Trump’s bulldozer diplomacy meets Canada’s pipeline politics + MORE Jan 25th

President Donald Trump signs an executive order on the Keystone XL pipeline, Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
When the Trudeau government gave the thumbs-up in November to Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline replacement and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion, pretty much every politician, journalist and other observer noted the wide distance between an approved pipeline project and a built pipeline project; on the road from there to here sit the complexities of investment deals, negotiations with First Nations groups, legal hurdles and protests. There were fewer utterances about that long and sometimes sinkhole-marked road (remember the formerly approved Northern Gateway?) when Donald Trump signed presidential memos Tuesday to revive and fast-track the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access line, except in news stories referring to the furious reaction from environmental and Indigenous groups.
A couple important reasons lie behind this difference between a Trudeau OK and a Trump OK…

Bob Lai, 34, lives in Vancouver and blogs at Tawcan.com. (Photo by Grady Mitchell)
Since my early 20s, I’ve always tracked my spending. That’s because I realized early that the key to wealth is increasing your net worth and to do that, you must have a money management system you can depend on. What has motivated me, since graduating at age 24 with a degree in engineering, is my goal to save more. To achieve this goal, I’ve done a lot of crazy things. For instance, I lived with my parents for 18 months, and dried my clothes on drying racks just to save $2.50 per dryer load at the laundromat. I also slept in my sub-zero sleeping bag to save on heating. It sounds extreme, but these habits are part of what has allowed me to save tens of thousands of dollars every year.
But things changed a bit after marrying my wife Ayoe in 2011. At that point, it wasn’t just about saving money. I expanded my financial goals by setting up a budgeting system described by T. Harv Eker in Secrets of the Millionaire Mind…

For the latest episode of the Canadian Couch Potato podcast, I was privileged to have the opportunity to interview Charles Ellis, who has been called “Wall Street’s wisest man.”

Mr. Ellis’s best-known work is Winning the Loser’s Game, a book that had a big impact on me when I was beginning my education on index investing. After spending decades as an analyst and consultant for pension and endowment funds, here was Ellis arguing that individuals—and even many institutional investors—would be better off simply using index funds. And while that seems like a familiar argument today, Ellis first made it some 42 years ago, in a hugely influential article called The Loser’s Game. That paper appeared in The Financial Analyst’s Journal in the summer of 1975, a few months before John Bogle launched the first index fund at Vanguard.
In our interview, Mr. Ellis and I discuss his latest book, The Index Revolution, which looks back over his long career and concludes that, alas, things haven’t changed very much…

JERUSALEM – Israel announced plans Tuesday to build 2,500 more settler homes on the West Bank, moving to step up construction just days after the swearing-in of Donald Trump brought to power a U.S. administration seen as friendly to the settlement movement.
“We are building – and we will continue to build,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote in a Facebook post.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer did not answer directly when asked about Trump’s reaction.
“Israel continues to be a huge ally of the United States,” Spicer said. “He wants to grow closer with Israel to make sure that it gets the full respect that it deserves in the Middle East.”
While Trump has signalled that he will be far more tolerant of Israeli settlement construction than his predecessors, he also has expressed a desire to broker a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, and siding closely with Israel on such a contentious matter could hurt U.S. credibility…

Mobile app meets mortgage specialist. That’s what Mogo Finance Technology Inc. is promising with its most recent announcement.
As of mid-January 2017, the Vancouver-based fintech company registered as a mortgage broker in three provinces: Ontario, B.C. and Alberta, with plans to expand across Canada. Mogo already offers online personal loans.
What differentiates MogoMortgage from other non-bank lenders is the launch of an online and mobile-friendly interface—where mortgage shoppers can compare rates, apply for a mortgage and track their payment progress.
Benefits of MogoMortgage
The biggest promise, according to Mogo press statements, is that their mortgage product will make the process of acquiring a mortgage—and paying off that debt—more transparent.
By using the MogoMortgage app you can get your credit score (for free!), apply for your mortgage, track your mortgage-debt repayment progress and set-up payment notifications.
Plus, the company promises rewards for meeting milestones, like a bottle of champagne on the one year anniversary of your first mortgage payment…