5.5 year – 2.95% + MORE Oct 3rd

WILLISTON, N.D. – Northwest Territories’ politicians are touring the booming Bakken region of Saskatchewan and North Dakota to get a taste of what might be in store if the territory’s own shale oil play takes off.
The group — with representatives of from the towns of Norman Wells, Tulita and Fort Good Hope, as well as the territorial government — spoke to local officials and viewed a hydraulic fracturing operation.
That method — which would be used in the Northwest Territories’ Canol shale formation — involves drilling long horizontal wells deep underground and cracking the rock with a mixture of high-pressure water, sand and chemicals.
David Ramsay — the minister of industry, tourism investment and transportation — says he’s confident that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, can be done safely in the Central Mackenzie Valley, although drilling into permafrost may be challenging.
Ramsay says the tour showed him the importance of preparing for an economic boom, that could result from developing shale oil, by ensuring there’s enough infrastructure and services in place…

Conventional wisdom suggests the percentage of equities in a portfolio should equal 100 minus your age—so 40% stocks if you’re 60 years old. But in our low-rate environment, coupled with the fact people are living longer, this outdated equation may not provide the returns needed for a comfortable retirement.

 
 
A more aggressive guideline is to subtract your age from 120 for more stock growth that should make your money last longer—so 60% stocks if you’re 60 years old. Conservative investors can use 110.

The post What’s the best asset allocation for your age? appeared first on MoneySense.

Today, MoneySense takes the wraps off its new online directory of fee-for-service financial planners and money coaches. This revamps our popular online directory of “fee-only” financial planners, a resource that many do-it-yourself investors and users of discount brokerages have found useful over the years.
But as Preet Banerjee writes in the just-published November issue of the magazine, the term “fee-only” covers a number of situations and is not as useful a term as it could be. So while we’ve retained the “fee-only” label at the top for the sake of continuity and online searches, there are really two directories.
The larger one is what we call “Money Coaches and Fee-for-Service Planners.” This refers to professionals who offer their advice, planning or financial coaching strictly based on time (usually by the hour) or by the project. The second directory we call “Primarily Asset-based Planners.”  This group is primarily charges a percentages of assets under management but also offers fee-for-service billing…

This GIC rate is offered by Outlook Financial and was updated on 2013-09-16. Click on the link above to get more details or apply online.

Real estate investors famously focus on location, location, location. If they started reading up on hiring a financial adviser, they might conclude the three most important things are fees, fees, fees. At least that’s the view from the outside looking in after scanning various newspapers, magazines, and investor advocacy websites.
Is that all there is to successfully managing your personal finances? Finding the lowest-cost solution?
Every day, investors recount stories of being shocked when they discover just how much they’re paying for financial advice or products, or only the latter. An investor starting from scratch and contributing $3,600 per year into a run-of-the mill mutual fund sporting an MER of 2.5% will have paid north of $37,000 in costs over the first 25 years. The same investor using a 0.25% MER exchange-traded index fund (ETF) with a no-cost automatic contribution option would pay less than $5,000 in costs and have $50,000 more in his portfolio. (We assume each fund can match a market return of 6% per year before fees…