Advice To My 20-Year Old Self: Form Good Habits

I was asked the following interesting question: "if you could give personal finance advice to your 20-year old self, what would it be?"  My answer is: be aware of your habits, and aim to create good ones.

How I Self-Published My First eBook - Methods And Costs

This article explains how I published my first ebook Understanding Government Finance without spending much on tools. The cost associated with self-publishing come from hiring outside talent for cover design and editing, which cannot be avoided.

Theme: Self-Publishing

Self-publishing is one way of generating an independent source of income, and therefore it is a personal finance strategy for some. Since it is how I intend to make money from this web site, it is a topic that is certainly of interest to myself. This article provides a summary of resources and my articles on the topic; it will be updated as I add content.

Globe And Mail Article And Passive Macro

I was featured awhile ago in an article at the Globe and Mail, "This investor has been overweighting U.S. stocks and bonds" by Larry MacDonald. Larry writes articles featuring the investment style of various investors for their personal portfolios. In it, I mentioned what I call "passive macro" investing.

Why 60/40?

One of the stronger "rules of thumb" for investing was to have a "60/40 Portfolio": holding 60% equities (stocks), and 40% bonds. This portfolio allocation is aimed at providing good long-term performance with acceptable risk. In this article, I explain why the 60/40 allocation is reasonable - the tilt towards equities should provide higher returns, but the allocation allows for considerable uncertainty in future investment returns.

Book Review: Investing From The Top Down

In Investing From The Top Down: A Macro Approach To Capital Markets, Anthony Crescenzi lays out the case for "macro" investing. Instead of trying to pick securities by scouring over company reports, one looks at the trends in the macro economy and markets. The advantage of this approach is that it requires less of a time commitment, and if one is successful, it will be easier to sidestep crises that are blundered into by those who myopically focus on what is happening to particular companies. Although billed as being useful for institutional as well as retail investors, it is not too complex and so I view the true audience as being retail investors or people who have entered finance without a background in economics.

Peak Oil And Personal Finance

Resource limits hang over the long-term outlook for societies - often summarised as "Peak Oil" or "Peak Food". In order to make a personal finance plan, it is a factor that ought to be taken into account. Unlike other macroeconomic trends, how you structure your portfolio probably matters less than how you structure your spending. This article provide a high level summary of my views on this topic, which will filled out in later posts. Correspondingly, I will give the justification for these arguments in later article.