Interested in investing? First, understand your finances.

A close friend told me they want to invest in the stock market. Why? They hope to retire at fifty. I'm concerned. The stock market is not a get-rich-quick scheme. If it were, we would all be rich. On the other hand, the market may treat reasonable investors very generously. We cannot all be like Warren Buffets but we can all be like me.

The first thing any would-be investor must do is get their present financial life in order. To this end, I advise a spreadsheet. Many of us have computers preloaded with Excel, the excellent Microsoft spreadsheet.

That said, I use the LibreOffice spreadsheet. My copy of Excel expired and Microsoft asked for a lump of cash for renewal. I moved to LibreOffice and sent the Europeans a donation in support of the open source movement.

 

You can design your own budget spreadsheet or you can use a downloaded spreadsheet template.  All spreadsheets require a little tweeking. 

To find a budget template, search the LibreOffice Extensions or check out the Vertex42 offerings. McAfee checked the Vertex42 site, determining that Vertex42 is a good company posting threat-free software. McAfee gave the site their SECURE certificate.

Here is a link to the Vertex Personal Budget Spreadsheet shown on the right. Remember all spreadsheets can use a little tweeking. It isn't difficult. If I run into a problem, I run with the problem to Google and it quickly delivers a solution.

What is risk? And do bonds lessen risk?

If you try talking to bank reps about investing for the long haul, creating a portfolio that will provide adequate income while not being too risky, the bank rep will immediately launch into a discussion of buying bonds to lowering risk. Huh?

Let's say you have $100,000 at retirement and you were to need $6000 annually to balance your books. What do you do. Back in March,  I told a friend who had this exact problem to buy the top five Canadian banks in equal amounts. At the time do this would have provided a yield greater than 7%.

If one did this, one could remove $500 a month for 20 years while increasing the amount removed by the rate of inflation. I used 2% as the annual inflation rate and at the end of the 20 years I calculated that you would still have a balance of $90,189.79. It would take until the 15th year before the portfolio balance dropped below the original balance value of $100,000.

To assume that during those 15 years the five banks would never increase their dividends is crazy. Most likely the dividends would slowly climb and your withdrawal would never reach the point of decreasing the balance. At the end of 20 years you would still have your complete balance, quite likely more.

Two concerns must be addressed:

Is it possible the dividend income will be cut? Possible? Yes, but unlikely. There is some risk but very little. If there is a dividend cut, chances are only one bank will be involved. Remember, the Bank of Montreal has gone almost 200 years without cutting its dividend. The top five Canadian banks prefer to issue more equity rather than reducing the dividend yield.

Is it likely the value of the bank stock will fall? Yes. That is probably not so much a risk as a given. But who cares? It is the dividend income that you need. The value of the stock itself is not the concern. And with a 20 year time frame, the chance is very, very slim that the bank stock will be worth less than when purchased.

Now, what happens when you buy bonds paying .95%? In your 15th year, the money runs out.

Oh, the interest paid by bonds may go up but no one knows when this will happen nor by how much the rate will climb.

Talk about risk. It seems to me the more bonds you buy, the more risk you assume. The world is a risky place. No investment is totally risk free but as you can see buying stocks may be as good a bet as one can make. If I'm wrong, I will let the bank reps have the last word. I doubt I'll hear from any.

Let me add, I have all my retirement funds in equities. I have done quite nicely over the past 11 years. If I'd have stayed with bonds, I would not be doing as well. Yet, the bank reps insist that I should own some bonds. Why?

I wish I had more of these stocks.

ALA: AltaGas

I have owned AltaGas off and on for sometime. Right now I own some and I'm glad I do. It is up 52% and it pays a damn fine dividend as well: 5.5%. It is in the $17 range today and many see it going as high as a $22. On the low end, its target is still higher than where it is selling today but not by even a buck. If the market pulls back, and it always does, I'm buying more.

 NTR: Nutrien

Another stock I like, and this one I own as much as I am willing to hold in my portfolio, is Nutrien. It is a Canada-based producer and distributor of potash, nitrogen and phosphate for agricultural, industrial and feed customers worldwide. Its dividend isn't all that great but at 4.8% it is enough to pay me to hold and wait. As I won't be needing my capital for years and so for me this as an almost risk-free investment.

Now, there are investments with which I wish I had less involvement. REITs for instance. But, I cannot time the market and I cannot tell the future. Unless all becomes very clear and without the requirement of a crystal ball, I will continue to hold my BPY.UN, XRE and ZRE and enjoy the dividends. BPY.UN is paying 11.5%, XRE 6.2% and ZRE 5.35%. If you are an investor, you have to learn to look on the bright side. Sometime, that can be hard. Practise! (That said, some would say accept the losses, cash out and run. If you wait, it will get worse. They might be right. We'll see. Come back in a couple of years.)

Luck has a big role in investing

I feel that I am still a newbie when it comes to investing. Oh, I hit a lot right but I feel I benefit more from luck more than smarts.

I got out of the market in March as although I agree that one cannot time the market, I believe one can time a fast approaching virus.

COVID-19 was a clear threat and I took cover. It was, for me, a no brainer. This decision was based on what I believed to have been common sense. And in retrospect, I appear to have been right. My portfolios are doing wonderfully.

Do I have any advice? Oh, I'd say, if you are a Canadian investor, check out the Morningstar Canadian Income Portfolio that is updated monthy on TD WebBroker. It has been the one source of advice that I have found to be of generally excellent quality. A lot of my portfolio falls in line with the Morningstar suggestions and most of my most successful stock buys can be found in the Morningstar portfolio.

Newspapers are poor sources for financial advise.

With the recent crash, newspapers dusted off the traditional horror story reporting that seniors who had foolishly put their retirement money in the market now faced financial ruin. It is not exactly a myth but it isn't the whole story either. A more complete story would report that folk frightened by what they have read in their daily paper or those who get their financial advice from the daily paper may well have invested unwisely.

Let's say you were a senior in early 2008 and you put all your retirement savings, $100,000, into the TD Monthly Income fund. It is a simple balanced fund investing primarily in Canadian stocks along with a conservative percentage devoted to bonds.

You needed that money to live in retirement and were going to remove $450 every month to balance your budget in retirement. And that money was coming out no matter what. You could not meet your expenses in retirement without it.

Unfortunately, the stock market crash of 2008 happened just days after you put all your money into the fund. Wham! And you were out tens of thousands of dollars. The daily paper told you what you already feared, "You are toast!"

Left numb by the loss you did what you always do when faced with an insurmountable problem, you did nothing. And you did the right thing. Look at the following chart.

Yes, you were able to remove $450 from your investment every month for almost a dozen years and your finances were looking quite good until covid-19 caused the market to crash. $450 a month is an annual 5.4% withdrawal rate. This is a lot more than the 4% that the newspapers often claim is your maximum rate of withdrawal.

Your goals was to live on an amount similar to what was being offered by an annuity but keeping the principal to pass on to the children. After ten years the annuity would continue to pay a weekly amount but there would be no benefit to the kids after the death of the annuitant. There were other benefits from going the mutual fund route, such as the surviving partner continues to draw the monthly income even after the death of the one whose savings was used to make the purchase.

With the market crashing, you noticed stories in the media warning retirees that they were now at risk of running out of money. Post Media carried a particularly worrisome story.

The media giant reported: For example, if a 75-year-old had $500,000 and was planning to live on this cash for 10 years at a rate of $50,000 annually, a 20 per cent drop in capital would reduce that annual income by $10,000 to $40,000.

Huh? Why? What is this fellow doing with his massive stash of cash? Is it simply hidden under his mattress? Suspicious, you crunched the numbers. You discovered that if the fellow put $500,000 in the TD Monthly Income fund just days before the historic  market crash of 2008 and then immediately started removing $50,000 annually, after 12 years of withdrawals he would have something like $67,556.25 today.

When the blue line, the TD Monthly Income line, ends there is still a balance of $67,556.25 remaining.

It must be said that some newspaper articles are better than other. The London Free Press carried an article that had some good advice. It was a little self serving as it was written by a financial advisor and spoke very highly of using these whiz kids to direct your investments. https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/thompson-dont-panic-and-overcome-covid-19-market-fears/wcm/f88ab65d-18a2-4960-9443-05ad73014278/

The biggest problem with newspapers is the editors may have no opinion on the subject and so publish what they feel are balanced articles but, in fact, they are running bunkum and truth and giving both the same weight. If the editors were more knowledgable, I'm sure they would make different decisions.

Is the worst over?

My portfolio is the purple line with the large dots. The other two lines are the U.S. and Canadian markets.

It is April 8th and the markets have closed. The worst is over for the moment. Oh, I fully expect there will be more dips to come but it is hard to believe we will revisit the incredibly deep recent low. The only thing louder than the roaring of the bear was the roaring of the media.

Surely, you read the stories  about the "massive losses" suffered by those retirees who foolishly were too exposed to the market. Their portfolios needed more bonds, more cash, with the goal of diluting the volatility of the market.

"One dividend that always pays out and increases with time is knowledge," I read in a BNN piece. I wanted to raise my hand. I know another: Canada's biggest banks. They promise to never cut their dividends. (Instead, the issue more equity.) But, as a retiree investor I don't care. All I care about is the dividend and it will not be touched. Why did the writer not have the knowledge to know this?

I have a friend who is preparing for retirement. He says he is going to start playing in the market. Gaining experience. He's put about $20,000 aside for this purpose. He's read he should not be in the market with money he is not prepared to lose.

What an awful attitude. But he is simply repeating the standard advice the experts are pushing on television and in print. Never, absolutely never, approach the market with the attitude that losing money is O.K. It's not.

Some smart journalists should sit down at a table, six-feet apart, and brain-storm the question: What are the words and phrases relating to investing that should be investigated and possibly redefined? For instance, a BNN story equated risk with investing. "Everyone should understand risk is inherent when it comes to investing."

Is this really true? The world is a risky place. Risk is the background noise of life. Put your money in a safe GIC and watch its buying power slowly drain away. Or put your money in a good stock. In a good company. Remember, you are investing not gambling. And also remember, bear markets do not last forever. Many investors had fully recovered from the effects of the 1929 crash in just four years and almost all were in the black by the sixth or seventh year.  (These are facts that are rarely mentioned.)

So, take on no risk and accept .6 of one percent on your savings. Or find some good companies that you believe can get through just about anything the world can throw at them and invest. I took the second path. And just see how my investments have done over the past few, short weeks. This portfolio earned 17.14%.

Heck, if I wanted, I could cash in my stocks, go to cash and remove 4% annually for the next four years. As it is, I will be taking a small part of my money off the table as the bull returns. I'm not greedy. Furthermore, I'll be ready to buy when the next dip or full correction occurs.

Let's start the brainstorming here. What terms should a good journalist investigate?
What is risk? (You might be surprised.)
What does the word growth mean when used as in growth stock, growth mutual fund, etc.?
Are bonds really necessary? They cut volatility but . . .
Is volatility always, or ever, bad?
Are corrections bad? . . . or good?
Are bear market worse? . . . or better?

There, you get the idea, make a comment. Go for it.

Now that IS crazy!

I'm in the market. I'm often told I am wrong to be in the market during retirement. Too much risk, they say. I've ignored the advice and done remarkably well. So, I thought what if I turn a spreadsheet loose on the problem.

Say I had invested $100,000 in the market. I divided the money among the top five Canadian banks. Why? Well, historically Canadian banks never cut their dividends and its dividends that I need. Then the market crashed leaving my portfolio valued at only $50,000.

This didn't happen immediately. It took a few months but when the dust settled I had only half my money left. Should I take my remaining retirement money and get out? Or should I leave it in?

Let's say it's going to take 10 years for my portfolio to recover. For simplicity sake we'll say my investment recovers five thousand a year for ten years. (I didn't really think this through as this meant that in the first year my investment would recover $5000 or ten percent of the remaining balance. In the last year, it would also recover $5000 but on a much smaller balance. Percentage wise my portfolio would be recovering more and more each year. Oh heck, let's accept that for the moment. After all, this is only a fast spreadsheet calculation.

So, leaving my $50,000 in the bank stock, it grows at a constant $5000 per year for ten years and pays a dividend of 9% or $4500 dollars at first paid as 1.5% quarterly. Why is the yield so high. Because the banks don't cut their dividends. The cash amount remains constant but the yield number grows as the value of the investment shrinks. And over the years, as the value of the portfolio approaches its original value, the dividend yield will be back to where it started: 4.5%.

In truth, it is hard to see a portfolio of five solid banks taking ten years to recover. Three years would be a long time. And it is hard to see the banks not raising their dividends once or twice over a ten year period.

Put your money into an annuity, lock it in, lock in the monthly payment and sit back and watch that payment shrink. It will have lost a goodly amount in ten years to encroaching inflation. Put the money in the market at the wrong time, watch it shrivel and then watch it spring back in the coming months or years. Your annual payments will increase with time and at the end of ten years you will be glad you kept you were in the market.

Is this crazy? Impossible. Not really. I retired in 2009, and against all the best advise of the business page journalists with whom I worked, I put all my money in the market. ALL my money. A lot of it I put in income trusts. I bought BTH.UN composed of the top one hundred income trusts in Canada. I enjoyed a ten percent dividend.

It was too good to be true. The government put an end to the income trust game. But BTH.UN held quality units and it was very well diversified. The dividends continued, the price climbed back to where I bought in and I exited with more than I had when I entered. I had only used four percent to live and the remainder I had reinvested.

I tried to tell my former journalist co-workers about BTH.UN. They were not interested. No story there.

It is now 2020. I've been retired for eleven full years. My pension is peanuts and I need my portfolio to live. I remove what the government demands from my RIF every year. This coming year I must remove 5.4%. I will and I won't. I cannot afford to deplete my capital that but I must -- sorta. I will move 5.4% of my holdings in-kind into my TFSA and my non-registered portfolio accounts. That money will not be taxed until next year. There's no tax in the year of withdrawal on the minimum withdrawal amount.

To live I remove the dividends that have accumulated, up to about four percent of my holdings. Presently, I am making more than five percent in dividends but my dividends may get cut in the coming months. (I can squeak by on a 3.75% yield.)

I retired eleven years ago with X amount of money. It was an amount far less than the financial advisors told me I should have. Buy annuities I was told. I put the money in the market. Today, after living on my savings for eleven years, and after the recent collapse, I have my original funds multiplied by 1.6.

I still read stuff that is wrong in the paper and I still try to tell the reporters there are other ways to look at the numbers. I am not just ignored but occasionally blocked (on Twitter). Now, that is crazy!

(This post has been re-edited to correct a whole slew of truly stupid math errors. I need an editor, badly. There were some editors at the newspaper who were, as they say, worth their weight in gold. Some of the folk working at your daily paper are absolutely brilliant.)