Financial Independence

Questions and Answers 1. How much time does it take to reach financial independence? It depends on your expenses, you should try to reduce your expenses to speed up the process. You can also increase your savings rate. The target is typically to have 25 times to 30 times your expenses. 2. What should I

I’ve wanted to write this post for a little while now because I think this subject is way underrated and helps a lot with optimizing your finances for financial independence. In fact, a “just-in-time” way of spending might seem counterintuitive in a world where people constantly talk about buying in bulk, points cards and credit

One of the most common case I have when I talk to people interested in investing is the fact that they have very limited funds available, either by having a low income or a low saving rate. In fact, they easily buy in the index investing strategy and would like to own Vanguard Index ETFs

I think it’s time to have a look at the best tools for adding leverage to financial independence : the registered savings account! There are a few registered accounts that the government of Canada let us use. The RESP (Registered Education Savings Plan), the RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan) and the TFSA (Tax Free Savings

This post will give you all my best money saving tips. That’s kind of a must to become financially independent and, if that’s your thing, retire early! You can also just pick a few of them to save money as you see fit. The list will be updated as I find new ways to save

Global warming is a multi-generational issue that affects everyone. I wanted to do a quick assessment of (aspiring) financially independent people compared to the typical consumer of our society. This idea comes from my morning walk/bike thoughts to work. Typical Consumerism Anything we own has to be created from scratch. Extracted from the ground, processed,

“Machines will replace us” should be replaced by “machines must replace us”. If they don’t we have a serious structural problem in our society. The speed at which we create products is at an all time high, but yet we’re still on a 9/5 schedule, five days a week. People say that prices go up

Which one is more relevant? Reduce your spending or increase your earnings? We’ll do a quick comparison of both and then I will explain why I think reducing your spending is way more important than increasing your salary or getting a second job. Increasing Your Earnings Increasing your earning is good, everybody likes a pay

That’s a given, an emergency fund is needed, always. In my honest opinion, it should be proportional to the amount of risk you’re worth but different points of view exist on the matter. Some say that you should keep 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, a year… But in the end it depends on you

Buying a home is not necessarily a bad investment, it mostly depends on how much you put in there and how much trouble you’re willing to go through. I still think people don’t understand how volatile this type of investment is. Personally, That’s why I treat it as risky, in other words it should not

An interesting subject on which I’ve been learning a lot in the last couple of months. Most probably because of the big boom of Ethereum in the media and the skyrocketing Bitcoin. In fact, there are a lot of cryptocurrencies, not only Bitcoin and Ethereum (which is not meant to be a currency by the

Today I spoke with a saleslady at a store near where I live and she was complaining that they didn’t offered financing for sewing machines yet. This while showing all the nice features a 3.5k $ sewing machine could do. I was seriously impressed by the machine, but not really by her reasoning on financing.

Something struck me the other day as I was watching yet another documentary on good food to eat and that kind of stuff. If you want to attain financial independence, you have to live long enough to get there. It’s true that a lifestyle change will bring happiness during the process as well as to

Let’s have a look at how the financial independence indicator is calculated (on the right of this post) so that you can also calculate your own progress towards this goal. I admit that it’s accuracy might depend on many personal factors but we need measurement to have an idea of where we currently stand in

Donate Once, Help Twice Donations to charity can really help the people in need, it can also help reduce you income tax at the same time! I’ve been playing around a bit with the calculator on the Canadian Red Cross Website and I found that giving can really make an impact on your taxes as

The easiest way to become financial independent is to cut down expenses. So to prove that I’m not just saying this without standing by my words, I will give a peek into my own financial situation, more precisely my expenses and try to show how I cut them down. A Quick Look at my Expenses

Management fees is quite a simple topic to explore, that’s what is good about it! Yet, many people have money invested and still don’t know what they are. Since it can make what you think is a good investment, something mediocre. I think it’s worth taking a few minutes to discuss about it. What They

You will hear that at least one hundred times in your life: stop wasting your money on renting and buy your own place instead. The question: is renting really throwing money by the window? I don’t think so! Let’s see it for ourselves! The Situation I will give you an example to illustrate the situation

Let’s compare what happens with money that sits in a bank account and money that’s invested. For that we’re doing a Cash versus Investing contest! I agree, you should always have an emergency fund but for the rest, we can compare what it might do over the long term. It’s going to be a rough

That should be clear but your chances of winning the lottery are so slim that it’s statistically negligible. In other words, what you are really doing is paying an extra tax to the government. I am pretty sure you will agree that they have enough of our money already, don’t they? The Big Question: What

Managing risk in a portfolio is not an easy task but with exchange traded funds (ETFs) it can become a lot easier! Here is a simple method I use for managing risk in my portfolios. Everything in the same basket First I consider every portfolios as a whole. Let’s say I have one portfolio of

If you want to attain financial independence or simply to cut down your expenses, a budget is always useful. The goal is to get as much fun as possible out of every dollar you earn! Create a Budget Creating a budget is most probably the best way to take control of your finances rather than

Financial Independence Yup, I could talk about the subject for hours! FI or Financial Independence occurs when your passive income becomes higher than your expenses. That would mean that you could live forever and never need to make money anymore! An easy example, let’s say I spend 30000$ per year. Then following the 4% rule,

What are ETFs? Exchange Traded Funds or ETFs are a great innovation in the world of finance that can provide large exposure to a specific or not so specific segment of the market. An ETF is just like a stock, that means it is traded on a specific stock market during the day and can

What is portfolio rebalancing? Portfolio rebalancing can be an hard or an easy task depending on how many different assets you have in it, let’s say I have a portfolio with 4 different funds (Mutual Funds or ETFs). Let this portfolio be my template asset mix. I have 30% in TSE:VCN, 50% in TSE:VUN and