By 2 Cents on December 1st, 2010 | Category: 20 Cents |  This is a special edition of our monthly 20 Cents roundup. Balance Junkie was born one year ago today. It’s been a pretty eventful year in the financial world, and I’m grateful to everyone who has shared their thoughts here over the past 12 months.
I hope to continue to grow our community in the coming year as well, but I’ve been told I need to be a little more forceful with self-promotion. It’s not something I’m terribly comfortable with, so if you know anyone who is interested in personal finance, economics, and life balance, please don’t be shy about mentioning BJ or forwarding articles you find particularly interesting. If you want to suggest anything you’d like to see more of on BJ, go ahead and send me an email.
I’d like send out a special note of thanks to Balance Junkie readers and to my [...]
Read on and enjoy … 20 Cents from November 2010: BJ First Anniversary Edition
By 2 Cents on November 12th, 2010 | Category: Investing |  I’m away for a few days, so I’ll have a couple of guest posts for you today and Monday. Today’s post comes from Rachel at MomVesting. She’s got an interesting take on my What Is a Balanced Portfolio post. I enjoyed this and I hope you will too.
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Our esteemed host is an advocate of balance, and honestly we are too. We believe diversification is good, but only when it’s good diversification. Let me explain. Even in the case of a well-diversified portfolio, sometimes all you’re doing is guaranteeing worse returns than you’d expect otherwise. If anything was failsafe in investing, then everyone would do it.
What is Balance?
In her post about balance, 2 cents looks at how she can claim to be balanced when she doesn’t own any stocks. There’s no inherent lack of balance in lacking a certain [...]
Read on and enjoy … In Praise of Imbalance
By 2 Cents on November 3rd, 2010 | Category: Investing |  Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.
~Albert Einstein
Update: This article was included in the Canadian Personal Finance & Investing Carnival #9 at Investing Thesis. Thanks!
Last week I wrote about what it would take to get me to invest in the markets again. My friend Jim Yih challenged me with a really great question in the comments section and I promised to answer it in full this week. I’ve heard the same question on occasion from others as well, so I’ll do my best to address it today.
I’m not currently invested in any stocks or bonds except for a small position in an inverse ETF. I won’t go over my rationale again, as I’ve covered it [...]
Read on and enjoy … What Is a Balanced Portfolio?
By 2 Cents on October 22nd, 2010 | Category: Book Reviews | Saving for your child’s education will likely improve the odds that she will participate in post-secondary education by diminishing financial barriers and building a financial nest egg.
~ Mike Holman
Whenever I was looking for detailed information about RESPs, I would always end up at Mike Holman’s blog. It used to be called Four Pillars, but the name has since changed to Money Smarts Blog. Mike’s always had a very comprehensive section on RESPs on his site and it was my go-to reference on the topic.
Still, I’m a huge fan of physical books rather than their cyberspace cousins and I wished I could have a concise book about RESPs on hand to use as a reference. It’s so easy to forget the details of relatively complex financial products like RESPs given that you likely don’t revisit them more than once or [...]
Read on and enjoy … Book Review and Giveaway: The RESP Book
By 2 Cents on October 20th, 2010 | Category: Investing |  Just remember, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything and the wrong way is to keep trying to make everybody else do it the right way.
~ M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter
Update: This article was included in the Carnival of Wealth #9 posted at Personal Dividends and in The Carnival of Financial Planning #163 posted at The Skilled Investor. Thank you!
I don’t like roller coasters. On a high school trip, however, a couple of friends convinced me to give it a try. I came off with my stomach in my throat and my knees moving sideways. It was not enjoyable. A couple of years later, some friends talked me into going horseback riding even though I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it. That was one of the scariest experiences of my life as the horse took off and [...]
Read on and enjoy … Stock Allocation: All or None?
By 2 Cents on July 30th, 2010 | Category: Investing | A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.
~ Yogi Berra
Update: This article was chosen for the Best of Money Carnival, #Sexty-Two at Budgets Are Sexy. Thanks! It was also included in the first ever Carnival of Wealth posted at Personal Dividends. Thank you!
When we looked at the current pros and cons of investing in commodities and real estate, it became quite apparent that there are some pretty good arguments on both sides of the debate. We often hear contradictory truisms. Cash is trash. Cash is king. Which is it?
The correct answer is likely “it depends”. There are times when it’s prudent to hold more cash, and there are times when it makes sense to move more money into riskier assets like the ones we’ve been discussing this week. Today, we’ll take a look at the case for each and [...]
Read on and enjoy … Cash: Is It Trash or King?
By 2 Cents on July 28th, 2010 | Category: Investing | No man acquires property without acquiring a little arithmetic also.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Update: This article appeared in the Carnival of Financial Planning #153 at The Skilled Investor.
We continue our look at the prospects for various asset classes in the current market environment today with a survey of the commodities and real estate landscape. Both of these are usually considered hard assets. As Dennis Gartman always says, “if you drop them on your foot, they hurt”.
Generally speaking, hard assets like commodities and real estate tend to appreciate during inflationary times and depreciate during deflationary climates. So your view on whether to allocate money to these two may hinge on your position in the inflation vs. deflation debate. I tend to be in the camp that says we are currently in a deflationary environment, and likely will be for some [...]
Read on and enjoy … Commodities and Real Estate: Pros and Cons
By 2 Cents on July 14th, 2010 | Category: Investing | The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.
~ Theodore Rubin
Update: This article was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance – Gettin’ Hot in Here Edition posted at Nerd Wallet. Thanks!
I’ve mentioned inverse ETFs a couple of times lately, so I thought it might be a good idea to explain what they are and how to use them for those who aren’t already familiar with them. Inverse ETFs are exchange traded funds that rise in value when the index that they track falls in value. If you believe the markets are going down, you can buy shares in an inverse ETF just like an individual stock. If you’re right, your shares will rise in value. But if the market rises, the share price of your inverse ETF will [...]
Read on and enjoy … Inverse ETFs: Pros & Cons
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