It seems that after watching “The Secret“, I have been attracting attention from the main characters in the movie. First it was Joe Vitale with the book “The Key“, now John Assaraf with his newest piece, The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life. Wait, before you discard this review [...]

With the price of gas at all time highs and my car getting older and older, I find myself doing research on energy efficient vehicles. When I first started my search, I came by the interesting concept of the air car. Seems like a really cheap way to run a car, but I [...]

From The Money Writers this week: The Digerati Life gives us the true math in choosing a fuel efficient car in her article “Fuel Efficient Cars In Your Future? Watch For The MPG Illusion” Lazy Man and Money contemplates a new investing strategy in his article “Beauty Holding: Investing in Models?” Generation X Finance explains investor emotion in [...]

Last year, Scotia Bank purchased TradeFreedom. Seems that their quest to increase their online discount brokerage market share isn’t over yet. This week, they announced the purchase of E-Trade Canada! WestJet is offering 50% off fall flights from Sept 3 to Oct 31, 2008. Tickets must be booked by July 23, 2008. [...]

Diversified indexing seems to be all the rage these days. To be honest, I’ve only recently started seeing the real benefits of indexing. As you may know, I am an aggressive investor and a performance chaser. However, even as an aggressive performance chaser, there is always room in the portfolio for some [...]

With VISA being a public company now, they are looking for ways to spread their reach and make more money. One way is to compete with one of their arch rivals, American Express. AMEX cards are notorious for offering better rewards than the traditional VISA/Mastercard, but times are changing. Introducing the new Visa Infinite [...]

I got home from work yesterday to find my wife watching Oprah on TV. As I entered the family room, my wife exclaimed, “you’ve gotta see this… it’s right up your alley.” “Oh yea?” I replied intrigued with my wife’s tone of voice. “It’s all about money!” she explained knowing the keyword that would peak [...]

I’ve been getting quotes for own occupation disability insurance from various insurance agents and they all promote the “return of premium” feature as being the best thing since sliced bread. Whenever a sales person promotes a product aggressively, my suspicion sensor trips and sets off an alarm. In my experience, heavily promoted financial products are [...]

Another week has blown by which means that it’s time to review some news and articles around the web. Lets start with the news: The Canadian government has changed the CMHC rules! 40 year mortgages have been reduced to 35 along with a minimum down payment of 5% instead of 0%. I guess they are [...]

This is a guest post series by Brian Poncelet who is an independent certified financial planner (CFP) working in the financial services industry since 1994. Along with insurance, Brian Poncelet focuses on mortgage and retirement planning. Overview of Critical Illness Insurance Critical Illness (CI) insurance pays a lump sum benefit upon diagnosis of [...]

I’ve written about top cash back credit cards in Canada before, and even modified my top pick. However, there are an abundance of other rewards based credit cards out there that deserve a look. My selections are based on the value of the rewards and the extra perks given. Also, all the [...]

If you’ve been following Canadian financial news lately, you’ve most likely heard about the whole BCE take-over drama and controversy. Is the deal going to go through? Will they pay shareholders the original agreed upon cash amount? Or will they renegotiate the deal with a lower amount? It all began with the Ontario [...]

I’ve been getting quite a few emails from readers on how to improve credit scores. Improving credit scores is a well covered topic on the net. However, based on my experience, lets highlight some of the reasons why high credit score is important and some of the main ways to obtain (or maintain) [...]

Here’s a summary of the top MDJ articles by a combination of comments and traffic for June 2008. In addition, i’d like to give thanks to sites that sent traffic to us along with giving a shout out to our sponsors. Most Popular MDJ Posts for June 2008 Hybrid vs. Gasoline Vehicle Comparison - Are Hybrids [...]

This is a guest post series by Brian Poncelet who is an independent certified financial planner (CFP) working in the financial services industry since 1994. Along with insurance, Brian Poncelet focuses on mortgage and retirement planning. The first post was about reducing risk with life insurance. From The Wealthy Barber: “Disability insurance [...]

You’ve all heard it before from books, personal finance blogs and newspapers to keep your investment expenses low. But does it really matter if your portfolio management expense ratio is 2% instead of 0.30%? Lets take a look. Lets assume that the ETF portfolio is a typical global index portfolio using iShares ETFs of [...]

I apologize to those who are seeing this post for a second time. The first time it was released in error and was removed the same day. What does retirement mean to you? This is an interesting question that I think about often and I’m curious as to what it means to my readers. [...]

Welcome to the traditional monthly net worth update - The June 2008 edition. I keep writing these updates to give myself a little heads up on how the finances are doing and it seems that most readers find them enjoyable also. Lets start off with our income and expenses. Even with our reduced income [...]

Time again for the monthly Smith Manoeuvre Portfolio update, June 2008 edition. For those of you just joining us, The Smith Manoeuvre is a Canadian wealth strategy that utilizes a home equity loan to invest in income producing assets. The result is a tax deductible loan and portfolio that increases as you pay down your [...]

Some great articles by The Money Writers this week: The Digerati Life has written another great article that explains the ups and downs of the stock market in “A Stock Market Reality Check: What Investment Risk Actually Looks Like.” It shows that historically, down periods are followed by much higher markets. My Dollar Plan lists [...]