Weekend Reading – Rich renters, famous shopping bans, false profits and more

Welcome to my some fine personal finance and investing Weekend Reading friends.  Earlier this week I shared our progress on this financial goal and I questioned the need to hold bonds at this time.  What do you think about those posts?  Are we on the right track?  What’s your take on holding bonds right now?

Hopefully you’ve noticed my site is now using a responsive theme so it’s very mobile-friendly.  I encourage you to take My Own Advisor wherever you go (if you don’t already do that).  Thanks to my friend Avrom from Dividend Ninja who helped with the site refresh.  I like the look and feel and I hope you do as well!

Enjoy these articles and see you here again next week!

Bridget Casey from Money after Graduation prefers to rent in real estate hot Calgary, feeling like she’s a rich renter.

Congrats to Cait Flanders who recently made the pages of Forbes magazine thanks to her impressive year-long shopping ban.

The astute Jason Zweig said to be careful about false profits.  “When 90% of professional investors, with their M.B.A.s and powerful computers and multimillion-dollar research budgets, can’t beat the market, why should you believe anyone who says you can do it by day trading? (After all, the new information that comes to you over the Internet comes to the pros too.)”  Good luck to all day traders, you need it.

Check out some investing advice from The Oracle.  I like this one:  when stock prices drop, buy.  “I like buying it as it goes down, and the more it goes down, the more I like to buy. … If you told me that the market was going to go down 500 points next week, I would have bought those same businesses and stocks yesterday. I don’t know how to tell what the market’s going to do. I do know how to pick out reasonable businesses to own over a long period of time.”

I liked this 5i Research filter of dividend stocks and REITs here.  A reminder you can subscribe to 5i to obtain conflict-free investment research AND get a copy of Canadian MoneySaver’s Special Edition here.

From Mr. Money Mustache if you wouldn’t buy it, you should probably sell it.

Here is some investing advice from Boomers to Millennials.  This was a great takeaway from the article: “But as someone who’s managed to create a decent sized nest egg over the years, you should be able to explain that truly smart investing is also simple. You create a mix of stocks-bonds based on your age and risk tolerance – which generally means investing 70% to 90% of your savings in stocks early in your career — and pretty much leave it alone except to rebalance periodically.”

Here is some more essential advice to Millennials seeking to get rich.

Financial author Jonathan Chevreau invests with ETFs and “high conviction” stocks.

Michael James on Money used mortality tables to see the effect of using the 4% rule for retirement.  Very interesting and detailed results.

Dividend Hawk is reporting some impressive dividend income.

Retire Happy talked about weatherproofing your finances.  This includes having an emergency fund, avoiding too much debt, and investing within your comfort zone where you can accept some market losses.