Build Wealth Canada Podcast

Today we’re going to talk all about dividend investing for Canadians, including shedding some light on using dividend investing as part of your investing strategy. We’ll take a look what to look for, and of course the different types of dividend investing available to Canadians. Now if you’re a long time listener of the show, then you know that there are quite a few investing strategies out there. Dividend investing is definitely one of the really popular ones, especially among those that like the idea of their investments spinning of passive cashflow on an ongoing basis, as opposed to you having to sell-off some of your ETFs or stocks to generate the cashflow you want. And so today's guest is Nick McCullum from the site Sure Dividend. They specialize in dividend investing whether it’s through ETFs or individual stocks so I thought it would be great to have him on the show, so we can learn and to help us make an informed decision on whether having a dividend focus within our portfolios is something that may be a good fit for you. Nick and his team do a ton of research on dividend investing, and specific dividend investing stocks and ETFs so if this is something of interest to you, and something that you’d like to learn more about, then you can check out the resources page that Nick actually created specifically for Build Wealth Canada listeners where you can actually do a free trial to see their research and advice, and really see if this type of investing is the right fit for you. To learn more and get a free trial to any of their newsletters, you can go to the custom page that they created for us, over at suredividend.com/kornel.

Today I’m excited to have Edward Kholodenko on the show who is the CEO of Questrade. If you’re a long time listener of the show then you know that I actually use Questrade to buy all my investments. So, when Questrade reached out to me about interviewing their CEO I thought it would be a great opportunity to ask him the questions that I have, and that I know a lot of the listeners have about their brokerage. I currently save at least $480 per year in fees by using Questrade so needless to say I’m a big fan, especially since they let me purchase ETFs for free. At the time of this writing, they are the only brokerage in Canada that I know of that offers this. It’s worth mentioning that this episode is not sponsored by Questrade, or anything like that. I’m simply a big fan of what they offer, have been using them for years, and thought this would be a great opportunity to ask their CEO some top questions that you should know the answers to, when choosing a brokerage for your investments. Links & Resources From the Episode Open a free account to receive a $25-$250 bonus here. This is part of the refer-a-friend bonus which you can learn more about here. Learn more about the Build Wealth Canada Investing Course Here Get the latest unbiased investment research by signing up for a free 30-day trial of 5i Research. You’ll also receive a free 1-year digital subscription to Canadian MoneySaver Magazine (Canada’s largest personal finance magazine). Question’s Covered 1. One of the reasons that I chose to use Questrade for all my retirement accounts is because you let your customers buy ETFs for free (or almost for free if we include ECN fees). Is the ability to buy ETFs for free through Questrade something that you see your company offering long term, or is this more of a short to mid-term offer that’s temporarily being used to attract new customers? 2. I imagine you get your fair share of potential customers that are reluctant to keep their investments at an online discount brokerage like Questrade, vs at one of the largest brick and mortar Canadian banks. Can you speak a bit about the security that Questrade uses compared to some of these largest banks? 3. What if there was a scenario where Questrade got hacked, or if somebody’s account got hacked because their password was compromised (through no fault of Questrade). What kind of protection or insurance is provided in those scenarios? Would the $10 million in private insurance cover the customer in these cases? 4. Can you give us an overview of the state of the online brokerage space in Canada? In particular, what trends and developments are currently happening, where do you see things are heading in terms of technology and innovation, and what can consumers expect in the coming years? Are there certain things that Questrade is really prioritizing for the coming years as one of Canada’s largest discount brokers? 5. Can you talk about the lack of financial transparency when it comes to fees that Canadians are paying on their investments? There have been rules that have come out (CRM2) to help with this but is there more that Canadians should know? 6. As far as I know, Questrade doesn’t provide some of the more ultra safe investment options such as GICs. For those that want that high level of safety (despite the lower returns), what options do you suggest for them? 7. You probably hear a lot of myths from potential customers about online investing. Can you share some of the most common and critical misconceptions that Canadian have? 8. Please tell us a bit more about where we can learn from you, and learn more about Questrade. If you liked the episode sign up for free to receive all new episodes as they get released, news on giveaways, and the free guide on the Top 5 Personal Finance and Productivity Tools.

This is part 2 of the series on how to execute an early retirement, with financial planning veteran John Kalos. In this episode, we use our financial plan as a case study so that you and other Canadians can get some insights on how to execute an early retirement. The goal is to give you a better understanding of what a financial plan should include, what it can do for you, and give you some insider tips from a real ex-banker on what to look out for when you encounter a financial planner or advisor trying to sell you a service like that. If you do have some questions for John (the financial planner we used), or if you'd like to discuss potentially having him take a look at your financial situation too just like he did with my family, then you can sign up for a free consultation with him by going to buildwealthcanada.ca/john. It's totally free, and there's no obligation or anything like that. Links and Resources Covered Receive a free consultation with John and have your questions answered at www.buildwealthcanada.ca/john. Kornel's investing course with free sample lessons at www.BuildWealthCanada.ca/invest Top Tools and Resources for Financial Independence (for Canadians): Sign up anywhere on www.BuildWealthCanada.ca for a free guide on all the top tools and sites that I’ve personally used to help us achieve financial independence in our early 30s. They’re also what we use now to optimize and manage our finances, and ensure that we’re paying the lowest fees while getting solid returns on our investments.  Questions Asked During the Interview: You and I went through the entire financial planning process together, with you as our financial planner. After you created the financial plan for us, one of the insights that came out of it, which goes against what we hear in the media a lot is that if you were to retire or semi-retire right now, you don't necessarily always need a 1 million dollar or more investment portfolio to pull it off.For example, our portfolio wasn't at $1 million and all the numbers supported that we still have enough for a full retirement right now. Why do you think we often hear in the media how you need that $1 million dollar portfolio, and why is this not necessarily always the case? To give everyone listening some actionable things that they can do when searching for a financial planner that's right for them, what are the red flags to look out for when meeting with a financial planner/advisor? I really like the process that you and I went through when you did our financial plan, and I think it's a really good example of what the process should be like. So now that we've talked about the negative things to look out for and what we don't want, can you give us a brief overview of your process?. I know this is something you've been optimizing for 20+ years so can you also highlight the critical pieces in the process that everyone should have when working with a financial planner? When you did my plan there were several critical components that you made sure you factored in that could really make a huge impact on whether someone can retire early or not. For anybody looking to do an early retirement, what were these key components that can really shorten the number of years that you need to work? Also, let's break this question down into 2 parts. First, let's talk about the controllable factors (ex. Spending, part time work, etc.) which we can all focus on that have the biggest impact on how early we can retire.And then after that, let's talk about the factors that we can't directly control, but that absolutely need to be factored into the financial plan, no matter who your financial planner or advisor is, because they have such an enormous impact on our ability to retire early (ex. Inflation, CPP and OAS). What I really liked in particular was the summary page that you produced where it talked about things like what's the most we can spend annually and still have enough to stay retired? And how much we actually need to retire? Using our actual numbers and financial plan as a real life example, can you speak to what the results for us were in the context of, what are the answers that we should have from our financial planner when getting a financial plan like this done> Early retirement execution questions: Now that we have all the numbers we need from doing a financial plan, let's switch gears and talk about how to actually execute an early retirement or semi-retirement once you know you have enough in your investments.To start, how should our portfolio change when we move from an accumulation phase (where we're working full-time, saving and investing), to the decumulation phase where we're not working at all or only working part-time. When in retirement, should Canadians tweak their portfolio to generate more yield and try to live off that? or do you suggest just selling-off a percentage of the portfolio every year during good years and keeping a cash cushion during that bad years so that we're not selling our investments when the markets are down? For the fixed income portion of our portfolio how do you decide between using bonds vs doing a GIC ladder? What size of a cash cushion do you suggest for people in retirement or semi-retirement? How should early retirees deal with moving money out of the RRSP early? (Explain what the basic personal amount is here too please) What type of investments should you keep in each of your accounts to help minimize your taxes?  

In this episode, we use our financial plan as a case study so that you and other Canadians can get some insights on how to execute an early retirement. The goal is to give you a better understanding of what a financial plan should include, what it can do for you, and give you some insider tips from a real ex-banker on what to look out for when you encounter a financial planner or advisor trying to sell you a service like that. If you do have some questions for John (the financial planner we used), or if you'd like to discuss potentially having him take a look at your financial situation too just like he did with my family, then you can sign up for a free consultation with him by going to buildwealthcanada.ca/john. It's totally free, and there's no obligation or anything like that. Links and Resources Covered Receive a free consultation with John and have your questions answered here. Kornel's investing course: Free Sample Lessons Top Tools and Resources for Financial Independence (for Canadians): Sign up anywhere on that page for all the top tools and sites that I’ve personally used to help us achieve financial independence in our early 30s. They’re also what we use now to optimize and manage our finances, and ensure that we’re paying the lowest fees while getting solid returns on our investments.  Questions Asked During the Interview: You and I went through the entire financial planning process together, with you as our financial planner. After you created the financial plan for us, one of the insights that came out of it, which goes against what we hear in the media a lot is that if you were to retire or semi-retire right now, you don't necessarily always need a 1 million dollar or more investment portfolio to pull it off.For example, our portfolio wasn't at $1 million and all the numbers supported that we still have enough for a full retirement right now. Why do you think we often hear in the media how you need that $1 million dollar portfolio, and why is this not necessarily always the case? To give everyone listening some actionable things that they can do when searching for a financial planner that's right for them, what are the red flags to look out for when meeting with a financial planner/advisor? I really like the process that you and I went through when you did our financial plan, and I think it's a really good example of what the process should be like. So now that we've talked about the negative things to look out for and what we don't want, can you give us a brief overview of your process?. I know this is something you've been optimizing for 20+ years so can you also highlight the critical pieces in the process that everyone should have when working with a financial planner? When you did my plan there were several critical components that you made sure you factored in that could really make a huge impact on whether someone can retire early or not. For anybody looking to do an early retirement, what were these key components that can really shorten the number of years that you need to work? Also, let's break this question down into 2 parts. First, let's talk about the controllable factors (ex. Spending, part time work, etc.) which we can all focus on that have the biggest impact on how early we can retire.And then after that, let's talk about the factors that we can't directly control, but that absolutely need to be factored into the financial plan, no matter who your financial planner or advisor is, because they have such an enormous impact on our ability to retire early (ex. Inflation, CPP and OAS). What I really liked in particular was the summary page that you produced where it talked about things like what's the most we can spend annually and still have enough to stay retired? And how much we actually need to retire? Using our actual numbers and financial plan as a real life example, can you speak to what the results for us were in the context of, what are the answers that we should have from our financial planner when getting a financial plan like this done> Early retirement execution questions: Now that we have all the numbers we need from doing a financial plan, let's switch gears and talk about how to actually execute an early retirement or semi-retirement once you know you have enough in your investments.To start, how should our portfolio change when we move from an accumulation phase (where we're working full-time, saving and investing), to the decumulation phase where we're not working at all or only working part-time. When in retirement, should Canadians tweak their portfolio to generate more yield and try to live off that? or do you suggest just selling-off a percentage of the portfolio every year during good years and keeping a cash cushion during that bad years so that we're not selling our investments when the markets are down? For the fixed income portion of our portfolio how do you decide between using bonds vs doing a GIC ladder? What size of a cash cushion do you suggest for people in retirement or semi-retirement? How should early retirees deal with moving money out of the RRSP early? (Explain what the basic personal amount is here too please) What type of investments should you keep in each of your accounts to help minimize your taxes?

Today’s guest has written over 1,000 financial plans for Canadians and is truly as experienced as it gets in this field. He has extensive knowledge on some of the higher impact investment strategies that can really help accelerate our returns such as the Smith Manoeuvre and how to use an RESP properly. We also cover how to structure your investment portfolio and what investments to buy. Links and Resources Covered Top Tools and Resources for Financial Independence (for Canadians): Sign up anywhere on www.BuildWealthCanada.ca for a free guide on all the top tools and sites that I’ve personally used to help us achieve financial independence in our early 30s. They’re also what we use now to optimize and manage our finances, and ensure that we’re paying the lowest fees while getting solid returns on our investments. Kornel's investing course with free sample lessons at www.BuildWealthCanada.ca/invest Questions Covered: 1. To start things off, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into financial planning. 2. One of the strategies that I wish I knew about back when I was younger was how to make your mortgage tax deductible. Our friends in the US are able to easily deduct their mortgage interest against their taxes, whereas this is generally not allowed in Canada. However, you suggest a strategy called the Smith Manoeuvre for Canadians which when properly structured and deployed, lets Canadians deduct their mortgage interest as well. Now you’ve set this up for many Canadians within you financial planning practice. Can you start off by taking us through what the Smith Manoeuvre actually is, how it makes all this possible, and how much money can actually be saved by doing this. In other words, is this actually worth our time to look into? 2.1. I get the impression that Canadians use this with their primary residence a lot, but what if somebody has their mortgage paid off or has a rental property. Is it highly beneficial to use this strategy then too? (ex. taking out equity from the home using a HELOC and using it for leveraged investing?) 3. I’ve researched the Smith Manoeuvre a fair bit and a common theme seems to be that you have to be very careful with how it’s set up so that the Canada Revenue Agency doesn’t flag you and treat this as tax evasion where you end up paying all sorts of fees. Can you talk about what to be careful of, and what the common mistakes are when Canadians try to set this up? 4. A lot of Canadians hear about the free money you can get from the government if you put money in an RESP. I remember when we had our daughter I got numerous calls from companies that were trying the “help” us with setting up an RESP. To kick things off, can you explain what an RESP is, and is this something that we need a company to set up for us? When you work with clients, at what point do you advise them to start moving the investments to something less volatile like bonds once their child starts approaching the age when they start their post-secondary education? Do you start with a diversified, all stock portfolio, and then use a formula to know how much to move into bonds every year? 5. Let’s say you had to retire tomorrow with a $1,000,000 portfolio. You have no debt, a paid off house, but no work pension. How would you structure your portfolio and what investments would you buy so that it would last you indefinitely? Would you change your investments and portfolio structure at all once you hit 65 (assuming that’s when you choose to start receiving CPP and OAS from the government). 6. Traditionally, the general accepted rule has been that the older you get, the more you should put towards bonds to keep your portfolio less volatile. You wrote a very interesting article talking about how loading up too much on bonds isn’t actually the sustainable thing to do. Can you talk about your findings and research. 7. Tell us more about where we can learn more from you? 8. What are some of the most common questions and problems that you tackle for your clients?

Today I’m excited to have Mark Seed on the show, who runs the popular Canadian blog, My Own Advisor. On the blog, Mark documents his journey and lessons learned as he invests towards achieving an early retirement, and works on growing his portfolio to 1 million dollars. What’s very interesting about Mark, is that he is a hybrid investor meaning he doesn’t just invest in one particular way (for example, he doesn’t just buy the index with ETFs). Instead, he uses ETFs to hold US and international companies, but when it comes to the Canadian portion of his portfolio, he holds individual stocks of strong dividend paying companies instead of just holding a single ETF that captures all the major companies in Canada. This is a bit of a different strategy than what I’ve been doing, so I thought it would be great to have Mark on the show to broaden our view by seeing how others invest, learn why he invests in that way (the pros and the cons), and see if maybe it’s a good fit for the way you invest. Links and Resources Covered Top Tools and Resources for Financial Independence (for Canadians): Sign up anywhere on www.BuildWealthCanada.ca for a free guide on all the top tools and sites that I’ve personally used to help us achieve financial independence in our early 30s. They’re also what we use now to optimize and manage our finances, and ensure that we’re paying the lowest fees while getting solid returns on our investments.  Kornel's investing course with free sample lessons at www.BuildWealthCanada.ca/invest Questions Asked During the Interview: What made you decide to be a hybrid investor instead of just sticking with index investing or just dividend investing? What is your process you take for selecting which dividend paying companies to buy? Once you’ve done your due diligence on the company, what analysis do you do to determine whether now is the right time to buy? For example, how do you decide whether a company is currently overvalued or undervalued? How do you deal with the risk that you are investing in individual companies? As opposed to hundreds or thousands of companies through an ETF. For example, let’s say you’re holding CIBC. How do you deal with the worry that something might happen at that particular company and it could potentially never recover back to its previous stock price? (ex. Nortel, Blackberry) What made you choose to buy individual dividend paying companies vs buying something like the aristocrat ETF? Once you choose to retire, how do you plan on changing your asset allocation, if at all? (i.e. Going from an asset accumulation stage, to an asset decumulation phase). What if you retired early? What if you did a traditional retirement where CPP, OAS, and your pensions kick-in right away (or almost right away). If you did a much earlier retirement where CPP and OAS don’t kick-in yet, would you move all or most of your investments to stable Canadian dividend payers partially due to the dividend tax credit? Speaking of asset allocation, what are your thoughts about using bonds as part of your portfolio, especially in retirement? Many Canadians are feeling reluctant to use them due to their low returns, and are expecting their prices to drop due to their fear of rising interest rates here in Canada. What’s your take on this? A common criticism against the Canadian index is that we as Canada are too concentrated in just a few sectors (i.e. energy, financials, materials). I imagine you run into the same challenge with Canadian dividend investing. Do you do anything to offset this in your portfolio? Have you come across any good solutions? Do you have any other advice for dividend focused investors? (or investors in general) Tell us more about My Own Advisor and what’s the best way to hear more from you?

Today we’re going to take a deep dive into the world of real estate, and we’re going to approach it from 2 sides: First, we’ll talk about real estate as an investment (i.e. If you’ve ever thought about investing in a property and renting it out). Now if you’ve listened to past episodes of the show, then you know that it can actually be really hard to get the numbers to work when buying a home and trying to rent it out as an investment. Today’s expert, however, is going to share some strategies with us that she uses to actually successfully invest, and make the numbers work, despite the high prices of real estate that we’ve been seeing. Next, we’ll shift focus and talk about the different home buying tips, and expensive mistakes that you can avoid when buying a home for yourself. Even if you’ve bought a home in the past, I still recommend that you tune-in as the real estate market has likely changed since you last bought a home. Join me in welcoming today’s guest, Limor Markman, as she shares the latest money saving tips and ways to protect yourself, whether you’re buying a home for personal use, or as an investment. Links and Resources Top Tools and Resources for Financial Independence (for Canadians): Sign up anywhere on www.BuildWealthCanada.ca for a free guide on all the top tools and sites that I’ve personally used to help us achieve financial independence in our early 30s. They’re also what we use now to optimize and manage our finances, and ensure that we’re paying the lowest fees while getting solid returns on our investments.  Have a mortgage question? Ask our own in-house expert, Sean Cooper over at www.BuildWealthCanada.ca/sean Kornel's investing course with free sample lessons at www.BuildWealthCanada.ca/invest

On this episode, we cover some of the top financial mistakes Canadians make, as well as common misconceptions that may be holding you back in accelerating your investments and net worth. Links and Resources: Top Tools and Resources for Financial Independence (for Canadians): Sign up anywhere on www.BuildWealthCanada.ca for a free guide on all the top tools and sites that I’ve personally used to help us achieve financial independence in our early 30s. They’re also what we use now to optimize and manage our finances, and ensure that we’re paying the lowest fees while getting solid returns on our investments. The Canadian Financial Summit is available at CanadianFinancialSummit.com Kornel's investing course with free sample lessons at www.BuildWealthCanada.ca/invest

In this episode, we talk about what a robo advisor is, and how it can be a lot less expensive than the traditional approach of investing in high-fee, actively managed mutual funds. I find robo advisors to be the easiest way to invest in Canada, but this does result in higher fees than if you were to just buy the investments yourself (which is actually really easy).  I personally just buy the investments myself to get the lowest fees and pay the least tax possible (You can see exactly how I do it over at www.BuildWealthCanada.ca/invest.) With that said, I realize not everybody wants to learn how to actually be a passive investor and get the lowest possible fees, and so robo advisors can be a good option if you value simplicity of fees.  Links and Resources Top Tools and Resources for Financial Independence (for Canadians): Sign up anywhere on www.BuildWealthCanada.ca for a free guide on all the top tools and sites that I’ve personally used to help us achieve financial independence in our early 30s. They’re also what we use now to optimize and manage our finances, and ensure that we’re paying the lowest fees while getting solid returns on our investments.  Kornel's investing course with free sample lessons at www.BuildWealthCanada.ca/invest Questions Covered: 1. For those just getting started in investing, can you explain what a robo advisor service is, and especially why we as Canadians should care? 2. When you build investment portfolios for Canadians, why are ETFs such a core part of your portfolios? (perhaps explain what an ETF is first for all the listeners just getting started with this) 3. Nest Wealth mentions that you manage the money based on proven investing principles and Nobel Prize-winning theories. Can you elaborate on the Nobel Prize-winning theories component? 4. One thing I noticed on your Nest Wealth site, is that you actually list all the ETFs you buy (which is nice, I really like that transparency), but if I’m just a regular Canadian, why don’t I just buy the ETFs myself through a discount brokerage (especially since some discount brokerages let me buy ETFs for free) and then save on the fees that Nest Wealth charges? 5. Anybody following the financial services industry knows that there are a LOT of robo advisor services out in Canada. What sets Nest Wealth apart from all the rest? 5.a. One of the things that really intrigued me when I first heard of you guys is that you have a flat fee model. For those not familiar, can you explain what that is and why it’s actually a pretty big deal? 5.b. You mention that your portfolios are “custom built” unlike your competitors. Can you elaborate how this works and why it’s so important? 6. I imagine that a big concern Canadians have is that with all these robo advisor companies out there, it’s totally conceivable that not all of them will survive long term. Because of this, it wouldn’t surprise me if some Canadians are holding back from investing because they are afraid of losing all their money if something was to ever happen. Can you speak to this concern? 7. What customer support do you offer? Ex. If somebody has questions while going through the automated portfolio building process? What about after all is set up? 8. One of the other things that intrigued me was that on your site you mention that as a client you get your own portfolio manager that you can speak with, text or call. What types of things is a Portfolio Manager ideally suited to help you with? And what types of question are beyond the scope of a Portfolio Manager like this? (I’m trying to gauge what kind of other professionals you need on your team apart from Nest Wealth). 10. I went through Nest Wealth and had it build a portfolio for me. I noticed that there were different goals that you can select, and I assume Nest Wealth will optimize your portfolio, depending on your goal correct? How does Nest Wealth change what portfolio it recommends depending on whether somebody is savings for retirement vs is already retired and now needs the income instead of growth? What about if they’re saving for something like a down payment on a home or post-secondary education for their child? What’s the strategy behind those types of portfolios? 11. I noticed Nest Wealth will build your portfolio based on your questions, but it won’t actually tell you whether you will be able to actually retire by an age you specify, and whether your income in retirement is sustainable. Is that because that is an area where you actually need a financial planner to do a more in-depth, 1-on-1 personalized analysis with you? 12. How is the MER absorbed? Is that covered by the monthly fee? What about other fees? 13. To close things off, who is Nest Wealth not for? ex. Those with credit card debt? 13. Who is Nest Wealth ideally for? What type of person benefits most from what your service?

Guest Sean Cooper shares how he achieved financial independence by buying a house at 27 and paying off his mortgage at 30 in Toronto. Topics include saving for a down payment, navigating the real estate market, balancing mortgage payments with retirement savings, advice for entering the real estate market, strategies for paying off the mortgage, investing in index funds, and utilizing home equity for investments.