Posts made in August, 2007
Closed-End Mutual Funds versus Open-End Mutual Funds
I’m sure many people didn’t even know there was a difference, and further, if you own mutual funds – do you know if they are open-end or closed-end? Does it matter? Yes! MOST mutual funds out there are open-end mutual fund trusts. That means that the mutual fund “manufacturer” (like a Fidelity, or AGF, or Franklin Templeton) can constantly sell new units of the fund to investors – i.e. the fund is not “closed to new funds”. In contrast a closed-end fund’s manufacturer does not accept new money from investors to give to the mutual fund manager. So let’s look at the open-end version in a little more depth: the...
Read MoreA Link to a GREAT RESP primer (Registered Education Savings Plan)
The Canadian Capitalist – who also runs a personal finance blog – has written a fantastic summary of the up-to-date (for 2007) RESP rules along with a general description of how RESPs work. RESPs are Registered Education Savings Plans – a tax-sheltered account that is designed to assist in the accumulation of funds for your children’s future education costs. There are some unique rules and perks associated with these accounts – so you’ll want to read up on this for sure. If you are interested in learning more about RESPs – this is a great post to start with. Many thanks to Canadian Capitalist – I subscribe...
Read MoreLearn more about Life Insurance than your Insurance Agent knows part 12
So at last we are at the end of this 12 Part series! Once you have finished reading this article, I’m sure you will know more about insurance than most insurance agents out there – and at least enough to know when they are trying to dazzle you with smoke and mirrors… :) If you would like to start at the beginning, click here to go to part 1. If you would just like to go back one article to Part 11, click here. So I promised that I would end the series by discussing how YOU can determine how much insurance you require, rather than being "told and sold". By no means does this mean that I am done commenting and educating on insurance, it just...
Read MoreLearn more about Life Insurance than your Insurance Agent knows part 11
Part 11 in the series will discuss an important financial strategy known as an "Insured Retirement Plan" or IRP. If you would like to go the beginning of the series on "Learning more about Life Insurance than your Insurance Agent knows" click here to go to Part 1. If you would only like to go back to Part 10, click here. I alluded to the opinion that I have that UL (Universal Life) only makes sense for certain strategies – the Insured Retirement Plan (IRP) is one of these such strategies. Before I go into the mechanics of how the policy works, I will explain the net effect: when set up properly an IRP allows you to accumulate...
Read MoreLearn more about Life Insurance than your Insurance Agent knows part 10
Welcome to Part 10! Today we are going to explore why someone would consider "over funding" a Universal Life Insurance policy. If you would like to skip back one article, click here to go to Part 9. If you would like to start at he beginning of this series (highly recommended if you haven’t read it before!) then click here to go to Part 1. Remember from the last article that a Universal Life insurance policy is like a Whole Life insurance policy in that there is an insurance component AND an investment component. Whereas with Whole Life the goal of the investment component is to lower the cost of insurance over the course of one’s...
Read MoreLearn more about Life Insurance than your Insurance Agent knows Part 9
In Part 9 we are going to look at how Universal Life Insurance came about and how it differs from Whole Life Insurance. If you would like to start at the beginning of this series on Insurance, click here to go to Part 1. If you would like to go back to the previous article, click here to go to Part 8. One issue I haven’t mentioned is the tax treatment of the investment account inside the Whole Life Policy. It is a TAX SHELTERED environment – which means whatever happens inside this account is protected from taxation so long as funds are not drawn out for other use. Since the majority of investments in this investment side account are fixed income,...
Read MoreSite Enhancements (?)
Okay guys, I’ve made a few tweaks to the site but if anyone has any changes they would like to suggest, I’m all ears! Basically I’ve added a full list of ALL POSTS in the Archives landing page so that you don’t have to sort through each category post by post. I do also recommend using the search function on the site if you want to type in a keyword and get a list of all articles that mention those words. Additionally, I’ve increased the number of articles displayed per page to 3. Remember: finance I know, blogging I do NOT. :) Stumble It! ...
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