Business Wealth

Hey, business owners! How’s your estate planning coming along? If you’re like most of us, you may agree with Woody Allen, when he once said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

New regulations governing how mutual funds are sold to Canadians have attracted a fair bit of attention this year. In a past column, I criticized those rules as falling well short of the protection Canadians need to ensure their interests always come before those of investment advisors and their firms.

First things first: If your long-term investments are not yet globally diversified, they almost certainly should be. Robust evidence and common sense alike support the wisdom of managing your risks and expected sources of return by investing in both Canadian and international markets.

In my last “No Dumb Questions,” I introduced the basics of life insurance, and how you can use it to play defence on your family’s winning wealth team. But what if you’re also a business owner? Protecting your business and your personal interests can get complicated fast!

The Globe and Mail headline said it all: “It just became clear we’ll never see an investment industry where clients must come first.” The despairing headline was over a story about long-awaited proposals from provincial securities regulators to beef up investor protection.

In my last blog, I spoke about borrowing against your home to turbo-charge your retirement savings. In this post, I’ll go through some of the pitfalls you want to watch out for if you do decide to go ahead with this strategy.

You’ve probably noticed on your trips to the grocery store that in-house brands take up ever more shelf space. Grocery chains promote their private labels because they earn them higher profits while shoppers choose them for their lower prices.

You bought your dream house, you stuck to your mortgage payments and now you have some equity built up in the value of your home. But is there a way to better leverage your assets to improve your bottom line?

I didn’t think a recent report on sales practices at Canada’s big six banks got enough attention in the investment industry. Its conclusions are a wake-up call for those who think we don’t need tougher investor protection in this country.

Legalization is happening in Canada and pot stocks are on the rise. At times last year, some of the discount brokerage platforms were so bogged down with customer orders for these stocks that they had to shut down temporarily.