Category: Announcements

Welcome to the new blog! Mr. Cheap & Four Pillars have decided to team up and publish from one blog instead of two. Why are we doing such a crazy thing? Mainly because we want to keep blogging for a long time and judging from the number of blogs that come and go, it appears that posting on a regular basis for any significant length of time is a tough thing to do. Looking around the Canadian personal finance blog world it appears that there are only two blogs (Canadian Capitalist and Canadian Financial Stuff), which have been posting five times a week for longer than a year.

The other reason is for variety, having two different posters plus the odd guest poster should add a lot more experience and expertise to post from which should result in a better product for our readers.

The scheduled posts will remain the same for the blog – one new post every weekday morning with the occasional bonus post now and then.

You’ll notice the new title of the blog which reflects both of our old blogs as well as the new theme. If you’re thinking the theme looks a bit familiar it’s because it’s the same one as used by Canadian Capitalist. It would have been nice to find a theme that was more original but it really is a good theme!

Feel free to let us know what you think!

Just wanted to let you know that I was in a couple of Carnivals recently.

kmull hosted the #117th Carnival where I submitted my article “Ignore the Last Ten Years”.

Money, Matter, and More Musings (MMMM) – clearly a prime candidate for the Carnival of Long Blog names, hosted the #118th Carnival and included my submission “Save Money by Returning Items”.

I’m off on holiday and away from the internet this week so no posts!

However, I have an exciting set of posts lined up for next week starting on Monday, Sept 17.

Unfortunately not the golf variety! I don’t normally do “link” posts but I’ve gotten a ton of love this week and I just have to shout some of it back from the rooftops…

You might notice a common theme here is complimentary words about me & my site which always makes me feel all warm and tingly inside…

Mike over at The Financial Blogger had these wise words to say about my baby expense series which means a lot considering he has two of his own:

“moneysmartsblog.com created an awesome series about baby expenses. I hope you enjoyed these posts as much as I did and that you learned something. I would also suggest that you read all comments associated with theses articles. A post is just not as complete without comments!”

Mr. Cheap suggested that I start a cult which I think is not a bad idea…not a bad idea at all!

(it’s weird how I always do what Mike suggests – you should start a cult Mike!)

He also wrote a great article about his dream wedding which is quite funny. Hopefully I’ll be present at the dream wedding and the fact that it could very well end up occurring in my backyard (I live near both Mr. Cheap and a McDonald’s) will help improve the odds of an invite.

My favourite debt reduction blog, “I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…” or as I like to rename it “Paid Twice”, did a guest post on my blog on her views on Emergency Funds. I really enjoyed this post and look forward to learning more from Paid Twice about reducing debt since I have a bit to reduce. I’m hoping to have her back to do another guest post but I’ll have to take some time to think up a new topic.

Kyle over at Rather-Be-Shopping.com sent a link of love out this week and I have to admit his description of my blog almost (almost!!) brought a tear to my eye..

Four Pillars – This is a blog written by a Canadian man (not that it really matters!) and I find his posts very educational and insightful. I particularly like his posts on investing and baby expenses. As a father of a 3 month old baby I found the baby expenses stuff really interesting, he really nails this one from all possible angles. Many of which I had yet to even consider.

After much consideration I’ve decided that I’m going to forgive Kyle for putting me below Brip Blap on his list since I have to admit that I’d rather read Brip Blap’s site over my blog any day. This guy is easily one of the best pure writers on the net and on top of that (and possibly more importantly), he has interesting things to write about as well!

Brip Blap had this to say about the baby expense week:

Four Pillars had a baby-themed week that I thought was just excellent, end-to-end.

Canadian Money is a blog that I really enjoy because it’s written by a recently retired 55 year old Canadian who talks about various investment and retirement issues along with a lot of really nice photos he takes on his retirement travels. He referred to my leveraged investment plan this week in glowing terms.

Four Pillars posted an overview of his investment plan. One point I liked is that he has limited his leveraging to a level he is comfortable with, currently about 10% of his investments.

Ok, maybe it wasn’t a glowing endorsement but he did sound positive about it!

Lastly I wanted to mention a new Canadian blog called “Loonies and Sense” which is a pretty clever pun if you think about it. In fact I just got the joke just now as I was writing this post.

Anyways, it looks like a great blog so far, so check it out!

And lastly lastly – I was in the carnival of personal finance edition XXIVQI hosted by Advanced Personal Finance. I have to admit he did a great job with this carnival – very creative and very paranoid!

I also got mentioned by Smart Money Daily which is a rather interesting blog – he seems to have the same issues with real estate agents that I do. He picked me as the favourite post from the investing category from the carnival. Thanks Jason!

I’m enjoying a long weekend with absolutely perfect weather here in Toronto. Mid to high 20’s, sunny and very little humidity. This summer has been pretty hot and humid so it’s nice to get the temperature lowered a bit. Hopefully this is the kind of weather we can look forward to for the next couple of months.

Anyways, that’s it for the post 🙂

Enjoy your rest of your long weekend!

I’ve been reading some blog posts that have different ideas about blogging (needless to say). One of the things I read on Brip Blap’s interesting post about blogs is that you should post even if you are on holiday. I didn’t realize that WordPress has a scheduler for posts (that’s why I had the test post last night – a test) so it’s not that hard to keep the posts going even if you are off camping for the week. While I can see this is a good idea if you are serious about building your blog (and not losing readership) I don’t know if it’s something I want to do.

My reasonings:

1. Laziness – preparing five extra posts in advance would be more work which I’m not crazy about.
2. Discussions – One of the big things I love the most about having a blog is the discussions that sometimes occur. If I posted an item that generated a good discussion and wasn’t there to enjoy it then that would annoy me to no end.
3. Less comments – If I knew the poster wasn’t going to reading the comments for a while then I would less inclined to leave a comment.
4. Does it really matter? I took a week off in July and although my hits went down during that week (as they should) they seemed to rebound without any difficulty. A week off isn’t really long time and a regular reader is probably not going to cross me (or any other blog) off their list because of it.
5. Blog aggregators – Thanks to these nifty devices, it shouldn’t really matter how often you publish, once you are on someone’s feed they will get whatever you publish so it’s not like they have to keep going to your site to see if you are publishing again. Speaking of which – Brip Blap pointed out something that drives me nuts – blogs with partial feeds. Although I often click through and go to the actual site, I don’t like being forced to. So I decided that I would unsubscribe any sites that do this and just visit them directly (FB, I’m talking to you!).

I’d be interested to hear from any readers about their thoughts on this topic? And yes, I am planning to take a week off starting a week from now which is why I’m asking.

I’m going to copy Million Dollar Journey here and ask a question for a Saturday.

I’ve had a few comments & questions on RESPs and wanted to know if there was any interest in detailed series on the topic. There is a ton of material to cover so it would take probably a half dozen posts or so. Unlike the baby series I would spread it out a bit ie one post a week.

Anyways, let me know what you think via comments or email.

I entered another submission into the carnival which is hosted by My Open Wallet this week. She did a great job organizing the carnival and even picked my entry as an editor’s choice.

A couple of other blogs I follow also have postings in the Carnival – Million Dollar Journey entered his post on his Centurion credit card which he denies owning, and The Financial Blogger pans a Trump/Kiyosaki book entitled “Why we want you to be rich” – as if they really care how rich you or I am!

My post also got mentioned in a carnival roundup on a new blog called The BagLady which looks like an interesting blog.