, fear than one in five women pay much attention to the investments jointly owned by couples.

The main point of the video is that couples should share responsibility about investing in particular because it plays such a critical role in the health of their jointly held wealth. And naturally, Charles Ellis thinks they should give up on trying to choose high-priced actively managed investments (aka “The Loser’s Game”) and agree on an indexing approach to their investments.

In this respect, the video concludes that men are actually more prone to emotion during periods of market volatility, while women are better at staying the course.