As Didi says in the novel (Findependence Day), “There’s no point climbing the Tower of Wealth when you’re still mired in the basement of debt.” If you owe credit-card debt still charging an usurous 20% per annum, forget about building wealth: focus on eliminating that debt. And once done, focus on paying off your mortgage. As Theo says in the novel, “The foundation of financial independence is a paid-for house.”
Lately, the talk of the town seems to be rising interest rates. In April, the Bank of Canada raised the benchmark interest rate by a whopping 0.5% to 1%, making it the biggest rate hike since 2000. Given the high inflation rate, it is almost a given that these rate hikes will continue throughout 2022 and beyond. [On July 13, 2022, the BOC hiked a further 1%: editor.]
But before you freak out, let’s step back and look at the big picture. At 1%, the benchmark interest rate is still relatively low compared to the past interest rates.
I still remember years ago before the financial crisis, being able to get GIC rates at around 5%. And some people may remember +10% interest rates in the 80s or early 90s. Back then, interest rates were much much higher than measly below 1% rates we’ve been seeing the last decade.
Historical BoC overnight rates
What’s going to happen to the stock market? Well the general rule is that when Bank of Canada or the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, the stock market goes up. When Bank of Canada or the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, the stock market goes down.
It’s been awhile since I reviewed any political books here on the Hub. The last time was this time a year ago when I surveyed what were then the latest books on the Trump presidency (at one point in 2021, 3 of the top 6 New York Times bestselling books were on Trump: see here).
I occasionally wade in on this topic on the grounds that investors need to be on top of this seemingly unique political situation. That’s despite the fact that when Trump first won his shock victory in 2016, markets briefly cratered, only to quickly recover.
The particular pair of mini-reviews below has no real financial angle but you can see I explicitly covered that a few years ago in a MoneySense column that evaluated the implications of the Trump presidency for the Boomers’ collective retirements: see here.
Over the long weekend, I finished reading two recently published books that some may find of interest, whose covers are illustrated on this blog. One is Thank You for Your Servitude, Mark Leibovich’s entertaining summary of all the Republican enablers who made the Trump presidency possible in the first place, and may yet facilitate a dreaded second term. The other is This Will Not Pass [Simon & Schuster) by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, subtitled Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future. The co-authors are both New York Times writers and CNN political analysts, neither known as MAGA-friendly outlets.
Save your money and borrow these from the library
I might add that, despite being an author myself, I generally refuse to buy any of these US political books: I either read ebooks from the Toronto Library’s excellent Libby app, or download ebooks or audio books from the paid SCRIBD service. Libby often involves waiting a few weeks or months for popular bestsellers; however, if you can read quickly, you may be able to luck into the occasional Skip the Line service, which lasts only a single week. SCRIBD sometimes has books not yet on Libby, often in audio format, and unlike the library, you can keep them beyond the normal three-week limit.
There’s been a fair bit of press and YouTube clips on both these books. Formerly with the New York Times, Leibovich is perhaps best known for his bestselling This Town, about 21st century Washington. Thank You for Your Servitude [Penguin Press, New York, 2022] is subtitled Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission. While the author admits that many of the anecdotes will be all too familiar to anyone following the daily press, he manages to provide a fresh perspective on them while simultaneously apologizing for making readers relive the worst of these moments. Many of them center around Trump’s Washington-based Trump Hotel, which is where the book begins and ends. There you meet such familiar characters as Rudy Giuliani, Reince Priebus, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch O’Connell, William Barr, Jeff Sessions, Lindsay Graham, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kellyanne Conway and the whole sordid collection of Trump toadies and sycophants, or the so-called MAGAts.
One early chapter is entitled “The Joke,” which apparently is how even how Trump’s closest enablers seem to view his rise to the top of the political pyramid:
It would be risky, obviously, for a Republican member of Congress to declare, explicitly, that “Donald Trump is a complete ignoramus,” even though that’s what they really believed. But none of this had to be spoken because the truth of this scam, or “joke,” was fully evident inside the club …. Everyone … got the joke.
Covers Ukraine invasion but not January 6th hearings
The book is recent enough that it includes an epilogue about the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. The book ends on a despairing note of pessimism about the prospects of anyone stopping Trump in 2024. Of course, it was published months before this summer’s high-profile January 6th hearings, nor does he spend much time addressing any of the other multiple investigations into Trump’s businesses and political shenanigans.
The following telling snippet is one of many that may not be widely known. I was struck by the revelation in the epilogue that within a day of Trump’s “Be there, will be wild” tweet promoting the January 6 rally, the cheapest room in the Trump Hotel immediately jumped from US$476 to US$1,999.
Donald Trump didn’t just inspire the Jan. 6 riot … He seems to have made money off it.
That pretty much says it all. Leibovich ends with an ominous foreshadowing of Trump’s possible triumphant return in 2024. His final sentence is “And who’s going to stop him?” A few sentences earlier, he quotes a former Republican congressman who confessed that the party’s only real plan for dealing with Trump in 2024 involved a darkly divine intervention: “We’re just waiting for him to die .. That was it, that was the plan. He was 100 percent serious.”
Can Joe Biden extract the US from its “political emergency?”
Simon & Schuster
Those who are thoroughly sick of Trump — as I am — may find This Will Not Pass more to their liking, as roughly half the content is devoted to Trump’s successor, Joe Biden. The focus is what it describes as the “political emergency in the United States: the story of how the country reached and survived a moment when carrying out the basic process of certifying an election became a mortally dangerous task.”
It recounts how the country “sort of” survived but like Leibovich, leaves readers pretty nervous about what may yet occur in the 2022 mid terms this fall and ultimately in 2024. As Martin and Burns remind us (as if we needed it!):
Donald Trump has not been banished from national life, but instead remains the dominant force in his party and is bent on purging those few Republicans who won’t bow to him … The former president’s delusions about a stolen election … have lingered with corrosive force, warping his own party and catalyzing a wave of red-state voting restrictions aimed at cracking down on election fraud that did not happen. The fantasies of a Trump restoration have only deepened since his departure from the White House.
The book is arranged in three parts: the year before the 2020 election and Trump’s mismanagement of Covid; the tumultuous months between the contested 2020 election and Inauguration Day, and everything that has transpired since:
… As President Biden attempted an acrobatic feat of leadership: pushing a liberal policy agenda of titanic ambition with the thinnest of majorities … Far from quickly erasing the Trump era, leaders in both parties have found the shadow of the last presidency has been longer and darker than they anticipated, colouring every major political decision and legislative negotiation of the Biden administration and shaping even the perceptions of American democracy overseas.
Ambitious, yes: One chapter nicely summarizes the dominant question before Biden as “How Big Can We Go?”
Unlike Servitude, This Will Not Pass was published too soon to cover much of the events of 2022. Oddly, for an American book, it closes with an observation by a Canadian, Bob Rae (at one point Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations.) He calls Trump an “authoritarian … I don’t believe the Republican Party believes in democracy.” And he warned that the threat to American democracy was far from defeated: “America,” he said, “is a very important battleground.”
They Want to Kill Americans
(Added subsequently). There’s a third and even scarier book that I only began to read the day this blog initially was published. They Want to Kill Americans by Malcolm Nance, describes Trump’s brownshirts and the ongoing assault on American democracies by Americans. Here’s a link to Goodreads’ entry on it. And here’s a Kirkus review.
Jonathan Chevreau is Chief Financial Officer of the Financial Independence Hub, author of the financial novel, Findependence Day, co-author of the non-fiction Victory Lap Retirement, and columnist and Investing Editor at Large for MoneySense.ca.
With rising inflation driving up the costs of goods and services, a Scotiabank survey released Monday reveals over half [53%] of Canadians are worried about their ability to pay for day-to-day expenses. The majority (78%)of expect to be spending more on basic necessities like groceries and food, or gas (71%), and 53% expect to spend more on utilities (53%). 47% say these issues are impacting their ability to save for longer-term financial goals and 37% feel it’s impacting their current standard of living. Scotia Economics expects inflation to peak later this summer before starting a slow descent to 3.6% in 2023 and back to target by 2024.
“Canadians are feeling heightened levels of anxiety as a result of inflation: especially younger people and women who were also hardest hit by the pandemic,” said D’Arcy McDonald, Senior Vice President of Retail Payments and Unsecured Lending at Scotiabank via a press release. “The cost of everything is on the rise and Canadians are worried about their ability to afford the essentials such as food and gas. At the same time, there have never been so many jobs in the Canadian economy, wages are picking up, and inflation will come down over time.”
Financial stress hits differently across the country
Where Canadians live dictates how much they believe rising costs will impact their finances and ability to pay their bills. 49% of residents in the Atlantic think inflation is having a major impact on their ability to set and stick to a budget, compared to 36% of residents of British Columbia and Quebec.
When it comes to feeling financial anxiety, 57% of Quebecers are least likely to be concerned about their ability to pay for day-to-day expenses, compared to residents of Alberta (45%), Manitoba/Saskatchewan (44%), Ontario (43%), and the Atlantic (39%).
The young are most impacted and most concerned
Women, younger Canadians, and those with lower household incomes are significantly more concerned about their financial situation over the next few months. Women (44%) are more likely than men (35%) to say inflation and the rising costs of goods and services is having a major impact on their ability to set and stick to a budget.
Canadians between the ages of 18-34 (45%) and 35-54 (46%) say inflation and the rising costs of goods and services is having a major impact on their ability to set and stick to a budget, compared to Canadians 55+ (30%). Continue Reading…
Carrying debt into retirement can ruin your golden days. You will most likely have a limited income after retirement. Though you can boost your Social Security income by taking the proper steps, your spending may rise yearly due to inflation, causing your budget to collapse. The burden of debt and the high expense of medical bills can wreck your retirement.
According to a CNBC report, the total debt burden of America’s senior citizens has increased by 543 per cent in the last two decades. 70% of baby boomers are in credit-card debt and are unsure how they can get out of it. It is recommended to pay off your obligations as soon as possible and enjoy your golden years. Repaying your debts during retirement is always a good idea. But how will you go about it? Here are some of the ways to repay your debt in retirement so that you can enjoy your golden years.
1.) Sort your debts by priority
The first stage in debt management in retirement is prioritizing which bills to pay off first. So, make a list of all your loans, including their interest rates and remaining balances. Unsecured debts, such as credit cards, typically carry high-interest rates because no collateral is required. I recommend that you begin paying off loans with the highest interest rates first, which will help you save money in the long term. Furthermore, unlike student loans or mortgages, you cannot deduct interest payments from your tax returns on unsecured debts.
It is preferable to pay off unsecured obligations first, as they are not usually tax-deductible.
2.) Seek professional debt assistance
Are you drowning in high-interest unsecured debt? If this is the case, you may be working hard to repay your obligations but cannot do so due to the constant high-interest rates. In that case, you can seek professional assistance by contacting a reliable debt relief business. The company’s debt advisers will examine your debts and develop a reasonable payback plan based on their findings. You can enroll in a credit card consolidation process to repay your huge credit-card debt. Settling debts can be possible under the guidance of a professional debt relief company. They will negotiate with your creditors to lower the excessive interest rates. Once your creditors have agreed, you can begin making single monthly payments for all of your debts. In this manner, you may pay off your unsecured obligations without worrying about coordinating multiple payments. You can also save money on interest payments because your debts’ interest rates will likely be reduced.
3.) Examine your budget again
Hopefully, you have a budget to keep a proper spending plan and preserve money for your financial well-being. The more you put into your monthly loan payments, the faster you’ll be debt-free. As a result, you must save more to increase your monthly loan payments.
To do so, go over your budget and identify places where you may decrease costs and save money. You can save money on things like eating out, entertainment, cable TV subscriptions, etc. You can save a significant amount of money to put towards your monthly debt payments.
4.) Follow your preferred debt repayment plan
You can use any debt payback method, debt snowball or avalanche. The debt snowball strategy requires prioritizing the debt with the lowest outstanding sum first. At the same time, you must make minimum payments on all of your other loans. After you have paid off that loan, you must focus on the debt with the second smallest outstanding balance, and so on. Continue Reading…
The total return on Vanguard’s Canadian Long-Term Bond Index ETF (VLB) since 2020 October 27 is a painful loss of 24%. Why did I choose that particular date to report this loss? That’s when I wrote the article Owning Today’s Long-Term Bonds is Crazy.
Did I know that the Canadian Long-Term bonds returns would be this bad over the past 18 months?
No, I didn’t. But I did know that returns were likely to be poor over the full duration of the bonds. Either interest rates were going to rise and long-term bonds would be clobbered (as they have), or interest rates were going to stay low and give rock-bottom yields for many years. Either way, starting from a year and a half ago, long-term bond returns were destined to be poor.
Does this mean we should all pile into stocks?
No. If you own bonds to blunt the volatility of stocks, you can choose short-term bonds or even high-interest savings accounts. This is what I did back when interest rates became low.
Does that mean everyone should get out of long-term bonds?
It’s too late to avoid the pain long-term bondholders have already experienced. I’m still choosing to avoid long-term bonds in case interest rates rise more, but the yield to maturity is now high enough that owning long-term bonds isn’t crazy.
Isn’t switching back and forth between long and short bonds just a form of active management?
Perhaps. But it’s important to understand that bonds and stocks are very different. Stock returns are wild and impossible to predict accurately. There is no evidence that anyone can reliably time the stock market. However, when you hold a (government) bond to maturity, you know exactly what you will get (in nominal terms). When a long-term bond offers a yield well below any reasonable guess of future inflation, buying it is just locking in a near-certain loss of buying power for a long time. Continue Reading…
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By Bob Lai, Tawcan
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