Reddit Reddit reviews The Value of Simple: A Practical Guide to Taking the Complexity Out of Investing

We found 8 Reddit comments about The Value of Simple: A Practical Guide to Taking the Complexity Out of Investing. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Value of Simple: A Practical Guide to Taking the Complexity Out of Investing
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8 Reddit comments about The Value of Simple: A Practical Guide to Taking the Complexity Out of Investing:

u/elbyron · 33 pointsr/PersonalFinanceCanada

First of all, don't bother with your friend's financial planner. They are just going to try and sell you on whatever funds have had strong recent performance, show you pretty charts, and make you feel good about investing with them. It's all sales tactics, not so dissimilar from those of a used car salesman. They make it seem like they are offering all this wonderful help for free, but they do get paid - and it'll come from your investments in the form of trailer fees that the mutual funds pay out to them. Much like the car salesman starts to panic when you ask to look under the hood, if you were to start asking the financial planner about management expense ratios and why he doesn't recommend index funds, you'll probably get one of two responses. Either they will be dismissive, making it seem like the fees are negligible relative to the great performance their promising you (but no guarantees of course), or they will be a bit more honest about them but argue that the higher fees are worth paying in order for you to be given their oh-so-valuable advice. It's all a load of BS - anyone can very easily learn the basics of DIY investing, and even those who don't want to are still better off with a robo-advisor like WealthSimple or JustWealth, who believe in keeping your fees to a minimum and instead of collecting hidden trailer fees, they are very up-front about what they charge for their service.

I don't think you really need a person to hold your hand though. Your initiative indicates to me that you have what it takes to learn what needs to be learned, and handle things yourself. Start by reading the two books you picked up - that will answer some questions and give you a solid foundation for learning more about investing. Then I highly recommend an eBook called The Value of Simple, which you can get from Chapters, Amazon, or from the author's website. It goes more into detail about DIY investing strategies, focusing mainly on TD eSeries and buying ETFs with Questrade - the two most cost-effective methods. Tangerine's investment portfolios are fine for starting out with, but at 1.07% MER and another 0.03% trading fees, it's still a bit on the costly side (though nowhere near the MER costs of a BMO fund).

Since you mentioned buying a house in the next 5+ years, I wanted to add some words of caution: any money that you want to save towards the new house should be kept relatively safe, in low-risk investments or guaranteed ones like GICs or high interest savings accounts. 5 years is simply too short of a timeframe for investing in equity. Your RRSP and other retirement funds can certainly take on a lot more risk, since you won't need that money for a long time.

u/russilwvong · 5 pointsr/PersonalFinanceCanada

If you're new to investing, I wouldn't recommend that you start with a high-risk, undiversified investment like weed stocks. Here's a brief introduction that I wrote up.

Investing basically means lending out your money, and getting some kind of return on it.

There’s two kinds of investments: debt and equity. With debt, you lend the money and get a fixed rate of interest. With equity, you buy a small slice of a business and get a share of its earnings. Typically the business will pay out some as a cash dividend and reinvest the rest to expand its business (for example, by buying or building another factory), causing its value to grow.

Either way, the value of your investment compounds over time. The rule of 72 says that if your annual return is x%, then it takes about 72 / x years for your money to double. At 5%, for example, it doubles every 14 years or so. So if you can invest $10,000 at 5% and not touch it for the next 40 years, it’ll double a bit less than three times, increasing to $70,000.

Equity investments are volatile: they go up and down. So investors aren’t willing to pay as much as for debt investments, resulting in a higher return on equities. In the long term, equity investments grow faster than debt investments. You take a higher risk and get a higher return.

There's different approaches to investing in equities:

  1. Stock picking - you look for companies which you think are undervalued, i.e. selling for less than they're worth, and buy their shares.

  2. Buy a mutual fund - a mutual fund is run by a manager who actively decides what companies to invest in, spreading your investment over a larger number of companies. Charges an annual fee of 1-2%.

  3. Buy an index fund - an index fund has much lower fees (0.25% or less), because you just buy a small slice of all companies in the stock market ("passive investing"). There's no need to pay a manager and their staff to look at each company and decide whether it's undervalued or not.

    A common approach is to keep your costs low by just buying index funds. Stock picking is hard: it's like trying to find a diamond in a field that's already been searched by an army of professionals. With mutual funds, you’re paying a lot. When your expected average annual return is around 5%, 1-2% is a big chunk. And because stock picking is hard, mutual fund managers have a very hard time doing better than average.

    Index funds are liquid (you can sell them easily) and diversified (you’re not going to lose all your money if a single company or a single economic sector does badly).

    You probably don't want 100% of your retirement savings in equities, because they go up and down, which can be pretty hard to take. (You don’t want to panic and sell whey they’re low.) A common recommendation is to keep 40% or 50% in bonds (interest-paying debt investments), which are less volatile, providing some stability and reassurance when the stock market is going through a meltdown.

    The Vanguard Balanced ETF Portfolio fund, VBAL, is a simple, hands-off way to keep your investments 60% in equities, 40% in bonds, with annual management expenses of about 0.25%. (If you want a different allocation, VGRO is 80% equities / 20% bonds, and VCNS is 40% equities / 60% bonds. iShares and BMO also offer asset allocation funds.)

    For a step-by-step guide, I'd recommend John Robertson's book The Value of Simple: A Practical Guide to Taking the Complexity out of Investing. (He comments here as /u/HolyPotato.)
u/Kassul42 · 4 pointsr/PersonalFinanceCanada

tl;dr, my advice would be to take 3 deep breaths and not be in a huge rush. Don't dilly dally for no reason, but take a little while and educate yourself on what options you have. The reading list in the sidebar is a very good start. Stuff like Millionaire Teacher(new version just came out this year) will help you understand what you're investing in, why you would chose one method to invest over others, etc... Spending a few bucks on those books(or better yet, get as many as you can from a local library) will save you a heck of a lot over the course of your life.


You certainly can invest through CIBC. Either through an advisor there, or a self-directed system where you control things more directly.

But just because you have a savings account with CIBC doesn't you don't need to invest with them though! You have a few different options besides them.

An increasingly popular method is to use a roboadvisor like Wealthsimple. They charge a % of the value of your investments as their take, but they also do all the buying and selling and whatnot for you which might help keep you from doing something Silly(a lot of folks do). Silly things might include putting all your money into whatever country/sector/company has been really hot lately under the assumption that it'll keep going up forever(it probably wont!)

Or to save a bit more money you can open an account with TD and invest using their e-series mutual funds. They're quite cheap in terms of fees(for Canadian mutual funds anyway, we're used to paying through the nose for stuff like this).
Once you have that account set up you just pay your TD account number through CIBC's bill payment just like you would a phone bill or whatnot. Then once they money is in your TFSA/RRSP/Taxable account you use them to buy the appropriate funds.

Then if/when you want to really save some cash, and can be online during 'market hours' going to Questrade is a popular choice. That way you can use rock-bottom cost Exchange Traded Funds(think mutual funds, but they trade like individual stocks) and you aren't paying any significant fees to buy those.

But seriously, read a couple of those books(and make one of them Millionaire Teacher). If the how-to of investing with TD or Tangerine or Questrade is confusing to you, or you want more info on that sort of thing, The Value of Simple is a good book to get too. The e-book version gets more updates due to the realities of printing costs, but the author has a bunch of new/edited info on their website.

Finally, as to WHAT to invest in, most folks in here follow something along the lines of a Couch Potato strategy.

u/[deleted] · 4 pointsr/PersonalFinanceCanada

Those are good funds. Your asset allocation seems fine.

Once you've chosen that asset allocation, you don't need to further analysis to find out what is good and bad. You should just rebalance back to your targets through new money addition or through sales.

It doesn't matter that it's all in TD funds.

Read [The Value of Simple] (https://www.amazon.ca/Value-Simple-Practical-Complexity-Investing/dp/0987818910/188-2447184-6532411?ie=UTF8&camp=15121&creative=330641&creativeASIN=0987818910&linkCode=as2&redirect=true&ref_=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl&tag=blesbythepota-20)

Watch this [video] (http://www.moneysense.ca/save/retirement/retire-rich-dan-bortolotti-on-index-investing/). Your index funds serve the same role as ETFs.

u/justlikeyouimagined · 3 pointsr/PersonalFinanceCanada

Dan from CCP has some suggestions for low cost ethical investing but the article is from 2010 and may not be current info. One of the commenters who says he's a fee-for-service advisor has created an Organic Couch Potato Portfolio that uses some of Dan's suggestions. I dunno about those solar bonds.. might not be super liquid.

Rebalancing is not that complicated. The Value of Simple by /u/HolyPotato explains exactly what to do (and has lots of other good information), otherwise there are some great blogs like Canadian Couch Potato and Canadian Portfolio Manager that can help.

I think everyone has to learn this for themselves, but don't overthink it. When I launched my passive portfolio I was checking on it every day, I was keen to reinvest my first dividends as soon as they were paid out, and I spent a lot of time researching, tweaking and convincing myself that what I was doing was right.

A year later I'm checking less and less, I have a 'meh' attitude towards doom and gloom in the financial news and I'm just gonna rebalance when I contribute to my portfolio once a year and leave it alone unless there's a crash.

u/graeme_b · 1 pointr/PersonalFinanceCanada

Hi, just came across your book browsing this subreddit. Looks great, and I ordered it on amazon.ca

Just wanted to let you know that the availability is showing as 1-3 months. I ordered from amazon anyway because I'm hoping that's just an error and it will ship sooner. But you might want to look into it; at the least it's probably deterring orders.

Looking forward to reading it! I'm about to start using RRSPs and wanted a primer for the whole system.

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0987818910?

u/MeSoSawsy · 1 pointr/PersonalFinanceCanada

Hey! I just started investing as well. I jumped straight into ETFs for various reasons.

I think your idea is great. I wanted to mention that when you start nearing $10,000, take a look at this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Value-Simple-Practical-Complexity-Investing/dp/0987818910

You can find the PDF version online if a library doesn't have a copy. The only part I looked at is how to invest in ETFs using Questrade. I was intimidated by the Questrade platform and trading on a real stock exchange network. This walks you through how to buy and sell ETFs on Questrade which is perfect. You can also open a practice account on Questrade to try all of the buttons they have on their trading platform website. One thing to note is that the book is a little outdated as the user interface has changed. Regardless, you'll definitely find your way around easily.

Good luck!

u/Badrush · -5 pointsr/PersonalFinanceCanada

Wow you're knowledge is at zero. An RRSP is an investment vehicle, unless it's a special kind offered by a bank you won't even get anything if you let it sit there as cash.

I'd try to explain things but it would take me forever.

.

  1. Read up on RRSP and TFSA

  2. Realize you need to buy Index Funds or ETFs

  3. Open a brokerage account with Questrade or a bank.

    .

    To get the above answered I recommend looking through this sub or buying this book (It's not mine but it is very easy to read in a weekend and gives you an explanation for everything).

    http://www.amazon.ca/Value-Simple-Practical-Complexity-Investing/dp/0987818910/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1420877097&sr=8-2&keywords=simple+investing