2009 March | WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com

Bloggers 2009 Stock Picking Contest Q1 Results

Posted by Preet on Mar 31, 2009 | 1 comment

A few personal finance bloggers decided to have a friendly stock picking contest for 2009. We had made our picks back in December of 2008 and the plan was to track the calendar year performance of four picks (equal weighted for the sake of determining portfolio performance). As alluded to in my post that discussed my picks initially – don’t take these contests too seriously. A one year horizon is nothing more than gambling. …and when I gamble, I go big or I go home, Baby! :) My picks were pure swing for the fence plays – two of them were 300% leveraged ETFs, one was a 200% leveraged ETF and the fourth was a penny stock play. Leveraged ETFs only do...

Bear market = More insurance sales

Posted by Preet on Mar 30, 2009 | 6 comments

Most financial advisors work on commission. When investment sales are down, advisors often turn to talking about insurance – the in-house sales and marketing material often talk about various strategies involving life insurance, critical illness insurance, disability insurance and long term care insurance. Insurance policies pay surprisingly large commissions. For example, a simple term insurance policy costing you $20/month can generate hundreds of dollars of up front commissions. Whether you need the various types of insurance (and how much) is up to you and your advisor to decide, but don’t forget to get a detailed quote which outlines what is known as a...

Financial Advisor Suicide

Posted by Preet on Mar 29, 2009 | 4 comments

Thanks to everyone for putting up with the lack of posts for the last two weeks. I was filming the next step in the W Network’s Expert Search which airs in June and July – I’ll post the exact schedule when it is finalized. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming… I received an email from Joe Killoran, the author of Investorism.com, which linked to a sad article about financial advisor suicide. There was one advisor in the New York area who knew personally of four financial advisors who committed suicide within a four month time-span. You can read the short article by clicking here. There are a few obvious reasons which potentially...

The Less You Know, The More You Make

Posted by Preet on Mar 20, 2009 | 3 comments

Fact 1Knowledge is Power Expressed mathematically: Knowledge = Power Fact 2 Time is Money Expressed mathematically: Time = Money Fact 3 From physics, Power = Work / Time So now we just replace a few terms: PowerKnowledge = Work / TimeMoney Remember, Knowledge IS Power and Time IS Money. Or written more cleanly: Knowledge = Work / Money Solving for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge Therefore, Money approaches infinity as Knowledge approaches zero, regardless of the amount of Work done. Perhaps this explains why executives at failed institutions are still making the big...

Proceeds of Crime are Taxable

Posted by Preet on Mar 15, 2009 | 6 comments

I was browsing through the CRA’s website (Canada Revenue Agency) and stumbled upon an interesting page that indicated that the proceeds of crime are taxable. Upon doing some more digging I found some material which seemed to indicate that there are special liaisons between the CRA and law enforcement agencies who coordinate to ensure that known criminals engaging in illegal activities are taxed on any income received – primarily to minimize the funds and property accumulated by criminals. Apparently, many years ago the courts ruled that illegal income was considered business income and was therefore taxable. Must be an interesting job being one of those...

A Lap Of The Blogs

Posted by Preet on Mar 12, 2009 | 8 comments

If you are new to WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com, every Friday I run a post called “A Lap Of The Blogs” which provides links to articles I found interesting and think that others may want to read for themselves. I also include some commentary on what’s going on in my personal life and a weekly “racing video” since my former life was in the auto-racing industry. The name “Lap of the Blogs” is in reference to “A Lap Of The Gods” which is an old video series which chronicled on-board footage of the world’s greatest F1 drivers lapping various racetracks from around the world. I had the pleasure of sitting in on another NCFBA meeting this week while in Ottawa...

The Social World versus The Financial World

Posted by Preet on Mar 12, 2009 | 4 comments

I’ve been looking into pitching a possible TV show idea to the W Network revolving around the psychology of money and I thought I would share with you a study that I found interesting. Some psychologists prepared an experiment in which test subjects were asked to perform a mind-numblingly boring task. In this case, they had to click and drag an object on a computer screen from one side of the screen to the other and then repeat over and over again. The experimenters measured the number of times this was accomplished during a five minute time span. Experiment 1 In experiment 1 there were three groups of subjects. Group one was told they would be paid $5 for the...