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Getting started and planning basics
Starting out with banking and investments can be a baffling and humbling experience. It can be difficult to understand the material and to distinguish good information from bad. We are hopeful you find the information here on the wiki helpful.
You are invited to begin your journey with getting started. It is the staring point on this wiki to provide information in a simple and understandable format.
Our objective is to help you be able to handle your personal finances and investments on your own and at minimal cost.
Important personal finance topics include:
- Budgeting and an Emergency fund
- Debit cards and Credit cards
- High-interest savings account
- Owning vs renting
- Insurance
- Creating a financial plan
- Investing plan for short term goals
En français
Le wiki contient un nombre limité d'articles en français. Veuillez commencer par Prendre en main ses finances et commencer à investir.
Investing
Investing involves building and managing a portfolio that typically holds several asset classes such as equities, fixed income and cash.
This is done to meet the investor's goals, which are defined as part of a financial planning process. The asset classes are combined into an asset allocation, which implements your investment policy statement.
The article portfolio design and construction serves as a general entry point for topics in the investment management category. Other important articles include diversification, investment strategy, investment styles, rebalancing, risk and return, simple index portfolios.
Commonly employed portfolio building blocks include exchange-traded funds (including asset allocation ETFs), and mutual funds (including index funds and balanced funds).Retirement planning and living in retirement
Retirement is one of the major events in many people's lives, involving not only a change in lifestyle but in many cases a reduction in income or change in sources of income. It should be part of your financial plan.
These changes generally require consideration well before you are planning to retire.
Once you are living in retirement you should know that Canada's retirement income system has three main tiers or "pillars".
- Tier 1 consists of government benefits, namely old age security and the guaranteed income supplement for low-income seniors.
- Tier 2 is composed of mandatory public pension plans, i.e. the Canada Pension Plan or the Québec Pension Plan.
- Tier 3 consists of mandatory to voluntary savings schemes such as workplace pension plans, registered retirement savings plans, and other accounts (see tax deferred and tax free savings plans) which can be used for retirement savings.
Life events and the financial lifecycle
The typical stages of the financial life cycle are outlined in the following articles:
- Young savers and investors
- Mid-life investors
- Pre-retirement investors
- Investors in early retirement
- Investors in late retirement
Still looking for answers or have a question?
The Financial Wisdom Forum (FWF) is a vibrant discussion community about Canadian financial matters. Savers and investors can pose questions about financial matters of all kinds, help answer others' questions, and provide information that might be of interest to do-it-yourself investors. We hope this will help you to invest on your own, or at least to have more informed conversations with financial advisors.
We encourage newcomers who may have little knowledge of finance. There are no stupid questions. We were all beginners once.
Ultimately, many financial questions do not have a right or wrong answer, but rather a range of options. It is up to you to weigh the pros and cons in light of your specific situation. We are not registered financial advisors or planners but we do have a lot of collective wisdom to share.
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