Canadian Capitalist highlights Dilbert’s Financial Plan, with a key modification for Canuck audiences. Now you might think that Dilbert author Scott Adams writes an awful lot of stuff tongue-in-cheek, and you’d be right, but this is in earnest. It’s worth reading, and more than that, it’s worth putting into practice.
- Make a will
- Pay off your credit cards
- Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
- Fund your RRSP to the maximum
- Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
- Pay down your mortgage (if you have one) as fast as possible
- Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
- Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
- If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio
Like Canadian Capitalist, I haven’t written up a will yet, so I suppose I should put that on the near-term To-Do list.
Chris is most often found flying a desk, but he delights in studying the Golden Age of Aviation (1919-1939). He admires all the pioneering men and women who navigated the skies with nothing more sophisticated than a map, compass and sextant—and the conviction that there was no place they could not reach.
