Our Best Wishes

Wow! It’s already that time of year again! I can’t believe 2017 is almost a thing of the past...

Perhaps a sign we are not getting any younger, let’s hope it’s also an indication we are enjoying ourselves. Don’t know about you but for us, pleasant times always seem to go by much faster. And age kind of amplifies that feeling.

With big emotions, both good and bad, the last year sure still went by in a flash!

Enjoy Precious Time with Family and Friends

With a brand-new year already at our doorstep, we hope you can take a break from our hectic modern way of life and enjoy precious moments surrounded by family and friends.

Last year’s tumultuous experiences sure gave us an eye-opening perspective and renewed our focus to strive for a healthy balance life.

We are now more grateful and appreciate all we already have. We also savor our privilege of choice and cherish many possibilities to help others.

Have Faith and Dismiss Obscure Thoughts

New Star Wars movies always inspire us corny analogies and statements.

Luckily for you, this one will be quite classic and simple: « May the Force be with you! ».

We just love when a touch of Disney’s magic brings back Star Wars’ wisdom into the mix. We should be well served in the next couple years.

We will also have a great chance to experience the powerful Disney-Star Wars duo up close as we are going to Disney soon.

We look forward to sharing our magical venture with you in an upcoming post.

Meanwhile, let’s hope the Jedi in all of us can survive longer and won’t cave in to the sometimes-irresistible temptations of the dark side.

Photo Credit

Experience Living with Only 75% of Your Salary

Could you live with only three-quarters of your salary? Extreme savers may find this quite easy as they probably already save more than 25% of their actual income. But let’s face it; they are still exceptionally rare individuals.

Heck, many can’t even get by with their full revenue.

I’ve been experiencing it first hand myself for the last 2 years. As some of you might know, my working conditions allowed me to take a differed 6-month leave of absence in 2017 and to spread out income deductions over a longer period so I’ve been paid 75% of my salary since 2015.

So today, we’ll talk about financial and psychological implications of having your salary amputated and how my family and I fared with it. We definitely think the broad benefits are worth the hassle.

I’ve been doing it for real but everyone has the option to at least artificially implement it. For instance, by using pre-authorized transfers to automatically put aside a significant portion of their paycheck. It can be a great way to discover if you have the financial means but also the stomach to live with less money. If you prefer, gradually doing it could give you a chance to learn to slowly cope with it. 

Is Living with Less That Hard?

12-Minute Balance (Revisited)

The 12-Minute Series was originally posted in 2012.

We’ve decided to republish it integrally because we believe it can still help as everyone aspires to make things better.

Let’s hope it stirs up the discussion and stimulates you to change the world 12-Minute at a time!

This article was originally posted on May 12, 2012

Many believe that one of the most important keys to happiness is balance. Sadly, many lives equate to a never ending juggling act struggling in search of that so elusive concept.  

The 12-Minute Approach offers you simple yet powerful ways to achieve that so precious balance in your life.

Let’s hope that, by focusing on rhythm, order and harmony, these 12-Minute Ideas help you strive toward that balance so essential to your happiness and well-being.

Equal Balance between Needs and Activities

In order to stay happy yet still be effective, your life should be equally balanced between your needs and your activities.

Preparing to Take Assets Out of RRSP

Early in the year, we talked about taking time to think and analyze the possibilities surrounding future withdrawals from our investment accounts. In the initial stage, our reflection concentrated on questions like how? And how much? At this point, we will sadly report that our efforts have not significantly paid off. We have not demystified the 4% rule yet. Neither did we develop or stumble upon a better alternative.

All that analysis still eventually oriented us towards the when?

Too Much RRSP May Equal Too Much Tax

As a result, we recently discovered our RRSP value may be too high and are now considering withdrawing money from it sooner than expected. In that context, it looks like we will deregister an important portion of our RRSPs to avoid future tax problems. Essentially, we discovered that too much money in our RRSPs may result in paying a lot more tax later in life or having a big tax bill attached to our heritage, mostly destined to our lovely daughter.

We will admit having too much money is a good problem to have. But it’s important to start taking measures now to possibly avoid wasting an important chunk of it later. With retrospect, investing more in TFSAs instead of RRSPs would have been a better choice, from a fiscal standpoint at least. Fortunately, it’s not too late for some type of gradual rebalancing.

Our RRSPs grew up faster with larger contributions and higher returns than projected. In that regard, part of the credit can be attributed to our successful DIY investing approach.

Changes in our pension plan conditions also greatly impact our future financial situation. Unfortunately, planning for an early retirement kind of goes against the grain. Consequently, we made very conservative assumptions during the last round of negotiations as initial talks amputated pension benefits by almost half for early retirees like us.  

The final agreement was better or less bad than anticipated, we will only lose about 10% of our retirement payouts. Again, this will probably end up generating additional taxable income later.

With all those factors combined, the perspective of paying more tax during retirement than in active life unexpectedly becomes very probable.

As an example, you can see from the Leaving Money in RRSP Chart that, just a 100K$ portion accumulated in your RRSP today, at 45, could generate a nasty tax bill of more than a million bucks 40 years down the road. RRSPs can be a great tool to avoid paying taxes now as it differs your fiscal obligation. But if your ultimate tax rate is high like in this example at 50%, you might end up paying a big chunk of that deferred tax back.

Now that we know we are going to take money or stocks out of our RRSPs, it’s time to explore related technicalities.

Gradual Transfer to Tax-Friendly TFSA

Let’s briefly get back to how much? Projecting income and corresponding tax levels over an extended period is far from exact science. You can still have a general idea of fiscal implications and take actions that should improve the situation.

Portfolio Update November 2017

Once again, it’s time for another update of our DIY Portfolio. As usual, our following update can be expected in about 12 weeks, in February 2018.

Meanwhile, you can have a look at previous portfolio updates here:

Portfolio Update August 2015

Portfolio Update November 2015

Portfolio Update February 2016

Portfolio Update May 2016

Portfolio Update August 2016

Portfolio Update November 2016

Portfolio Update February 2017

Portfolio Update May 2017

Portfolio Update August 2017

The weak US dollar is still hurting our DIY Portfolio a bit, but the bleeding at least stopped in early September and we have seen signs of a meaningful turnaround since. As we talked about before, we can still expect more interest rate hikes from the Bank of Canada that should put additional pressure on the relative value of US vs CAN dollar.

Wacky Golf Fact (Revisited) – Getting Lost in a Bunker

The Wacky Golf Fact Series was originally posted in 2016.

Our initial plan was to add new articles to this fun series but the Rules Modernization proposed by the golf authorities caught us of guard.

Even though these new rules won't be in effect till January 1st 2019, they still propose major changes and will completely revolutionize they way we play golf and enforce the rules. Don't get us wrong, we welcome these changes and they should be great for golf! We are just not ready to talk and write about them yet. 

So you will note that our article still refers to the actual and soon to be thing-of-the-past golf rules.

This article was originally posted on December 18, 2016

Everyone has heard about getting lost in the desert. In some countries, it’s even considered a common occurrence, especially when a violent sand storm is raging.

But have your ever heard about getting lost in a bunker (or on the beach as some say)? Not in a military bunker but rather a golf bunker a.k.a. a good old sand trap!

Many clumsy or impatient golfers lose a lot of strokes in them...but actually losing your ball in a bunker is rare.

Beware these special bunkers that seem to act like quicksand and swallow your ball.