Category: Announcements

Unfortunately July was a month of changes for me. Half way through our trip to New York my girlfriend and I decided to go our separate ways, so I’m now renting (short term) a room in a house with a couple of other men. Towards the end of the month the project at the contract I’ve been working on finished up. I was going to be moved to another project, but it turned out they needed a different skill set then what I had, so we mutually agreed to terminate the contract early. I’m hoping to take a little time off, then get back into things.

My monthly fixed costs are slightly different:
Rent – $500
VOIP – $22.45
internet – $45
Total: $567.45

During the move and settling in, my variable expense went up a bit, but I’m working to get them back down.

I made it into the Carnival of Personal Finance today which is being hosted over at Plonkee Monkey’s blog. My post about looking for a house called “House Wars” was entered.

Feel free to check out the carnival!

A quick thank you to the Money Gardener who was kind enough to award this site with a golden blog in the category of “Best Use of a National Symbol”.

This is a very exciting milestone in the history of the Four Pillars blog.

Ok, I’m back from a great holiday and will resume regular posts on Monday.

It’s interesting that when I’m at home or work it’s all I can do to stay off the internet but when I go on holiday and don’t have access to the internet then I don’t even think about it!

See you on Monday!

I’ve been posting daily for the last couple of months, and judging from my more experienced fellow PF bloggers, this is a tough pace to maintain. Viewing this as a “marathon rather than a sprint” I’ve decided to pull back to weekdays only. Hopefully this will improve the quality of individual posts (or not) but should certainly help me keep posting longer without getting burned out (which I’m not feeling or worried about yet, but maybe its better to try to switch to a more reasonable pace while I’m still feeling good about it). Besides which, since my traffic drop significantly on the weekends, this should save my Monday readers from having to plow through 3 days of my drivel ;-).

I get the feeling that other bloggers really do “write every post on the day”, while I’ll often write a few days posts at a time when I’m feeling creative, then queue them up for posting one per day. Is this a blogging no-no? What is people’s motivation for writing daily?

I’m going to lump in holidays with weekends, so after today’s post, see you next Tuesday!

I really love bank stocks, and have been quite happy with my BMO so far (given, we’re still on our honeymoon as I only bought it 2 weeks ago). CIBC would be nice with a slightly higher yield (its at 3% right now) as its payout ratio is the lowest of all the banks (at 34%) so in theory it has the most cash to pour money into dividends. I like their products (PC Financial is backed by CIBC) and the fact that they’re trying to develop internationally (they own a massive chunk of FirstCaribbean).

HOWEVER, 3% is just 3%. With BMO still up at 3.8% its pretty tough to consider other Canadian banks. When I start looking in other sectors (other than tobacco) things get even worse. Manulife Financial (MFC) looks quite a bit better then their competitor, however they have a relatively pitiful 5-year average dividend of 1.7% (its currently at 2.2%, so a good buy if you like the company). You’d think there’d be massive growth to compensate for such a low dividend, however their average 3 year dividend increase is comparable to BMO’s (26% vs. 23%). The stock increase in price hasn’t been that impressive compared to BMO (MFC grew at 12% vs BMO growing at 15%). One very nice thing about MFC in relation to BMO is that MFC’s current payout of 28% is much smaller then BMO’s massive 45%. I wish the insurance companies would pass more cash along to shareholders, but perhaps there is legislation that requires them to keep a certain amount of money on hand.

Maybe its just a case of different industries and the price of diversification, but banking definitely seems more lucrative than insurance.

Now that I’ve got the first post out of the way and participated in my first tour, I should probably introduce myself.

Name: Mike

Favourite investment book: Four Pillars of Investing – William Bernstein

I’ve had an interest in finance for at least 15 years, however in the last six months I’ve gained a huge interest in personal finance. I think having a fairly sizable mortgage along with not getting any younger, motivated me to try to take stock (no pun intended) of my financial situation particularly with respect to retirement.

During the process of assessing our rrsp portfolio, rrsp contributions, debt repayments, retirement lifestyle etc, I’ve learned about a lot of new things and the Canadian financial blog community has been one of the best sources of information for me.

In the last several months I have really enjoyed reading other financial blogs and leaving comments (some quite lengthy) on them and having discussions with bloggers and other commenters. I’m hoping that by having a blog of my own, I can provide another source of information and opinions for other people and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot in the process myself.

Soon I’ll be starting a series covering our investment portfolio and financial situation and going through the thought process that has occurred in trying to figure out things like asset allocation, specific investments, risk levels etc. The portfolio is still a work in progress but I’ll be providing updates on that as well. I don’t want this blog to be all about me, me, me so I’d like to mix in posts about items in the markets or news.

See you tomorrow!

p.s. I just put the blog together a few days ago so if you have any suggestions for improvements then feel free to let me know.

p.s.s. I’m not sure if the RSS stuff works so if anyone signs up then please let me know if it’s working or not.