Hot Off the Web- August 26, 2009 Personal Finance and Investments In Globe and Mail’s “Target date funds missing their mark” Shirley Won discusses some of the problems with target-date funds. There are actually two types of these funds discussed in the article: the structured product types which include guarantees and (2) the age-dependent asset […]

Hot Off the Web- August 18, 2009 Back from holidays and ready to roll again. In the next few weeks, in response to some reader requests, I plan to do some special topic blogs on: asset allocation, a quantitative look at the value of LTCI (long  term care insurance) and the impact of savings rate, […]

Hot Off the Web– July 29, 2009 Personal Finance and Advisors Tara Siegel-Bernard in the NYT’s “A boot camp to prepare for retirement” describes a very interesting approach for people within a couple of years to retirement to assessing financial readiness for retirement. “It’s a way for people to really wrap their arms around something […]

Hot Off the Web- July 23, 2009 Personal Finance and Investments WSJ’s Andrea Coombs discusses the need for not just managing all the passwords that we use for our online financial information but to consider what happens if you die in “You need an online estate plan”. “That’s all well and good while you’re alive. […]

Hot Off the Web– July 17, 2009 Pensions Jason Kirby in Maclean’s “Demanding Times” dissects the differences between public and private sector pension systems in Canada and suggests that “any sober analysis of the numbers shows most government workers do enjoy a distinct advantage over their private sector counterparts. Government workers enjoy enviable pay, more […]

Hot Off the Web– July 10, 2009 Personal finance and advisers Ron Lieber in his NYT article “A day to tackle the financial to-do list” refers to a “What to do if we’re dead”-list or more gently “Organizing your financial life. Critical information at your fingertips” list that you might want to look at and […]

Hot Off the Web– July 3, 2009 Pensions In Diane Urquhart’s letter to Ted Menzies she tables key reasons for raising priority of pension deficit (and severance, disability payments and health coverage) in bankruptcy over other unsecured creditors. The rationale includes: minimum impact on cost/availability of credit, would encourage restructuring rather than liquidation, other developed […]

Hot Off the Web- June 26, 2009 Pensions For Nortel pensioners, no doubt the story of the week is that the company is no longer trying to restructure itself but in fact it has kicked off its liquidation with the announced sale of a key part of the company.  This was followed mid-week by the […]

Hot Off the Web- June 19, 2009 This week President Obama tabled proposals for “sweeping reorganization of financial market supervision” and more consumer protection. The proposals are now being debated in Congress with apparently “some” resistance to dramatically increasing the Fed’s regulatory oversight and enforcement role since according to many it was a significant contributor […]