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Swap Based ETFs Explained

swap

A reader question asking about Swap-Based ETFs and whether they are a smart move for Canadians. With a bit of searching around on the Internet, the simplest explanation for what they are and their advantages is here: Canadian Couch Potato- Understanding Swap-Based ETFs. They are basically a vehicle to reduce taxes within an investment portfolio. I myself do not hold any of them, but they seem like potentially a good idea and I plan to…

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ETFs and Dividend Paying Stocks in a Single Portfolio

etf stock

Another reader question today: “Do you combine the 70:30 approach with dividend stocks (I mention a 70-30 approach for investing in my book, The Wealthy English Teacher, where I refer to something like having 70% of your portfolio in stocks and 30% in bonds)? Is it sensible to have a portfolio like the following: 10% HXT Horisons S&P/TSX 60 index 25% Vanguard FTSE Developed Index ETF 30% S&P 500 index 30% Horison’s Canadian Select Bond…

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Why doesn’t Andrew Hallam like Dividend Paying Stocks?

andrew hallam

A reader question: “After reading your book (The Wealthy English Teacher: Teach, Travel, and Secure Your Financial Future) and being on the Dividend Monk’s site I was excited to see what Hallam would say about quality dividend stocks (strong fundamentals, history of increasing dividends, etc) in The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat. However it seems like Hallam dismissed them quite quickly, saying that they didn’t earn as well as…

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Expat Brokerage Options

A common question that I get from my friends who are teaching English abroad is what brokerage I use to invest in the stock market. It can be quite complicated and a brokerage in your home country might not necessarily be the best choice for tax-related reasons. Andrew Hallam and Expat Brokerage Options The best information out there on this topic is from Andrew Hallam, in The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher…

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What I’m Buying: VDY (Canadian High Dividend Yield ETF)

The problem that’s not really a problem I’ve talked a bit about how I’ve been sitting on almost $10,000 of cash, waiting for the market to crash so I can buy. I actually like to have all my cash invested, along with around $30,000 on the margin, so that was $40,000 I didn’t have put to good use. Now, I do realize that having too much cash isn’t really a real problem, but it was…

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February 2015 Passive Income Report

February 2015 came in with a total passive income of $471.03. Check out the February 2015 Passive Income Report for all the details. Everything was pretty much normal except for a $150 sponsored blog post that I did over on my other site, My Life! Teaching in a Korean University for a car insurance company offering English service to foreigners. Sales of my eBooks which came in at an impressive $85.38. February is a slow…

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The Wealthy English Teacher- Available on Amazon

 The Wealthy English Teacher: Teach, Travel, and Secure your Financial Future is now available on Amazon. It has a much bigger potential audience than my most nichiest of niche first book about how to get a university job in South Korea. I’m hoping that it’s the type of book that people really like, and tell their friends about, who in turn tell a few other people. So far, I’ve sold a decent amount of copies in…

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Top 3 Reasons to Ignore Professional Stock Pickers

I continue on with a series on personal finance rules inspired by this post over at The Simple Dollar. The first three parts in this series were: Keep It Simple Stupid, Spend Less Than You Earn, and Pay Per Hour Worked in case you missed them. Today, some good advice from The Simple Dollar, which is to ignore professional stock pickers. You know, the ones you see on TV (Jim Cramer at Mad Money) and…

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January 2015 Passive Income Report

Better late than never! I was traveling around Vietnam for the past few weeks and wanted to take a technology break, which is why this report is only happening in the middle of February. I earned a total of $272.92 this month-for all the details you can check out: January 2015 Passive Income Report. While not a huge number, I’m pretty optimistic about it for the following reasons: 1. Ebook sales of How to Get…

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Do it Now! Update Your Public Profiles

I Was Shocked to Discover…Outdated Public Profiles! In my recent effort to focus more on quality over quantity in my Internet ventures, one of the things I did was to spend a few hours and update all my public profiles to have some sort of cohesive message. In some cases, like on Blogger and HubPages, I had stuff from years ago that didn’t really make sense anymore. Even more disturbing was the fact that both…

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Hubpages Marketing through Pinterest

Driving Traffic to my Websites In my effort to focus more on quality over quantity, I’ve decided to focus on getting more traffic to the sites that I already have, such as this one, my new one (Jackie Bolen), My Life! Teaching in a Korean University and my various HubPages instead of building new sites. I think these sites have some quality content on them, but just don’t have enough traffic for me to make…

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HubPages Referral Trackers

Sometimes I have to kick myself for not figuring out basic HubPages stuff like this out sooner after Squidoo became HubPages a few months ago. Anyway, onwards and upwards to the land of HubPages Referral Trackers, which is basically their affiliate program. It essentially works by pasting your personal tracker code onto sites like this one or social media (find the set-up page by going to Earnings—>referral trackers) and then if the person that clicks…

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What I’m Selling: Wal-Mart Stock

With the recent run-up in stocks over the past year, I’ve been slowly exiting positions in my portfolio that I wasn’t 100% confident in and reducing the money I’ve borrowed on the margin and going to cash in anticipation of a medium-large drop within the next year (hopefully!). Wal-Mart stock is one of them. Why I’m Selling Wal-Mart Stock Retail is Ultra-Competitive Retail is an extremely competitive space as consumers are pretty fickle. It’s just…

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Year-End Stock Portfolio Report

I was just looking at my stock portfolio report for the past year and the value of it has gone up by 7.76% in this past year and 27.76% since I moved my account to Interactive Brokers in March of 2013, making me essentially thousands of dollars. Impressive. But, it’s very similar to what the S&P 500 has returned, so I can’t actually take too much credit for it. And, of course I am under…

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How to Prepare for a Bear Market

I was reading an article by Dan Bortolotti in Moneysense magazine called “How to Prepare for a Bear Market.” He’s all about index investing, couch-potato style which means that he just has a few index funds that he puts his money into in certain ratios, which is kind of my style. Everyone is predicting a bear market in the coming year or two, in which case more active investors would get defensive by moving into…

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Short-term vs. Long-Term thinking and how it relates to financial success

These past few days, I’ve been working away on my new book about financial freedom for teachers abroad and the following thought has been running through my head. Financial success all comes down to short-term vs. long-term thinking. There are lots of people who don’t think beyond the immediate in front of them-today, this week, this month and next month. These people often struggle to pay their bills each month and live in the land…

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Why I Don’t Like Mutual Funds

I was happy to see that Andrew Hallam in his book, The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat dislikes mutual funds as much as I do. It actually surprises me that more financial gurus, such as Dave Ramsey (from The Total Money Makeover) don’t jump off the mutual fund bandwagon and onto the index investing or dividend stock investing one. Anyway, mutual funds are a pretty terrible investment choice especially…

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Am I Worried About Losing All My Money in a Stock Market Crash?

I was talking with a friend yesterday and she was asking how much money I can gain or lose in a single day and if I was worried about a stock market crash, or not. Short Answer: I can gain or lose $3000 or $4000 or even more in a single day and I’m not worried about it. Here’s why: the gains or losses in my portfolio are not actually real gains or losses because…

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Book Review. The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat

Disclaimer: I was sent a free copy of this book by Andrew Hallam, The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat in exchange for reviewing it on this blog. Overall, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to any expat looking to get into the investing arena and do it right the first time, instead of through trial and error and losing a lot of money in the process. I…

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What I’m Buying: Energy Stocks

I normally like to have around $20 000-40 000 invested on the margin (money borrowed from my broker), which I can get at a really low interest rate (1.62% for the first $100 000 with Interactive Brokers) and then invested in dividend paying stocks that pay 3-5%, which leaves me with a nice profit of around 1-3% (after taxes) on that money. Except lately the markets have been going up and up and I’ve been…

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Where my Traffic Comes From

I’m totally convinced that the way to make money online and drive traffic to your sites is by having an empire of sorts. Like I mentioned a few days ago, simply having a single Ebook on Amazon but without any social media or blog following of any kind will make it pretty hard to be successful and make a lot of sales. I was just recently looking at the referral stats for this blog and…

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