Hub Blogs

Hub Blogs contains fresh contributions written by Financial Independence Hub staff or contributors that have not appeared elsewhere first, or have been modified or customized for the Hub by the original blogger. In contrast, Top Blogs shows links to the best external financial blogs around the world.

What can you buy for 5 bucks? Quite a lot!

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By Jonathan Chevreau

fiverrI recently delivered my debut “Ice Breakers” talk at the local (Port Credit) chapter of Toastmasters, an organization I highly recommend for anyone who wants to polish their public speaking and leadership skills.

I began by pulling out a $5 bill and dropping it at my feet. I asked how many audience members would pick one up if they saw a stray fin on the sidewalk. Most would, but also admitted they probably wouldn’t bother to stoop to pick up a penny or a nickel. I also remarked that when you pull a green $20 bill out of your wallet and consider what it can purchase, your attitude to that bill’s value is probably about what it was to a purple $10 bill some two decades earlier. Inflation, it seems, is forever with us.

If this is inflation, bring it on!

fiverrBut if you ever wanted a concrete demonstration of the value of a lowly blue $5 bill, then go the website fiverr.com. That’s FIVERR, a “fiver” with an extra R. Continue Reading…

The Mathematics of Catastrophe

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dougdahmer
Doug Dahmer

By Doug Dahmer, Emeritus Retirement Income Specialists

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

I was not the best math student in the world but I certainly enjoyed numbers. I especially liked prime numbers and their unique indivisibility. I still cannot figure out how they come to be.

In the course of my retirement-income planning career I had another math lesson that now holds my interest even more. Here is the lesson. If you halve a number, you have to double the new number to get back to the original number.

Now put your income-generating capital into that equation and you will see why it holds my interest. If you are deriving income from X and it goes to 1/2 X … well, you don’t have to be Einstein to see the problem.

iStock_000034496492_Medium (640x427)When you draw a predetermined dollar amount from your investment portfolio and it drops by ½ you are about to experience the mathematics of catastrophe. Continue Reading…

Rocco versus the Banksters: Why it matters

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graham chevreau insipid photo
Graham Chevreau

By Graham Chevreau

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Rocco Galati Versus the Bank of Canada

 “I have a firm basis to believe that the Government has requested or ordered the mainstream media NOT to cover this case,” said Consitutional Lawyer Rocco Galati after winning his latest battle in the Federal Court of Appeal on January 26, 2015. He went on to say: “This case is on solid legal and constitutional grounds. It should win, but not all meritorious cases win in our judicial system.” 

Continue Reading…

The Hub’s Weekly wrap: Bag lady fears, fast-casual dining stocks & more

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Woman in povertyLaunched last week, the Hub’s Weekly Wrap aims to be a weekend read with brief commentary and links to some of the more interesting items touching on Financial Independence that appeared in North American cyberspace in the past week or two.

We aim to split these roughly half from American blogs and online media and half from Canadian. (That roughly corresponds to current traffic levels at the Hub.)

We’ll begin with this piece from Next Avenue: Unemployed, 55 and Faking Normal. This blog about the common fear of becoming a bag lady (financially speaking) was widely tweeted, including by a few women I suspect were in similar circumstances. No doubt about it, a combination of divorce and job loss can add up to a tough go, especially if you’re still not old enough to qualify for Social Security or the Canadian triad of CPP/OAS/GIS.

Fast-casual dining

Moving on to the more fortunate comes this piece from the Washington Post, mentioned on the Motley Fool’s Market Foolery podcast on Tuesday. The Chipotle effect: Why America is obsessed with fast casual food is an analysis of the trend to “Fast Casual” dining and the stocks of the major players capitalizing on this change (Chipotle and Panera to name two.) This is a threat to the old-time fast food joints like McDonald’s: ironically, McDonald’s incubated Chipotle in its early days.

4 reasons to pay your credit card bill early Continue Reading…

Are you ready for The Big Shift?

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bigshiftBy Jonathan Chevreau

If you’re intrigued by the kind of content we publish on the Hub, you should be fascinated by The Big Shift, a book published originally in 2011 by Marc Freedman.

The subtitle tells it all: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife. Freedman is a “social entrepreneur” who founded a firm called Civic Ventures (now Encore.org), and previously published (in 2007) a book called Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life. We’ll review that in the next few weeks.

Both books have crystallized my thinking of what this site is all about, so much so that we have renamed the fifth of our six major blog categories Encore Acts, (from the previous IBusiness Ownership). As we noted in Saturday’s new weekly wrap, an Encore Act may or may not include entrepreneurship but there are many Encore Acts that may not involve launching a new business.

The Longevity Bonus: centenarians galore?  Continue Reading…