Episodes
Thursday May 24, 2018
33 - Raj Lala
Thursday May 24, 2018
Thursday May 24, 2018
Raj Lala is an investment fund artist.
I talk about exchange traded funds(ETFs) a lot.
How the best portfolio is a diversified portfolio. And how the simplest way to diversify is to buy a handful of ETFs that are built to mimic certain parts of the market.
Robo-advisors, for example will usually have what we like to call “buckets” made up of ETFs that balance each other out to try to achieve an overall return, depending on your level of risk tolerance.
But how are these ETFs built?
Who creates funds and how are they created?
The answer is that there are a handful of people out there who are skilled at taking a bunch of investments and packaging them together in a bundle, or fund.
This is more of an art form than something you can learn about in books.
The art of fund-building is something that is acquired over years of practice, but there’s also a lot of natural talent to start with, like someone who is a great artist or musician. You have to have some talent to start with and then you hone your craft.
Raj Lala is one of these artists.
With his new company Evolve ETFs, Raj is focused on investments encompassing topics that intersect in Canadians’ daily lives.
Products like their North American Gender Diversity ETF, which invests in top North American companies as ranked by Equileap’s extensive Gender Scorecard, which includes 19 criteria of gender balance and gender equality.
I met Raj at the Evolve office in Toronto where he shared his personal finance journey and the idea of investing in financial products that mean something to you.
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Thursday May 17, 2018
32 - Laurie Campbell
Thursday May 17, 2018
Thursday May 17, 2018
Laurie Campbell is very passionate about improving financial literacy.
When I saw her speak at the Financial Wellness and Retirement Readiness Conference in February of 2018, I was impressed by her devotion to helping people solve debt problems.
Getting out of debt is hard and involves a lot of sacrifice.
But for some people it’s even harder to not get into debt in the first place. There are people, like myself, who had mental health and addiction issues in the past, and that led to an overwhelming amount of debt.
This is very hard to avoid, but as Laurie and I discuss in the interview, you can get out sooner if you reach out for help early. The problem is that there is still so much stigma, shame and embarrassment surrounding consumer debt, and people feel that they need to keep it to themselves and fix it on their own.
What happens is that their consumer debt gets larger and by the time people end up at Laurie’s office, they’re in big trouble.
But as Laurie has found out in her 25 years at Credit Canada, it’s never too late to make the changes to your life that are needed to get yourself out of debt and on the right track.
I visited Laurie at her office in Toronto to learn about her personal finance story and how she ended up as CEO of Credit Canada, a Canadian Registered Charity dedicated to helping Canadians overcome debt problems and improve their personal money management skills.
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Thursday May 10, 2018
31 - Matthew Jarvis
Thursday May 10, 2018
Thursday May 10, 2018
Matthew Jarvis is not a magician.
Yet there are those that come to him when they are about to retire and expect him to make a small amount of retirement savings last for 30 years.
Matthew is a Certified Financial Planner who’s clients are exclusively retired, or within 5 years of doing so, with at least $500,000 saved up.
Depending on your current lifestyle, half a million dollars might seems like either a lot of money, or very little, to last for 30 years. And that’s the thing about retirement planning. It’s very specific to the individual or couple, and what they intend to do with those next 30 years.
The truth is, everyone’s afraid of running out of money and there’s no shame in that. What’s important is that you talk to someone about it before it’s too late.
Though he is still a young man of 36, Matthew has been able to build Jarvis Financial into a very successful business since he started in the industry in the early 2000s.
He currently manages over $115 million in assets for his clients and has structured his business in a way that allows him to take over 80 days of vacation every year, spending quality time with his 3 kids, while still providing full service to his clients.
Matthew joined me from the Seattle, Washington area to tell his personal finance story.
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Thursday May 03, 2018
30 - Hamza Khan
Thursday May 03, 2018
Thursday May 03, 2018
Hamza Khan had a toxic relationship with money.
Obsessing about saving and spending caused a lot of stress in his family when he was young, so when he started making his own money, he just didn’t want to go there at all.
But when you’re not paying attention to your finances, things can get out of hand, even if you’re making good money.
During this time, Hamza was also experiencing what he now realizes was burnout.
Driven by his need to prove to his family that he could be successful in the world of marketing, he would forego sleep and work insane hours to achieve as much as possible.
But a series of troubling incidents led him to question his way of doing things.
This introspection ultimately led him to write his new book “The Burnout Gamble”. Hamza joined me to talk about burnout, productivity, freedom, mental health and his personal finance story.
“If a budget for your money is a reflection of your priorities, then your calendar is a reflection of your most valuable resource, which is time.” - Hamza Khan