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.

The Single Best Investment

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singlebestBy Jonathan Chevreau

The Single Best Investment: Creating Wealth with Dividend Growth, is the title of a classic investment book first published in 2006 by Lowell Miller, who heads Miller/Howard Investments.

It came to my attention via Wes Moss, who I interviewed for an upcoming MoneySense column, whose book You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think we reviewed here at the Hub. I mentioned the book in passing last week in this MoneySense blog last week. That blog focused on asset allocation but provided a big hint about Miller’s philosophy: there’s no place for bonds in Lowell’s investment worldview.

The book’s first chapter sets the tone in its title: Say goodbye to bonds and hello to bouncing principal. Like many stock believers and bond haters, Miller takes it as a given that the investing environment generally includes inflation. Since “safe” investments like t-bills, bonds, money market mutual funds and CDs (Certificates of Deposits in his native USA; known as GICs in Canada) are all “poor investments because what they give is less than inflation takes away.”

Stocks are the only asset class likely to beat inflation in the long run, but the “price” of such an investment is volatility. Continue Reading…

Live long & prosper

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longevityprojectHere’s my latest MoneySense blog, which they’ve titled Working to Live Better, Longer. Since it’s based on a reading of books about Longevity and even Immortality, we’re housing it here at the Hub in the Reviews, Encore Acts and Longevity & Aging blog categories.

Click on the red link above to reach the MoneySense version or if you want to see images of the book covers discussed, they are in the version posted below. (The two sites tend to use different images to illustrate):  Continue Reading…

A longevity guru’s tips on Happiness

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Thrive

By Jonathan Chevreau

Happiness, longevity, health and money are all (as you might expect) intertwined. In his book, You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think (also reviewed here at the Hub), Wes Moss focuses on the five money secrets of the happiest retirees.

One of the books he mentions is Dan Buettner’s The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. We will review that book, first published in 2008, in due course.

In the meantime, we’re going to look at Buettner’s followup book on happiness: Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way, originally published by National Geographic in 2010.

To research the book, Buettner travelled to four of the world’s allegedly happiest countries, two of which I’ve visited myself: Denmark and Mexico, and two I haven’t: Singapore and San Luis Obisco (in California). In each locale he contacts local elders known for their wisdom about happiness and how the city or country built its infrastructure to maximize it.

He then wraps it all up by summing up what these nations have in common with a chapter entitled Lessons in Thriving.

He concludes there are six “life domains” that can be shaped to boost one’s chances for happiness. These six “thrive centers” are: Continue Reading…

Life after Employment: what’s your Encore act?

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Encorecover

By Jonathan Chevreau

I’ve been reading several books on Encore Careers, second acts and the like. A few weeks ago, we reviewed Marc Freedman’s The Big Shift. Over a one-week break in Florida, I read Freedman’s earlier book, Encore, subtitled Finding Work That Matters In the Second Half of Life.

Last year, on our sister site, we also reviewed Stephen Pollan’s 2003 book on the same topic:  Second Acts.

All these books start with the premise that the baby boom generation may end up living a lot longer than they may have once imagined, which goes double for their own children and the generations coming after them.

Work that matters

If you believe that living to 100 is a distinct possibility rather than a one-in-a-thousand outlier event, then it follows that financial planning needs to take these extra years into account. Continue Reading…

Tax issues for Americans with ties to Canada (& vice versa)

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Brian preferred small
Brian Wruk

By Brian Wruk, CFP

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

As the Canadian tax deadline quickly approaches, the process of gathering all your tax slips, back-up for your deductions and getting them to your accountant begins or, maybe you are installing the latest tax software. Regardless, if you are a Canadian with some form of tax ties to the U.S., you may need to file a U.S. tax return as well. What kind of ties?

Let’s go through three of the most common ones:

  1. U. S. Citizenship – With all the media coverage, it is becoming common knowledge that being a U.S. citizen means you have to file a U.S. Form 1040 tax return. This is even more difficult to hide from the IRS since Canada signed an agreement that requires Canadian financial institutions to report all financial information tied to a “U.S. person.” This is all part of the IRS Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) initiative to crack down on U.S. citizens evading taxes through foreign accounts. Canadian financial institutions are reporting this information to Canada Revenue Agency, which in turn will provide that to the IRS as permitted by the Canada/U.S. Tax Treaty and the IRS will be looking for a tax return and the appropriate disclosures (FBARs).

Continue Reading…