Reviews

We review books that deal with everything from financial independence topics to politics, and anything in between. We may sometimes stray into films and music if there is a “Findependence” angle.

Happy (Financial) Independence Day!

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Depositphotos_8101987_s-2015To all our American readers, the Findependence Hub wishes a happy  Independence Day, or  as we like to say around here, Findependence Day.

Bloggers are fond of building posts around the July 4th celebration, and several are using the phrase Financial Independence Day. For instance, a year ago Forbes.com published a blog titled Financial Independence Day for Millennials.

In fact, on June 21st, 2016, Richard Eisenberg of Next Avenue and Forbes.com did just that, re-running a similar piece entitled How to Declare Your Financial Independence. And he did make an explicit reference to Findependence Day, more on which below.

This weekend’s Motley Fool Money podcast, as it was a year ago, is titled Declare Your Financial Independence. It features interviews with authors and radio personalities Dave Ramsey and Clark Howard. Continue Reading…

How the Age of Longevity will change your life and mine

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100-plus-book
100 Plus by Sonia Arrison (SingularityHub.com)

One of dozens of books I read for a  talk I gave on how Longevity Changes Everything is entitled 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith.

The author, Sonia Arrison, challenges the reader to at least open one’s mind to the possibility of human beings reaching the age of 150, which of course is a good 30 years longer than the age reached by modern centenarians, although still much less than the biblical Methusalah, Noah et al.

Certainly, as I was reading at the same time Moshe Milevsky’s new second edition of Pensionize Your Nest Egg, I was conscious of the financial implications of breakthroughs in human longevity. Milevsky’s preferred form of “Longevity Insurance” is life annuities and new hybrid variations of Variable Annuities that provide both stock market exposure and some guarantees and mortality credits provided by insurance companies.

Financial implications of Longevity

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Victory Lap Retirement: A Retirement book about NOT (fully) retiring

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Victory_Lap_Retirement_Front_Cover The fun now begins because Jonathan and I finally get to enjoy the fruits of our labours. The book Victory Lap Retirement has been written, the website and blog has come to life and our first pre-orders are starting to trickle in.

But there is much work to be done to accomplish our goal of building the VLR tribe and helping as many people as possible start their own version of a VLR lifestyle. Great things take time but the results are well worth it once you get there!

Everyone needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning

During your primary career, when you worked for money to ensure security for your family, you had a good reason to get out of bed each morning. But in VLR now that you have achieved Financial Independence (FI) and left your primary career you will need to find another good reason and we believe that some combination of work/leisure will satisfy that need for you. If it is work for pay even better!

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Will an expanded CPP speed your Findependence Day?

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cpp_image2Lots of media coverage this week about the (relatively) modest expansion of the Canada Pension Plan. As I noted in the print edition of Wednesday’s Financial Post (and online), this isn’t going to help almost-retired baby boomers in any material fashion but it’s certainly a welcome development for the generations that follow, including the Boomers’ own kids.

I note that quite independently, the Globe & Mail’s Rob Carrick was equally in favour of the changes: We can’t afford NOT to make these changes.

(Added Thursday: My take on this for Motley Fool Canada can be found by clicking on this highlighted headline: CPP Expansion Too Late for Boomers but a Win for their Children.)

As I speculated in the headline of sister site FindependenceDay.com, you could argue that a slightly sweeter CPP package of benefits should at least marginally speed up the arrival of the Millennials’ collective Findependence Day. However, I also noted that — as in my own case — there is still an incentive to delay the receipt of CPP benefits. In a way, Boomers who don’t take “early” CPP at 60 and opt to wait until closer to 70 are choosing to almost double their ultimate benefits.

There’s still an incentive to delay receipt of benefits

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The New Case for Gold

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Closeup silver ingots and golden bullions in bank vault. Finance 3d illustrationMy latest blog for Motley Fool Canada was posted today: click on The New Case for Gold.

That headline also happens to be the title of a new book by global currency guru James Rickards. You can find the book here.

What does Rickards mean by the NEW case for gold? When I say gold here, by extension I mean silver and other precious metals, preferably in bullion or coin format, not “paper” or electronic substitutes.

Rickards does go beyond the familiar arguments of gold as a combined inflation/deflation hedge, and does so in a 21st century context. He breaks new ground by referring to gold’s role in cyberfinancial warfare, its importance in economic sanctions in nations like Iran, and gold’s future as a competitor to the world money system known as SDRs: the Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.

G-Day approaching

51bmOorQk5L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_HIs main thesis is that G-Day is rapidly approaching: an ominous day when all the investors with mere paper or electronic claims on bullion actually attempt to procure the actual physical underlying metal. Like a run on the bank, the claims would far exceed the actual amount of the available metal. If and when that occurs, he believes the price of the metal would soar to over US$10,000 per ounce, in which case even a 10% insurance position would nicely cover losses in other asset classes should such a global monetary collapse actually occur.

The Real Crash

The Motley Fool blog also looks at another “bear” book that is similarly bullish on gold: the updated 2016 edition of Peter Schiff’s The Real Crash: How to Save Yourself and Your Country. Continue Reading…