Archive for category Investing

Peter Schiff Was Right

I’ve been reading some books from Peter Schiff and my eyes have been opened to macroeconomics and how the USA has been “running the show” and how the recent market crash is the beginning of the demise of the US dollar. Below is a video on a presentation he did for some Google employees in April. He goes over how we got into this mess and how we will get out of it. I will say, it won’t be fun. Enjoy…


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Inflation

I was cruising the financial blogs and came across this cool description of inflation (below). Inflation is the silent killer of our savings and our retirement plans. You can calculate how much you are going to need per year all you want but without adjustment for inflation you may find yourself a bit short in funds when it comes time to start drawing years down the road. $50,000 today will not buy the same amount of goods as it will 15 years from now. An interesting quote from this article states

A so-called “mild” rate of inflation of 3% per year leads to a 56% rise in prices over a 15-year period. Even a “low” rate of inflation of 2% per year leads to a 35% rise over that same period.

So if you want to retire on $50,000 per year in 15 years, then you better scale that up to $78,000 so you can maintain the same lifestyle.

Inflation will continue to exist as long as governments retain the fiat money system.

Inflation explained. Mint.com

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Infinite Return on Investment

Some people balk at the fact that you can actually make an infinite return on your investment. Infinite return is essentially what happens when you invest on margin (or borrow) and make money from the spread of the interest you pay on the borrowed money versus the gain on the investment.

If you have zero cash and a line of credit then you can potentially take your zero cash position to positive (or conversely, negative) by debiting your line of credit and putting it into a dividend earning stock (preferably in a real estate or utility fund).

I am currently paying 5.75% on my TD Bank line of credit. Killam Properties is currently $5.50/share with monthly dividends of $0.046667/share ($0.56/share yearly). Killam’s dividend yield is therefore 0.56/5.50*100% = ~10%. So the spread would be 10.2%-5.75% = 4.45%. Therefore I could make 4.45% on any money TD wants to give me at 5.75%.

I put $5,500 from my line of credit into the investment and purchase 1000 shares. At the end of the year I will have deposited $5500*4.45% = $244.75 in my gains account. You may think that $244.75 is not a lot of money but when you take into account the amount of time it takes you to set this up (not long with brokerage accounts) its not bad hourly pay.

I invest $0 of my own funds (all money comes from TD’s line of credit). Return on investment is calculated by money earned divided by money invested. Since money invested is $0 (of my own money) and anything divided by zero is infinite, therefore my ROI is infinite.

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