Building Wealth

For the first 30 or so years of working, saving and investing, you’ll be first in the mode of getting out of the hole (paying down debt), and then building your net worth (that’s wealth accumulation.). But don’t forget, wealth accumulation isn’t the ultimate goal. Decumulation is! (a separate category here at the Hub).

Q&A: Understanding Liquid Alternatives

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By Brooks Ritchey

(Sponsor Content)

Alternative investment funds are an exciting new strategy class that were previously unavailable to retail investors in Canada. Since they are new to the scene, many advisors and investors are interested, but don’t quite know where to begin. Since I have worked in the alternative investment space for years, I thought I could help explain how investors could benefit from these hedging strategies.

Demystifying Liquid Alternatives for investors

Some advisors feel that these strategies are too volatile or complicated to explain to their clients. We spend a lot of our time trying to explain that these are not complicated mysterious investments. The irony is that many alternative investments, liquid alternatives, especially with regulatory oversight, are about the same risk level as fixed-income products.

Others also worry about the fees on hedge funds, but they have come down a lot. Since I’ve been involved in the hedge fund industry, fees have come down from 2% management and 20% performance fees to 75 basis points management fees and no performance fees for some products.

How would you explain Liquid Alternatives to investors?

It’s an investment that has different characteristics than traditional equity and fixed income. Equity markets depend on the trend in economic growth and bonds depend on a different set of macroeconomic factors, but they’re both dependent on a trend. If you’re trying to find a strategy that’s looking for winners in the equity or in the bond market when the trends aren’t positive, you want to consider liquid alternatives. Continue Reading…

How much does it cost to Retire?

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Photo: Elena Saharova, Unsplash
By Steve Lowrie, CFA

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Hey, it worked.  Last month, I posted “What’s on your mind?” asking you to tell me what financial questions I could help you resolve.  Many thanks for your replies!

I’ll start with one good question posed, because it probably crosses everyone’s mind with increased frequency over time:  How much money do I need to retire?

Since I’ve been a financial professional now for more than two decades, I feel well qualified to answer that question.  The answer is:  It depends.

Okay, I realize that isn’t a very helpful answer, even if it’s the truth.  Let’s dig a little deeper.

From a purely quantitative perspective, there are several rules of thumb in common use.  For example, some say if you’ve got 20 or 25 times your annual income in reserve that should do it. Others suggest you’re ready to retire if you can withdraw no more than 4% of your investment portfolio each year.  So, if you have $1 million in your investment accounts, you should plan to withdraw no more than $40,000 annually in a “successful” retirement.

These and similar guidelines offer a decent starting point.  But bad luck happens.  Even if you’ve diligently saved up 20 times your income, if you happened to retire on the eve of a bear market or if you encounter large unexpected expenses, your handy rule of thumb could end up poking you in the eye. Continue Reading…

Motley Fool: How to move from Saving to Investing

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What’s the difference between Saving and Investing and how do you move smoothly from the one to the other?  Motley Fool Canada has just published the second in a new series of articles by me about the basic steps towards Financial Independence, or what I call “Findependence.” You can find the first one, which ran early in June, here; and the new one by clicking on the highlighted text here: 2 critical steps toward Financial Independence.

The first article discussed how the journey to Findependence hasn’t even begun while you’re still in debt. To paraphrase one of the characters in my book Findependence Day, you can’t even begin to climb the tower of Wealth until you get out of the basement of debt.

It’s nice to be free of debt, whether high-interest credit card debt, student loans or even a mortgage. It’s a big step moving from negative net worth to being merely broke, where your assets and liabilities cancel themselves out. Being free of all debt is certainly a nice place to be if you’ve been anxious over being hounded by creditors. But it’s not financial independence either, which is the stage of life when all sources of income more than meet your monthly financial needs.

As the followup article summarizes, you want to move from Debt elimination to the intermediate step of Saving, and then from Saving to true investing. Saving is being a loaner — you lend money to a bank or other institution and receive a small amount of interest back as well as your principal upon maturity. But to be an investor you want to be an owner: a business owner, through stocks or equities, or more broadly through a diversified basket of equity ETFs.

The end of the piece references a piece by Investopedia about the difference between investing and saving. You can find their explanation here. It says saving is for emergencies and purchases, by which they mean immediate needs. Investing is about a longer-term horizon (defined as seven or more years) and entails more risk than saving. That’s why they refer to the “risk free” return of investing in cash, treasury bills and the like.

Investing is about Money begetting Money

The beauty about saving is that, once the process is begun, it sets the stage for when  money begins to beget still more money, a process that will ultimately happen even while you’re sleeping. So does investing: the difference is that saving is a kind of junior partner to investing: it works a bit for you, but nothing so hard as true investing for the long term. Saving begets small amounts of money; ultimately, investing begets huge amounts of money: eventually enough to live on whether or not you choose to work another day in your life. Continue Reading…

Using Canadian Dividend ETFs as your core Canadian holding

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By Dale Roberts

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

As warm and cuddly and comforting as are dividends, the subject or investment approach can lead to some lively debates. Many will write (or build podcasts on the subject) that dividends simply don’t matter.

On that, here’s a measured response from Mike at The Dividend Guy blog. Please have a read of Should I Go With Dividend Growth Investing or ETFs. An Answer To Ben Felix. Of course many dividend and dividend growth investors will simply reference or pull out the Ned Davis research on S&P 500 constituents.

I like the evidence from the Dividend Aristocrats (NOBL) in the US and Canada (CDZ) that both have greater total returns compared to broad market funds through the last market cycle. There is a longer history of outperformance to observe in the US market with those Aristocrats that insist on at least 25 years of annual dividend increases. The threshold for a Canadian Aristocrat is 5 years of dividend increases.

All said, I will leave it to you to decide if dividends matter: to you. Given that nothing is more important than investor behaviour, if watching the dividends is a very useful distraction and those dividend payments allow you to stick to your plan, then they are more than worth the dollar value that shows up in your discount brokerage account.

And for the record I do think or know that the benefits of dividend growth investing do move beyond the emotional and behavioural and into the math and the types of companies that can be found by way of a meaningful dividend growth history. Even Ben Felix will admit that it can help us find certain types of companies and investment factors.

Canadian investors need help!

Let’s face it, the Canadian market is not well diversified. I would often state to clients that Canada makes for a terrible investment. The Canadian market is concentrated in financials and energy and commodity related sectors.

From iShares XIC, TSX capped composite.

TSX Composite Sector BreakdownThe Canadian investor needs the sector and geographic diversification offered by the US and perhaps International markets. Here’s the sector breakdown of the S&P 500, by way of iShares IVV.

S&P 500 Sector BreakdownThe basic principle of the need for added diversification holds true whether a Canadian investor embraces core index funds or dividend focused funds. How much you add by way of International exposure is certainly a personal decision. I am of the opinion that you might go light on that front given that the large and mega cap US companies earn a considerable percentage of their profits overseas. That said, in a recent CTCI investing post I suggested you might also look to developing markets where there is greater growth and growth potential.

Canadian Dividend ETFs

For my Canadian allocation in my personal RRSP account I hold a concentrated portfolio of individual bank stocks, plus pipelines and telcos. I do not expose my wife’s personal RRSP account to that concentration risk: we hold Vanguard’s High Dividend Yield ETF, ticker VDY. That is the core holding. Here is the sector breakdown for the VDY fund. Continue Reading…

Building your financial stop-doing list: Stop chasing dividends

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By Steve Lowrie, CFA

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

During the 20+ years I’ve been a financial advisor, I’ve noticed how often the market keeps playing the same devilish tricks, each time in a guise that differs just enough to fool us all over again.

Today’s “Stop Doing” post exposes one of these more common tricks of the trade: Investors who are seeking a reliable income stream for retirement should STOP building their investment strategy around dividend-paying stocks (or higher-interest-yielding bonds) in isolation, without considering them in the context of their total wealth management.

Speaking of devilish acts, let’s revisit The Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig’s “The Devil’s Financial Dictionary” (emphasis is ours):

DIVIDEND YIELD, n. A company’s annual DIVIDEND divided by its current share price. “You buy a cow for its milk and a stock for its yield,” says an old Wall Street proverb. But when a company gets into financial trouble and has to cut its dividend to hoard cash for its own survival, the yield will shrink or disappear. Investors who buy a stock only for its yield may suddenly find themselves owning a cow that gives no milk and is too scrawny to butcher for the meat.

Clearly, I am not alone in my skepticism when I see investors investing in a stock because “it pays a good dividend.”

What is a Dividend?

Sweep away all the complexities about corporate profits, and you’re left with this truth: When a public corporation makes a profit, it has two choices on what to do with that cash:

  1. Re-invest it back into the business, or
  2. Return it to shareholders through cash dividends or share repurchase plans.

These concepts aren’t new. Nobel laureate Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani published a paper back in the 1960s, explaining why profits are profits, whether they’re “packaged” as dividends or share value. So, let’s take a look at why chasing dividend-paying stocks may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Continue Reading…

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