Tater’s Takes
January 19th, 2012 by PotatoBefore I get to the rest of the links, an important reminder about the Canada Learning Bond for low-income families to help fund their RESP from MSB. If your net income is below $41.5k, and your child born in 2004 or later, the government will just give you money to help fund the child’s RESP — not even a matching amount like the CESG.
Larry MacDonald reports on more wariness towards stocks by younger investors. Of course, given investor psychology, it’s probably coming at the wrong time.
The housing bubble has started to get a few more mentions, perhaps because it’s a slow news period. Including:
3 of Rob Carrick’s 12 new year tips are variations on “don’t buy a house in this ridiculous market”.
Almost all of Canada’s banks have now also started to publicly fret about the state of the housing market. “There’s no question that the warning signs around the Canadian housing market have been visible for more than a year,†Mr. Downe [BMO CEO] said. The banks have mentioned that they did a stress test of their finances if house prices declined by 25%. Ideally, they should be doing these kind of stress tests regularly for risk management reasons — but the fact that it became newsworthy may be of note.
Plus, 2 segments on BNN on Wednesday, and another on Thursday (11th and 12th of January).
Nelson of Financial Uproar infamy has a guest post (is there anywhere he doesn’t guest post?) that spends a quarter of the word count on non sequiturs and still manages to be an excellent description of how easy passive investing can be (I needed a whole book to get the concept across!).
This is why I’m focusing my job search on non-academic positions, though that hasn’t gone so well so far, either.
Otherwise, not much new with me. Weight’s holding steady (not good, but not terrible). Just barely hitting one job app per week — I really need to quit it with cover letter writer’s block. The 2nd week of flag football went well, with more of our team showing up, and a slower rate of play due to the other team constantly consulting a playbook (I thought having a playbook was supposed to speed up your planning). In fact, I got so many breaks with all our spare players for subbing in/out that I started to question even going: having no subs last week was exhausting, but having enough to only play 50% of the time didn’t feel like exercise at all, and the commute down twice as long as my on-field time.