About Us

This blog started out in 2020 as a pandemic hobby. With the goal of keeping my sanity intact during lockdown, I decided to challenge myself to learn web design and improve my writing skills. I grew up in a family that was very open about money, its worth, and the importance of saving and investing, so personal finance seemed like the perfect fit.

Like many young investors around the great financial crisis, I thought that stock picking was the way to go. I used to watch CNBC’s Jim Cramer and follow what stocks Warren Buffet (the OG finance influencer) was investing in. But one day, my grandfather bought me the Wealth Barber and I started to understand that beating the market is impossible and that index investing was the way to go.

So as many of us do, I go down to my local bank branch, open a mutual funds account, answer a questionnaire, and I get placed in a growth fund. I then stumbled on the Canadian Couch Potato – which is still one of the best financial resources out there – and realized I was paying a very high Management Expense Ratio (MER). While I would have loved to have invested in ETFs, high brokerage fees made it impossible (in the 2010s, they were as high as 29.99). Instead, I followed one of the Canadian Couch Potato’s model portfolios that used the TD e-Series. Since I did not have enough money for a brokerage account, I had to mail in a form to get my mutual fund account to be converted to an e-series and ever since then, I have been a passive investor.

Having started this at a young age (and the bull market of the 2010s) has improved my life in many ways and allowed me to get financially ahead of many of my friends. This blog is my cheat sheet for you. You’re welcome.