U.S. Stats Canadians Should Know About

I was talking to an old neighbour about finances and stuff the other day. The discussion turned towards how it takes more and more money to maintain a middle-class standard of living. He's a doctor. When I mentioned that inflation is the silent little thief that is responsible for making it harder to pay the bills he stated, "Yeah, but when the costs of food and gas go up my income will go up too ... so it's no big deal." I used to think like that. But it's a very dangerous conclusion. Let us explain why, but first some data... It shouldn't be any big surprise any longer that the U.S. spends a lot more money than it earns in taxes. The U.S. government currently takes in approximately $2.3 Trillion in tax revenues every year. It spends approximately $3.6 Trillion. That a pretty big difference ... they're s...
 
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Little Habits Compound Into Huge Results

Email Tips Photo: planeta
When we first started sending out our weekly email it went to seven people. Of those seven, three were our own email accounts and one was our Mom. So we really only had three people on the list. That week we sat down and wrote an article about how to find good properties. We put the article on our website (www.TheRealEstateRenegades.com) and we emailed it to all three people who had signed up for our email. The next week we did it again. That week I think we had a total of nine people on our email list. We rinsed and repeated, week in and week out. Then after a few months we crossed ov...
 
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Is Warren Buffett Missing The Obvious?

  Why is arguably one of the most successful investors of all time churning out comments that any of us can poke holes in? Many people swear by his annual shareholder letter and hold it up as the gospel of investing. But his latest one posted in February has some absolutely strange comments in it. On page 19, you'll find this comment: "The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favourite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful).  Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative.  True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production.  Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold ...
 
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Gutting The Pig – And Other Exciting Childhood Memories

Pigs Photo: Olav Rokne
The more we share about both of our childhood's, the more I think we didn't have anything close to a normal upbringing. Case in point... Special Reader's Warning:  This one is a little more gory than usual, so if that's not your cup of tea please don't proceed. Both of us would go to our grandparent's farm in Europe (Croatia) every second summer for weeks at a time - often a month, sometimes two. While our friends were going to Disney World and their cottages up north in Ontario, we were working in the fields. Loading up our trusty donkey with huge sacs of potatoes for a long journey home through the bush. One year we w...
 
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Your Ideas Stink. But Your Implemention Rocks.

Smelly Nose  Photo: areenetay
It's becoming more and more obvious to all of us that job security is a thing of the past. Many of us will need to rely on ourselves, and our own ingenuity and hard work, for our financial well being. Even so called "guaranteed" pensions, government jobs with lifetime security... it's all smoke and mirrors. Just ask today's pensioners how far those "inflation adjusted" dollars are going. We know more and more of us are thinking the same way, because we're being peppered with questions around starting your own business. How to do it. What to do. When to start. We're not naive enough to believe we have all the answers. There are courses, books and...
 
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Fire Fighting for Profits & Freedom

All Nick and myself wanted to do was invest in some cash flowing properties and maybe write a few articles a month. That's it. Nothing else. But this year, that's not even two months old, we're fighting wildfires like two California forest fire marshals. We're doing training classes on weekday evenings. We're doing classes on weekend mornings. We're fighting battles with marketing material that should have worked like gangbusters - that didn't. We're dealing with several staffing issues. There are vendors and contractors that have dropped the ball on us and need to be replaced. Some that we've used for years ... gone bad. There was a website that was wasting about $1,600/month on ineffective advertising that had to be pulled down and replaced with a completely new website ... immediately. Our own brokerage we...
 
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