Implications of Covid-19 and Behavioural Finance on Your Financial Planning Process

Yet another year of your careful financial planning process has been disrupted by the pandemic – or has it?

These uncertain times have impacted our work, life, mental health, and financial security. However, if you have been reading my blog posts this year (and even further back), you will likely know the key to weather market storms: setting goals, making plans, and maintaining a focus on ongoing financial planning, without jumping off course as a result of ever-volatile markets (and world events).

Let’s look back at some of the most popular blogs of 2021 featuring this independent financial advisor’s musings…

Focus on Retirement Planning

Retirement Planning for Gen Xers: Build Wealth and Retire Happy

Are you a Gen Xer? Not quite a baby boomer, but too, ahem, mature to be a millennial? If you are in your 40s to mid-50s, your family financial planning has probably been on a wild ride lately.

You may be wondering if you’ll ever get to retire with any wealth left to spend.

Retirement Planning for Baby Boomers: Getting Ready to Retire Comfortably

Are you a baby boomer with retirement planning on your mind? If you’re among the surge of citizens born in a large urban center like Toronto and across North America during the 20ish years after World War II, you may be noticing a different sort of booming sound lately.

Search the Internet for “Retirement Planning Toronto” and you’re likely to see a lot of fear out there, along with plenty of headline-grabbing stats on how ill-prepared many boomers are to retire. Check out some of the most frequent topics of conversation I’ve found key to achieving your short- and long-term financial goals in retirement.

Financial Planning for Business Owners

Small Business Tax Planning: How Revised Corporate Passive Income Rules Impact Your Corporate Tax Planning

Proactive business owners can manage corporate investments and income for optimal tax efficiency. As a small business owner, you no doubt have active interests in your bottom line.

That’s why it’s worth knowing about some recent changes to the tax treatments on corporate passive income.

Thinking of Selling Your Business? Keep the Most Money and Minimize Taxes

You worked hard to build your business and the corporate assets that it has accumulated. If you plan to sell your business, even if it is 10 years from now, start working now to build a team of experts.

You can better protect your financial interests and ensure you leverage all possible corporate financial avenues and tax strategies to retain your business’ value and support your (and your family’s) short-term and long-term financial goals.

Tax Strategies

Tax Strategies to Boost Your Financial Savings

Does it bug you to pay more taxes than you need to? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone eager to shell out extra money just in case the government could use more. But practically speaking, that’s exactly what you end up doing if you don’t build tax-efficient investing and other tailored tax strategies into your ongoing financial planning.

Your tax planning strategy should take a holistic, tax-efficient investing stance in both tax-sheltered and taxable investment vehicles to optimize saving for the future.

Simple Investing Tips & Behavioural Finance Considerations

Simple Investing Steps to Build Personal Wealth

Simple investing sounds like a good idea, right? It’s important whether you’re mid-career and all-business, or you’re approaching retirement, with leisure time on your mind. It applies whether you live in bustling Toronto, my hometown of Barrie, or anywhere else in the world. It’s also a familiar theme on my blog.

Still, the secrets of simple investing never grow old and always bear repeating, lest we forget: Your long-term financial goals should drive your financial planning strategies, which should guide your investment portfolio … not the other way around.

Behavioural Finance Focus: Cost Savings Tips to Attain Financial Freedom

Are you ready to change your financial behaviour, uncover cost savings, and significantly improve your chance of reaching those long-term financial goals?

One great way to sharpen your financial acumen is by combining behavioural finance with an evidence-based perspective. By recognizing and understanding the basics of behavioural finance, you can fight those financial urges and focus on an evidence-based approach to wealth management.

The Hidden Costs of DIY Financial Planning: Those Bad Investments Will Cost You More than You’d Think

Eager to embrace DIY investing? Or have you at least wondered whether you’ve got what it takes to succeed on your own?

I understand the appeal. When you engage a personal financial advisor, you’ll see their advisor fees, loud and clear. The financial regulators require us to disclose them. Plus, at least here at Lowrie Financial, we want you to see them. How else can you tell if you’re getting a fair shake?

But therein lies a dilemma. Thanks to behavioural finance, we know about a multitude of murky costs that can slip in when investors allow their rational resolve and simple investing strategies to be hijacked by their complex instincts and emotions.

SPACs, NFTs, and Another Tech-Inspired Silly Season

Is it just our imagination, or has there been an uptick lately in exciting “new” trading tactics for seizing riches from exotic new markets?

After a year of sitting at home, an excitable generation of do-it-yourself traders has replaced traditional leisure-time activities with online pursuits—including aggressive, tweet-worthy trading for fun and profit. The result? Waves of volatile financial feeding frenzies and overnight sensations, egged on by a brood of freshly hatched social media stars, and a spate of flashy new trading platforms with captivating names like Robinhood.

All this might seem new and different, if I hadn’t already seen such eerily similar circumstances so often before, with so many unhappy endings.

Investing Is Not a Game

Are you out of breath trying to keep up with the breaking news about GameStop and all the other red-hot trades o’ the day?

During the last week of January 2021, a perfect storm of traders converged on the market, propelling the prices of a few previously sleepy stocks into the stratosphere. Interestingly, there was no huge, breaking news or major shift in these companies’ fundamentals to explain the surge.

Instead, a tidal wave of trading momentum happened to form on a Reddit forum called WallStreetBets. Whatever inspired the movement, it soon became a force of its own, like an online flash mob buying and holding shares at increasingly higher prices.

Why would anyone do this? Many may have just gotten caught up in the excitement.

Four Lessons Delivered in 2020

Sometimes, it takes years for key investment lessons to play out to the point we get to say, “See? Told you so.” Not so in 2020.

Now that this excruciating year is behind us, we can at last appreciate the remarkable crash course it offered in nearly every principle inherent to successful long-term, goal-focused investing.

A Gold Mine of Financial Tips and Tools from a Personal Financial Advisor

Not only did the blogs of 2021 provide some great fodder for your investing and financial planning, but there is a deep treasure trove of wealth management blogs of the past that are just as relevant today and will continue to be into 2022.

If you’d like to start your financial planning journey or build and maintain your current wealth management plan, reach out. I’m always happy to help.