Tag Investing for Retirement

Financial Planning is Guesswork

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
When a Plan Comes Together!

Financial planning is based on estimates & projections. It’s educated & data-driven guesswork. The return projection numbers are so precise that they run to two decimal places. Reality is not that predictable! Planning projections for equities have been about 6.5%, give or take, for the past few years. On a year by year basis, it’s been way off. Markets have done far better. They could have done far worse. But the projections generally work well, when considering average returns, over longer timelines. After the exceptional market returns of the 90s, a financial plan using 6.5% for projections might have been considered too conservative. But a 50/50 mix of the US & Canada would have returned an average of almost 8% annually, from 2000 up to today. Looking back, that 6.5% wouldn’t have been a bad number to create a plan with in 1999, eh? But things can get crazy over shorter time horizons. Especially when retirement withdrawals come into play.

Grumpy old guys & gals who retired in the last 10 or 15 years complain about not being able to draw down their big RRIF accounts fast enough. Their portfolios are growing faster than they can spend them down. While many of these retirees are probably brilliant investors, some just got lucky! They timed the start date of their retirement pretty much perfectly. The 50:50 US & Canada portfolio would have returned almost 12% annually since 2010. Almost double that 6.5% planning number. Now there’s nothing wrong with being lucky. But luck is not always good enough for retirement planning.

That same 50:50 portfolio would only have returned a little more than 2% annually from 2000 to 2009. An investor who went all in on the American market over that decade would have had a negative return. The US market lost money over that 10 year period. And that’s without withdrawing any retirement income from it. The really big question with financial planning going forward, especially for new or imminent retirees, is this … what will the next few years be like? Those early retirement years can matter. A lot. As we saw above, average return numbers work really well over the long haul. But a severe or protracted downturn in early retirement, like the 2000 to 2009 period, can make a real mess of a plan. Taking a big hit immediately after retirement can seriously impair income for all the years that follow. The message here is that we cannot assume that the high returns of recent years will continue. Planning must allow for these different outcomes.

Financial planning guidelines have to thread a needle with respect for a wide range of potential returns. And it’s wise to err a little on the conservative side of what the long term data say. Many recent retirees, & new financial advisors, have not experienced something like the lost decade back in the early 2000s. To varying extents, we are all influenced by recency bias. And recently, things have been great. But we may need to temper the optimism & plan a little more cautiously for the future. Especially if retirement is imminent. Despite our retired friend’s success over the past 5 or 10 years, thinking we can begin retirement & spend at a consistent 10% rate is very risky.

So if planning is just guesswork, should we ignore it? Absolutely not! Nobody can foretell what happens next, but that makes having a plan even more critical. The purpose is to figure out how to best use our money so that we can pay the rent & buy groceries all the way to the end. Plans include success rate estimates & simulations that show if the plan can survive the best & the worst combinations of market cycles.  Plans can include fun things like bucket list travel & fancy cars. Along with some things we hope aren’t needed, like illness or meeting long term care needs. It’s important to have a plan that considers the many vagaries of retirement. It’s equally important to have regular plan reviews & revisions over the years to ensure things stay on track.

Getting a financial plan done professionally can be very expensive. If you are paying an advisor to manage your retirement, financial planning may, indeed probably should, be included as part of that service. A good financial plan is a crucial part of living a successful retirement. Even for those DIY folk with a good knowledge of what’s required, having another set of eyes review the plan may still make sense. Indeed, it may be worth having a plan done by more than just one professional advisor. I know, sorry!

DIY folk tend to be frugal by nature & some may not want to pay for a professional plan. I get that. But you could ask about getting a review of your DIY plan, or a freebie, or a demo plan from whatever institution you have your money at. Some financial institutions provide that service. Sometimes you just need to ask. Fortunately, more & more planning tools are becoming available for the DIY cohort nowadays. Maybe with AI, we’ll even get some apps for that! But until that perfect app arrives, & perhaps even afterwards, getting a professional financial plan done might matter for most of us. Planning, especially for retirement spending, is quite complex. If you are not using a professional to put a plan together, there are some tools available that may help. Check out some of the tools in this post DIY Financial Planning … An Update. I have used the Adviice platform mentioned there & there are others like Optiml & MayRetire that I haven’t played with yet. Doing our own planning on a spreadsheet usually carries a greater risk of error. Whereas these platforms are getting feedback from a wider public audience, which helps weed out the errors & improve the product over time. Some of them have an access path to professional planning services. It’s great to see tools coming onto the market for DIY financial planning. As they improve & get smarter, perhaps they’ll help the profession space to offer more competitive services too. But until that happens, we’re stuck paying more. And despite the high price, it’s worth the spend if it helps us avoid a bad outcome.

If you want to learn more about saving & investing, please check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.

Beware of Advice from Recent Retirees!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Gambling on Retirement!

It’s unfair to tarnish all retirees with that statement, some might be offering great advice. But I’d be a little more circumspect about advice from those retirees advocating for earlier retirement because of their recent success. Some of these well-meaning folk might be suffering from recency bias. What’s that?

Anyone retiring in the past 15 years, with big stock market exposure, has probably been pretty lucky. Or, as they might prefer to see it … they are brilliant investors! This is especially true if their portfolio was biased towards the US markets. S&P500 Index® funds have returned close to 14% annually. The tech heavy Nasdaq 100 Index® has done even better.
I have to admit, some of them do look like investing geniuses!

Over the past decade & a half, it almost didn’t matter what strategy was employed. Just about any broad based American equity funds worked well. The growth investor did well & dividend investors did well. Investors who choose funds delivering huge yields via covered calls & partial leverage did well. They are all still doing well. Some of these retirees are mocking the old 4% Rule. As they sip frozen margaritas on a beach in the Caribbean! They are having a ball. And it’s hard to argue with success. But this might not apply to the next batch of retirees. And those with more limited finances need to be especially careful.

The 4% Rule is not a rule, it’s a rule of thumb. A guide only. But there are good reasons for its existence. Reasons that are at least broadly acknowledged by most. In a “normal” world, the safe withdrawal rate of 4% generally worked. In the “modern” world, it seems like you can haul out 12 or 13% every year & ride that gravy train all the way to the bank. Or the beach! That’s been the story for anyone retiring from 2010 onwards. The few blips we had along the way, like the one earlier this year, another in 2022, the 2020 downdraft for covid. They all repaired so quickly that nobody really noticed these as bad events. In fact, all those rapid blips did was reinforce the “buy the dip” philosophy. And, for those who didn’t panic, that has worked out very well.

But there will almost certainly come a time, where the dips will hurt a little more than these recent examples. There will be more enduring dips. And in such times, the 4% withdrawal rate may be more appropriate for managing retirement income risk. Ask anyone who retired in 2000. I’m not kidding, find an older retiree & ask. You probably won’t find them on social media! The experiences of more recent retirees is not how things always were. And while the good times are still rolling, they may not continue forever.
In case you can’t track down one of those older retirees, read this post on the Safe Withdrawal Rate in Retirement.

If you were planning on saving a million bucks before retiring, but you’ve only made it to half a million so far, pause a minute. Think very, very carefully about taking any advice that suggests you can retire immediately on your half-sized stash. Some recent retirees may think it’s okay to use 10% withdrawals nowadays. Or maybe they suggest that you can buy a bunch of funds yielding 10, 12, or even 15%, & go enjoy life sooner. This might not be good advice. Remember the old investing disclaimer: past performance is not indicative of future returns? In fact, it’s more likely going to be the opposite. After such an amazingly good run of returns, it’s far more likely that future returns will not be as good.

Look, I don’t know what the future holds. Maybe these enthusiastic retirees are right. But for anyone on the threshold of retirement, or for those younger retirees with a longer retirement timeline, caution is warranted. I’m sure I would enjoy spending a little more after a really good year of returns. And I’d probably do that again the following year, if there was another good year in the bank. But I would not start out a full retirement cycle of 20 or 30 years with the expectation that 10% a year is going to be the norm. While it’s not a commandment, I would treat that 4% Rule of Thumb with a little respect. I sure hope that we might still enjoy some good years of 5 or 6% spending. Who knows, maybe even a little more than that from time to time. Actually, let’s be honest here, I’m really hoping that 10% thing holds up for my retirement, from beginning to end! But I’m not taking that optimistic hope to the bank for the long haul. It’s probably not going to work as a good financial planning number!

If you can’t figure this all out on your own, please see a qualified financial planner & step through the process carefully with them. They will help you figure out how much you need to save to retire. And how much you might be able to spend during retirement. I know it’s expensive to work with a financial planner, but it might prove to be money well spent. Rather than finding out that you got it wrong half way through retirement.

If you want to learn more about saving & investing, please check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.

DIY Investing or Work With a Financial Advisor?

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Good old-fashioned financial advice.
But at what price?

DIY investing can drive you a little crazy. Do you like the crazy? Are you enjoying the work that comes with portfolio management? Some of us do! But it gets a little more challenging when we need to withdraw money during retirement. And will a surviving spouse be able to carry on with the crazy portfolio in the event the “money manager” departs first? Are you a good DIY investor? Or would you do better with an advisor?

There is an easy way to figure out if you should consider paying a fee to have a professional manage your portfolio & the retirement cashflow stream for you.
And it’s this …

Compare your DIY portfolio performance against an equivalent ETF. We all need a “benchmark” to check our portfolio against. If you’re 100% in globally diversified stocks, for example, compare your portfolio performance to that of one of the XEQT, ZEQT, VEQT all-equity ETFs. If you’re in a 60/40 stock & fixed income mix, compare your DIY portfolio performance against XBAL, ZBAL, or VBAL. Are you buying a mix of Canadian & US large-cap stocks? Then compare that to an appropriately allocated portfolio of VFV & XIU ETFs. A portfolio filled with way too many stocks & ETFs might also be usefully compared against one of the all-in-ones. If your portfolio performance lags its benchmark by 1% or more, you might want to consider handing it over to a financial manager.

As an aside, since some of these all-in-one funds are so new, you may need to break them down into their constituent ETFs to usefully use them for benchmarking over longer time periods. The longer the history, the more useful the insights.

I’m using 1% here because many financial advisors charge an annual 1% of portfolio value as a fee for managing a portfolio. Is that fee worth it? Get the advisor’s performance history & compare that to an equivalent benchmark ETF too. Their recommended portfolio should only lag the return performance of those ETFs by the 1% fee. If they meet that requirement and if your self-managed portfolio was lagging by more than 1%, you could be getting better results by paying the advisor the 1% fee. As a bonus, you’ll have less work & an advisor who will tell you that everything will be okay when the markets are imploding. Hand-holding is included in their fee! For retirees, the advisor may also plan the income strategy & tax-efficiently manage the cashflow for you, across all accounts. You might even get some estate planning advice along the way. If you have a good advisor, they can deliver a lot of value. Even if they underperform the market average by the amount of the fee they charge.

Can you find an advisor that will consistently beat, after fees, the market or benchmark returns? I don’t know, but be sure to review their data supporting this opinion very carefully. And not necessarily against the benchmark provided by the advisor.

Unfortunately, it can be pretty challenging to tell if an advisor is any good. And those investors who are most challenged by DIY investing will also be challenged by the process of choosing a good advisor. We all like to believe we have the best doctor taking care of our health. In reality, most of them will be closer to average than exceptional. Fortunately, there are minimum standards & qualifications that we hope will ensure an adequate level of service from these professionals. The same is only variably true for financial advisors. Because the qualifications for calling yourself a financial advisor in Canada are variable. Some advisors are closer to being a product salesperson. And while some feel or profess a fiduciary responsibility, it is not a legal duty or obligation for many. They cannot just take your money & head off to a beach somewhere, but they may be putting their own, or their company’s, interests just slightly ahead of yours when it comes to investment choices. Even if only subconsciously.

Of course, a good salesperson will make you feel better about the relationship you are getting into. And that’s not a bad thing. But you also need an advisor who can at least deliver average market returns for a broadly diversified portfolio. Minus the fees. And you do need to know exactly how much you’re paying for whatever services & products are being recommended! There may be advisory fees and product fees, check carefully.

If you are a balanced 60/40 style investor, what would you think of paying an advisor to put all your money into ZBAL? Or maybe 60% into XEQT, with the other 40% into a couple of bond & HISA-type ETFs? We sometimes resent paying for simplicity. Advisors know this & are less likely to present you with such a simple portfolio solution. After all, if things are that simple, why would we need an advisor!
Yet, in DIY mode, we sometimes struggle to follow the simple path ourselves. Instead, we prefer to work hard creating a portfolio that underperforms!

Of course, that simple solution might not be the ideal path for everyone. There may well be good reasons for some investors to pursue a lower volatility strategy, a higher income strategy, or whatever. But it is still useful to compare the total return on our own portfolios against those of low-cost, market index ETFs.

Robo-advisors are trying to bridge the gap between the advisory space & DIY, typically for about a 0.5% fee premium, in addition to ETF fees. I love the idea but it feels like you’re paying the added fee for the robo to pick the same ETFs that are in the all-in-one ETFs. Like some human services, they can fancy it up with one or two more esoteric picks. So you feel like you’re getting something extra for your money. But you generally won’t get the more valuable hand-holding that comes with the more expensive advisory services. Maybe AI will help with this down the road. But AI has been around for a lot longer than current market noise suggests & it hasn’t happened yet. Some robo-services do include human phone support. That might develop & grow into something more valuable going forward.

Isn’t there scope for fee reduction on the human advisory side too? Or for a service with a far more rapidly declining tiered fee-structure for larger portfolios? Are there any low-cost advisors out there? Shouldn’t there be more advisors competing with the 0.5% fees of the robo-advisors. Simpler portfolio advice & management should come with lower fees, no? I’m okay with portfolios constructed with low cost index funds. For some investors, the greater value may be more in managing asset location (what ETF goes in which account) & retirement cashflow. Some advisors include financial planning, a valuable service too. But can it be done for a 0.5% fee? Or less?

I realise that someone else’s job always looks easier than it really is from the outside. But I think financial advisory (& real estate) fees are very expensive in Canada. Particularly for the cookie-cutter portfolios offered by some companies. I’m totally okay with the right cookie-cutter portfolio, I just don’t want to pay through the nose for it. High fees are an ignorance premium being levied on a population that didn’t get this kind of knowledge coming through our educational system. And our schools still don’t prepare kids for the digital environment that now makes it far easier for the DIY investor to learn things the hard way. Fees will likely drop over time, as education & AI combine to work at improving the competitive landscape. Though in traditional Canadian fashion, it’ll probably drag out for a long time yet. And some of us older folk might not live long enough to benefit! 🤪

Regardless of the path we choose, it’s worth occasionally benchmarking our portfolio performance against a low-cost, well-diversified, ETF portfolio. One that approximately matches our portfolio’s asset allocation. Benchmarking can provide insight on how decent a job we’re doing with our investing strategy. And if we’re not doing such a good job ourselves, it may be worth talking to a financial advisor. But if you still find the idea of paying an advisor distasteful, then you’d better figure out how to learn to do it better on your own. Or maybe just use the benchmark ETFs instead!

If you want to learn more about saving & investing from the ground up, I’d like to suggest that you check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.

Canadian Banks for Dividend or Covered Call Income?

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 1 Comment
Dollars & Dividends

We love our dividends in Canada. If dividends are so great, why not go for the even greater yields available with covered call ETFs? Maybe we can toss all our investments into covered call ETFs & retire early? That sounds great!
But does it work?

Maybe!

Every investing strategy has its fan base. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to how the numbers work for the individual investor. And covered call ETFs can work for some investors.

However, some features of covered call writing can be less appealing. The notion of covered call ETFs having lower volatility, for example, may be true. But volatility is a measure of an investment going up, as well as down. In general, covered calls will limit upside. If a growing stock is called away, you lose some of the upside. As investors, we don’t mind volatility if it means our investment is going up. We only fret when it goes down. Hand in hand with that is the idea that covered call writing offers some downside protection. You’ll notice the wording in the description of many funds says something like downside protection may be limited to the returns provided by the covered call premium. That’s marketing speak for “we can crash as hard as anything else but you’re at least getting that juicy covered call premium along the way”. Unfortunately, during times of growth or recovery, the capped upside often means that the growth of a covered call fund doesn’t match that of a fund holding the equities directly.

Let’s take a look at an example using only Canada’s big banks. The five largest banks in Canada all started paying dividends in the 1800s. That’s a little too far back to look at, but if you’d invested $100k in an equal-weight holding of the Big 6 banks back in January 2000, that portfolio would have grown to almost one & a half million dollars today! Investing in the large cap American or Canadian market index funds would only have returned under half a million over that time. Of course, nobody would risk going all in on just the Canadian banks. Right!?! But this kind of performance is why Canadians like their banks.

To compare the different investing strategies, I’ll use BMO’s ZEB & ZWB here. Both ETFs are designed to track the Solactive Equal Weight Canada Banks Index. And both funds are managed by BMO Global Asset Management, one of Canada’s largest ETF providers. ZEB just holds the banks. ZWB holds the same banks, but adds a covered call strategy to about 50% of the portfolio to generate a bigger income stream. These ETFs have a relatively short shared history, so we’re only looking at returns over an 11.5 year period up to the middle of this year here.

Accumulation
During the accumulation years, all dividends & distributions are reinvested, that’s the “DRIP ON” scenario in the table below. This shows the Total Return, with dividends reinvested, from a $100k investment directly in the bank stocks. And it compares that to the same $100k investment in ZEB & ZWB.

It’s probably no surprise that directly investing in the stocks produced the greatest return. The direct investment was rebalanced semi-annually, to match the index tracking guidelines used by the ETFs. While ZEB does all that work for us, the fees charged by the fund cause a little drag on the returns. Since covered call writing lops off some of the upside potential, it’s also not a surprise to see ZWB trailing the pack here. It’s CAGR & Best Year are poorer. But, it’s worth noting that it’s Worst Year is slightly worse than the other two. Fund managers do warn that covered call funds “may” provide downside protection. Sometimes, that might only be by the amount of the covered call premium. But it’s not a guarantee. Since ZWB had the biggest drop of the three, the covered call strategy didn’t provide much of a safety net during the covid crash of March 2020. It’s possible that longer periods of sideways, or slightly down, markets could have allowed ZWB to produce a better relative performance. All in all though, it’s a pretty good performance for all strategies. That’s the accumulation picture. Next we’ll look at what happens when we start spending the income.

Spending the Money
Things change when we retire & need to spend some of our savings every year. All sorts of new challenges come up. The ideal scenario for many retirees is to have their investments generate enough dividends & distributions for them to live on. No worries about having to sell shares in a down market, & so on. Here’s how these three investments deliver on the income front.

This table shows the picture for an investor who retired in 2012 & sucked out all the dividends & distributions for living expenses along the way. The holder of ZWB would have had more income over the 11.5 year period. Though overall, perhaps not the best value, since the value of the underlying portfolio didn’t grow as much as the other two. If an emergency situation forced the sale of some shares to raise capital, the other two approaches had far bigger portfolio values to draw from. Aside from the income, the positive thing about all these results is that the underlying assets continued to appreciate. All these ETFs show positive CAGR. And this is with all the dividends & distributions taken out. BMO’s limited covered call strategy, over this timeline, worked well. Any income investment that shows negative CAGR for the underlying assets (with DRIP off) might be an exposure for a retiree with a longer time horizon. The portfolio value would decline over time & that will have an impact on the income stream over the long haul too. There is one other exposure here & that is the impact of inflation. If we adjust the End Value of the portfolios in the above table, the Big 6 & ZEB are worth an inflation-adjusted amount of about $150k. The End Value of ZWH, in 2012 dollars, is just under $95k at the end. This isn’t quite accurate, as the inflation adjustment comes from US inflation data, not Canadian. But it still shows the importance of having a portfolio capable of staying ahead of inflation.

Here’s what the income streams look like for these investments …

While ZWB starts out with a far greater annual income than the other two options, it shows more variability than the other two. Variability of income from year to year can be an issue for some retirees. Perhaps more importantly, the other income streams are catching up as time goes by. Direct investing shows a more consistent upward trajectory, even without any additional investment or DRIP. And this is exactly what you’d hope for with a portfolio of dividend-growth stocks. The dividend growth is what grows the income stream. That can be very important for an investor with a longer expected time horizon in retirement. Early retirees should watch out for this.

The Canadian banks generally do well over time. For portfolio growth & for growth of income. But now it’s down to personal choice. Do you prefer to trade some long-term portfolio value for the bigger income stream of the covered call approach early in retirement? Or do you like the more consistent growth of the income stream that comes from a portfolio biased towards dividend growth? There are a lot of factors that go into individual decisions. For a young investor with a long time horizon, total return is probably going to be more important than the size of the income stream starting out. It might also be more important for an early retiree. Or for a healthy retiree with a longer life expectancy. Things like leaving an inheritance, planning for home care or a retirement home, & so on, all factor into the decision making process too. Regardless, the Canadian banks have been a pretty solid investment over time & they look good in all these scenarios. Of course, as you’ll find noted on every fund’s webpage … past performance is not indicative of future results! We can’t just assume an investment will continue to do well in the future because it’s done well in the past. The banks have been great performers historically. But not all stocks or funds perform as well as the banks did here. Be sure to compare your choices for total return & income growth. And not just the size of the yield!

If you want to learn more about all this from the ground up, I’d like to suggest that you check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & educational purposes only. Opinions are my own, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.

Women Suck at Investing

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment

The title is clickbait, please bear with me & I will try to redeem myself. If you do an internet search with that same title in the search box, what you’ll find is a series of links to pieces & papers that suggest exactly the opposite is true. Women, it turns out, are generally better investors than men. Guys seem to run on testosterone-addled brains that make them do silly things when it comes to investing. So women who are investing generally outperform men. However, this is not about which gender makes for a better investor. It’s about those women who are not saving & investing for their long-term financial security.

The challenge for women as group is that fewer women are investing, as a proportion of their gender population. Those women who are not saving & investing may have exposure to greater retirement challenges. Women are more likely to face poverty in retirement than men. There is a gender pension gap that results in a great number of women surviving on lower income in retirement.

Despite all the progress with gender equality over time, it’s just not enough. There are still glass ceilings that women butt up against in the workplace. Many companies pay women less than men for doing the same job. Some women are channeled into lower paid & temporary or part-time jobs. And women tend to be the ones that take career breaks to raise children. All these things lead to a lower lifetime income. And lower lifetime income can lead to a lower retirement income from savings & pension plans, including the Canada Pension Plan, for women. With women living longer than men, this only adds to their challenges for retirement. Women, on average, will need a bigger retirement nest-egg than a man, to take them through that longer retirement phase. And many women are not saving & investing enough, early enough, to counter that predicament.

While women continue to work on fixing all those other issues of inequality, saving & investing should be a priority from the earliest working years. Don’t trust your neanderthal male partner to do it for you. We’re not that good at it! This is one area where women can seize the advantage. By starting early. Given enough time, an early start can level the playing field.

Why do I care? Because my wife is likely to outlive me by, not just years, but decades. For some of us, the challenges only come to light much later in life. And I have kids, including a daughter. I’d like them to get started early too. I wish I’d known more in my younger years.

Unfortunately, the kind of people who are reading this stuff are probably already engaged & knowledgeable. You are likely already saving & investing towards a more secure financial future. But if you have friends who are not, please encourage them to start. Investing looks like a digital casino to those unfamiliar with it. But it doesn’t have to be. And, as I’m sure you know, it’s not so intimidating once you take the time to learn a little. Please share your knowledge with those who might benefit from it. And if you have kids, regardless of gender, help them get started on the path early. Unfortunately, the urgency to get started early only becomes obvious much later in life!

If you want to help a friend get started, encourage them to read Double Double Your Money.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & educational purposes only. Opinions are my own, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.