What are we going to talk about today Tina - How to invest for your retirement - And this we
want to make clear to you we are not financial advisors Tina and I are not financial advisors
but what we are going to help you with is to show you where you can find financial advice that would
be suitable for you and we are also going to share some tips in this video about how we invest how
we downsized and used the capital and did asset allocation but before we get into that weighty
subject Tina - If you are new to our channel we are Tina and Norm and we talk all retirement and
many other topics to go along with it - And if you are new to our channel we would be honoured if you
would consider subscribing to us if you haven't already and be sure to give us that thumbs up
it really does help our channel reach a wider YouTube audience,
you may well be downsizing selling your home going into an apartment like we did or if that
is not for you, you might be selling your home downsizing to a smaller more economic house
but either way it is going to leave you some capital that maybe you should be investing,
so where would you go to get some good advice for investing Tina - I think one of the starting
off points Norm is that people should look to make an appointment with the financial advisor
of where they do their banking where they have current (checking), accounts and you might have
one bank or two banks but we have found that you can go and see these financial advisors and they
will give you advice based on they know who you are your circumstances, how much money you have
got and then you can choose to either follow what advice they are giving or wether you want a second
opinion - We very much value finding information out, doing research so yes use your local bank
maybe you might have a couple of banks you deal with or a credit union so they are free so you
might as well make the appointment they will ask you questions to get to know your situation, your
age what your hopping to achieve and they should be able to lay out a plan for you, the other
option is to go to your countries professional financial planners licensing association, in
Canada ours is Certified Financial Planner - And of course the difference with that is Norm hey,
you would be charged a fee to talk to them, they're probably not going to talk to you for
nothing but that's ok because you can take the knowledge then from your banks and from somebody
else and use that to put together to build a picture of what you would like to do - And in
many ways there is an argument that if you are paying for financial advice then maybe,
we hope it would be more unbiased because at the bank they are going to talk about their products
whereas a Certified Financial Planner can use products from a wide variety,
then there is also get a book you know Dummies Guide To Investing - Before we retired
we bought and read quite a few books didn't we on financial investing how to make things happen and
we got quite a few good ideas from reading some books - Our philosophy on investing has been to
have dividend stocks that are "aristocrat" of the dividend stocks like the Canadian banks, Telecoms
and they have been very good to us but we didn't want to put all our money into the stock market
because look what's happened right now so we did an asset allocation basically 50% in
equities and 50% in cash bearing investments and it's worked out pretty well for us,
we realize we are not maximizing our returns but as each interest hike happens and we are
close to having another one in Canada then we are looking to put a small amount of money into GIC's
and just locking it away for some months because we are probably hitting the top end of all these
interest rate hikes that the central banks have been doing - And I think another good thing Norm
with the GIC is that anybody who feels comfortable at having a steady fixed interest knows that they
can get that for 3 months, 6 months or a year, yes you are going to tie your money up but you're
going to get a better rate of interest aren't you - You are indeed and if you are uncomfortable with
the stock market picking individual stocks then there is a whole host of products available to you
such as ETF exchange traded funds, the main thing is to stay away from any funds that have a high
management expense ratio MER, so that would be one of the questions you would want to ask your
financial advisor, are you buying a low cost investment and of course there are discount
brokerages aren't there Tina - So you can do it "self directed" can't you and in fact we have two
that we have used we use the Bank of Montreal (InvestorLine), and we use Questrade and thank
goodness Norm knows what he is doing with both of those, but it's a really good way of monitoring
it yourself from home which is a great thing it is all online now - It is online the other thing that
we like doing is setting up our stock portfolio on something like the Globe & Mail or Yahoo Finance
you can do it on Google Finance as well and you can monitor your portfolio very
easily just by logging onto one of those sites after you have input everything - That's quite
exciting to be able to do that isn't it - It is - And on the Globe & Mail site we also put
stocks that we looking at buying for the future don't we so we can keep an eye on what we might
want to be buying plus seeing what we have already got so it's very interesting - Now another thing
you might want to consider and this happened to us recently in Canada that one of the large
internet companies were doing a software upgrade and their whole system crashed and it crashed
for about 3 days didn't it, some of the banks were using that company for their ATM machines
so that meant the ATM machines weren't working for 2 or 3 days and it was at a weekend as well
so Tina came up with a great idea that we should keep some cash - On hand - We are so reliant on
cards - That expression of keeping a little bit of money under the mattress seemed a really bright
idea didn't it because not only the ATM machines at the bank were down but a lot of stores were
using the same system and you couldn't buy stuff could you, the whole place just came to a complete
standstill - If you were using an interact card a cashpoint card or a credit card they were not
able to take those because the terminals weren't working because they were linked via this internet
provider so you know it's worth thinking about that in the future as well it is important to
have some element of equity investment wether it's going to be a low cost mutual fund,
an ETF and of course the first thing you want to do is max out all the tax free savings schemes
that are available to you wether it's pension plans because even though we are retired we can
still contribute to our registered retirement savings plan up until when we hit 74 then it
has to be converted into a RIFF you can still put money into these tax free savings schemes
like the TFSA and that should be where you go first but it doesn't have to be complicated
and we just want to encourage you to use any of these resources like your local bank, credit union
to find information out and perhaps ask family and friends if they have a
financial advisor that they trust and they like - Yes that's always a good idea isn't it - So
we hope everyone is staying safe - And keeping well - Until the next time - Bye, Bye