Personal Finance and Investing for Canadians eBook Mega Bundle For Dummies

Tony Martin, Eric Tyson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118605028
• eBook ISBN: 9781118605059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Get these two great books in one convenient ebook bundle!

Personal Finance For Canadians For Dummies, Fifth Edition, is a comprehensive road map to financial security. Expert authors Eric Tyson and Tony Martin offer pointers on eliminating debt and reining in spending, along with helpful tips on reducing taxes. Learn how to build wealth to ensure a comfortable retirement and tuition for the kids with a primer on investing. Using up-to-date Canadian examples and references, Personal Finance For Canadians For Dummies, Fifth Edition provides you with the tools you need to take control of your financial life—in good times and bad.

Making your own investment decisions can be intimidating and overwhelming. Investors have a huge array of investment options to choose from, and sorting through the get-rich-quick hype can be exhausting. Investing For Canadians For Dummies provides readers with a clear-headed, honest overview of the investing landscape, helping them to determine what investments are right for their goals.

New for the Third Edition:

• The US sub-prime loan disaster, and how it can be an investing opportunity
• Up-to-date information about new mutual funds and mutual fund alternatives, such as exchange-traded funds
• Perspectives on buying a home in hot real estate markets like Calgary, Montreal, and Halifax
• Valuable advice on the best way to cut start-up costs and minimize tax charges when starting a new business
• New RRSP and RESP information, and advice on what to do with new allowable contribution levels

Part I

Assessing Your Fitness and Setting Goals

In this part . . .

We discuss the concepts that underlie sensible personal financial management. You find out why you didn’t know all these concepts before now (and whom you can blame). Here, you undergo a (gentle) financial physical exam to diagnose your current fiscal health, and we show you how to identify where your hard-earned dollars are going. We also cover understanding and improving your credit report and scores and how to plan for and accomplish your financial goals.

Chapter 1

Improving Your Financial Literacy

In This Chapter

Looking at what your parents and others taught you about money

Questioning reliability and objectivity

Overcoming real and imagined financial hurdles

You don’t have to look very far to find what is at the root of Canadians’ financial woes: Study after study shows that we get a failing grade when it comes to financial literacy. Quite simply, many people lack even the most basic math and personal finance skills necessary to make critical financial decisions and informed choices about how to best save and spend their money. Consider the following:

Almost one-third of Canadians have not started saving for retirement.

Half of adult Canadians have difficulty carrying out simple math calculations.

Almost half of all Canadians think they can deduct the interest on a home mortgage (they can’t!), and that they reduce their risk by putting their money into only Canadian investments (they don’t!).

One survey found that almost 80 percent of people feel that the lowest-risk investments make the most sense when saving for retirement (they don’t — because most people need to make their money grow in order to be able to retire).

Just one-third of Canadians made a contribution (or planned to contribute) to an RRSP for the 2009 tax year. And just one in four was planning to contribute the maximum allowed.

Nearly 80 percent of consumers do not know how the grace period on a credit card works. An even greater percentage don’t understand that interest starts accumulating immediately for new purchases on credit cards with outstanding balances.

Fifty-three percent of people who took a multiple-choice investing quiz did not know that total return was the best measure of a mutual fund’s performance.

Forty-three percent didn’t know that owning a single stock was more risky than owning a basket of stocks.

Unfortunately, most Canadians don’t know how to manage their personal finances because they were never taught how to do so. Their parents may have avoided discussing money in front of them, and most high schools and universities lack sufficient courses that teach this vital, lifelong-needed skill.

Some people are fortunate enough to learn the financial keys to success at home, from knowledgeable friends, and from the best expert-written books like this one. Others either never discover the keys to success, or they learn them the hard way — by making lots of costly mistakes. People who lack knowledge make more mistakes, and the more financial errors you commit, the more money passes through your hands and out of your life. In addition to the enormous financial costs, you experience the emotional toll of not feeling in control of your finances. Increased stress and anxiety go hand in hand with not mastering your money.

This chapter examines where people learn about finances and helps you decide whether your current knowledge is helping you or holding you back. You can find out how to improve your financial literacy and take responsibility for your finances, putting you in charge and reducing your anxiety about money. After all, you have more important things to worry about, like what’s for dinner.

Talking Money at Home

We were both fortunate — our parents instilled in us the importance of personal financial management. Our moms and dads taught us a lot of things that have been invaluable throughout our lives, and among those things were sound principles for earning, spending, and saving money. Our parents had to know how to do these things, because they were raising large families on (usually) one modest income. They knew the importance of making the most of what you have and of passing that vital skill on to your kids.

In many families money is a taboo subject — parents don’t level with their kids about the limitations, realities, and details of their budgets. Some parents we talk with believe that dealing with money is an adult issue and that kids should be insulated from it so that they can enjoy being kids. In many families, ki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Personal Finance For Canadians For Dummies
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: Assessing Your Fitness and Setting Goals
• Part II: Saving More, Spending Less
• Part III: Building Wealth with Wise Investing
• Part IV: Insurance: Protecting What You Have
• Part V: Where to Go for More Help
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• Investing For Canadians For Dummies
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: Investing Fundamentals
• Part II: Stocks, Bonds, and Bay Street
• Part III: Getting Rich with Real Estate
• Part IV: Savouring Small Business
• Part V: Investing Resources
• Part VI: The Part of Tens