Personal Finance Canada

This was posted by the offical Globe and Mail account on another site.

Here is a quote of that post:

This is Bianca from the Globe, I'm an audience editor who works closely with our investing and personal finance teams. I wanted to share this valuable resource that I think many of you will find handy – and yes, with the special links in this post, there are no paywalls. Woohoo!

In 2024, we started our inaugural Globe's Big Guide to Credit Cards and we ran it back again at the end of last year, so here is our comprehensive guide to Canadian credit cards.

Our consumer affairs reporter, Mariya Postelnyak, interviewed a handful of credit-card super users to learn their tips and secrets, and you can read those here.

This is the guide for people interested in cash-back cards.

This is the guide for balance transfer cards.

And this is the guide for travel cards.

If you'd like to read the methodology behind how we came up with the rankings, you can find that here.

Each guide has a customizable tool at the bottom that allows you to figure out the best cards for your individual circumstances – you just need to add your income or family income.

If you have any questions, I'll try my best to respond in the comments and if I can't answer them myself, I'll reach out to our personal finance and data teams and get back to you.

I am with Manulife for my extended health care, such as dental, vision, massage, etc.

I need to do a dental procedure with $450. To find the eligible amount, I logged in my Manulife account and I am surprised that I can't find a place to show the balance of my eligible amount.

I called Manulife. I was told the only ways to find it out are: 1) call Manulife; 2) do the calculations myself based on the total eligibility and how much has been spent.

I find this is strange. It's like online banking not showing the account balance. And the only ways to find out is either calling the bank or do our own bookkeeping.

Am I missing something? Am I having unreasonable expectations?

How about other extended health care insurance companies, such as sun life?

Can sunlife customers see the eligibility amount themselves?

Thank you all!

I have a bunch of stocks and mutual funds in my portfolio. I’d like to sell some small percent of these “traditional” investments and purchase some cryptocurrency. But I’m trying to figure out how to calculate when is the best time to do this transfer.

Basically, what I want is to see some chart and setup an alert that tells me:

1. When the stock price is high (relative to my fiat currency) and
2. When the price of the cryptocurrency is low (relative to the above fiat currency)

First, how do I do this theoretically? Is there some way to construct a chart that simplifies two lines into one line, which is some calculation of the two lines that shows a single line with points very high on the y-axis when the above two conditions are true, and very low on the y-axis when the above conditions are not true?

Second, how can I setup an alert that tells me when the chart above is at some sort of year-time-high, so I can be alerted that “now” is a good time to sell stocks and buy the given cryptocurrency.

If I have a Vanilla prepaid Visa for example, how can I max out the money I use on it. I have a $50 one for example, but when I try put $50 on my mobile service provider account, the card gets rejected.

Could somebody just confirm whether I got it right? Whatever I contributed to my RRSP between Jan 1 and March 4 of 2025, and was declared in the 2024 tax returns, counted towards 2024. If my Notice of Assessment for 2024 says

Your available RRSP contribution room for 2025: $10,000

then it actually means I can contribute that much from March of 2025 until March of 2026 (whatever I contributed in the beginning of 2025 is a done deal).

WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK
IMPORTANT
Will America's $100K visa fee steer more tech talent to Canada? RBC CEO Dave McKay certainly thinks so. Last week's seismic change to the U.S.'s H-1B visa program creates a “material opportunity,” he says, for Canadian companies to attract more highly skilled foreign tech workers. And doctors and scientists too, yes — but especially tech: 60% of current H-1B visa holders work in tech, and in the first half of this year alone, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft used the program to bring more than 20,000 workers into the U.S. All three of those companies have Canadian offices. Now they have a $2-billion reason to hire the next 20,000 here.

Constellation loses its north star. Constellation Software is the best-performing Canadian investment of the past 20 years, and much of its success (as we covered on an episode of the TLDR podcast) is credited to “Canada’s Warren Buffett,” founder and CEO Mark Leonard. Last week the stock plunged by 15% after Leonard resigned from the company due to health reasons, with analysts calling his leadership “irreplaceable.” His insightful shareholder letters have also become a staple for investors — read some highlights here.
INTERESTING
Understanding how batteries work = understanding how to invest. Batteries are the “hidden plumbing of the modern economy” — they're in our phones, laptops, earbuds, cars, solar panels — and right now, two types of batteries make up 98% of the market: lithium iron phosphate, which is cheap and durable but requires a bigger cell, and nickel manganese cobalt, which is lighter but costlier. This Daily Brief essay makes a compelling case that understanding this difference — including where the two minerals are mined and which companies are betting on them — helps illuminate who stands to benefit from the industry’s growth. Canada’s working on becoming a larger source of the world’s lithium, but we're not a hot spot for cobalt, which is mostly mined in the DRC (although we’re working to refine some here). And when a tech product takes off, its battery type tends to follow: EVs, for example, want the lowest price for the most power (lithium!), while consumer electronics need the smallest storage possible (cobalt!). See, high school chem was good for something!

Useful AI use-case sighting! A startup that reduces health-care waits. With so much of the global economy kinda sorta riding on AI paying off, we're always on the lookout for evidence of promise, and Yukon-based PeerSupport.io might be on to something: it uses AI to pre-fill medical forms, suggest referral opportunities, and help patients navigate an often labyrinthine records system. In a pilot test, addiction patients got care 27 weeks sooner than usual, and form-completion time dropped from 18 minutes to two.

—Sarah Rieger

?

Seems like some life insurance could have helped mitigate the impact. That reminds me I should get some.

I hope this is the right place to post this!

I'm leaving Canada permanently next weekend, with a PGWP status which ends next year. I'm all done with tax returns, and I'm about to close my bank account.

My question is if I have to do anything else regarding CRA. Like report something or update? I did a search, but in the gov site mentions Canadian residents only.

TIA

Now that I have to file my T2 electronically I went looking for the most affordable way to do that and found T2Express. Not only was it the cheapest at ~$40 but it actually has had a native Linux version since 2020!

I wish I'd found this sooner because they also have a version for doing personal taxes called "myTaxExpress". The main reason I keep a Windows VM kicking around is to file our personal taxes every year with StudioTax and I'd way rather have something I could just run directly and not have to bother with that.

Their T2 software worked well enough for my purposes but a nil return is pretty straightforward. Anyone used their stuff to do their personal taxes and have an opinion on it? Are there any other options out there for Linux native software for filing a T1?

Author: Omar H. Fares | Assistant Professor, Faculty of Business, University of New Brunswick

Hey, maybe y'all can give some unbiased advice. My wife co-owns a €1.4 million villa in Spain with her grandma. The property has been on the market for 2 years. I'm inclined to believe that the realtors are incompetent and that something is being done wrong. Am I crazy, or is something wrong here?

There's an older lady who's a family friend who currently manages the property and deals with the realtors on my wife's behalf. She's lovely, but not an expert in this, by any means. We are told by her that an appraisal late last year upheld the €1.4 million valuation, but to be fair, neither of us have seen that appraisal.

The property is currently listed by several realtors in the area – namely, Villa Iberia, Inmo Palafrugell, La Clau Brava, Espigul, and Cala Maset. My understanding is whoever manages to sell the house, gets the commission.

The house is in the Platja d'Aro region and is ~350 m2 in size, with 4 bedrooms and a large outdoor pool, a short drive away from the beach.

Is the price way off, or is something else wrong? Surely 2 years is too long for selling this! Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to give some advice.

I am 21 years old, still live with my parents, currently studying Computer Science, and need some sort of income because I'm nearly out of money (mostly because I never had a job and I need bus fare to basically get around anywhere and I would like to have some money for hobbies).

Tried getting a job, going over my resume multiple times and handing in my resume in person, but that has not been working so far - I've been handing out like hundreds of resumes since January this year and got only 1 interview with no follow up (and I even tried places such as McDonalds, TimHortons, and Starbucks and also various programming jobs).

I have recently come up with the idea of mowing other people's lawns for money. However, when I suggested this to my parents, they said it was just inappropriate for me because if an adult were to do it, they'd do it with tools such as a proper gas powered mower, a weedwacker and possibly even a van, but all we have is an electric mower that doesn't even have batteries (don't know if there are any with batteries), so I'd have to take electricity from my customers. I also don't have enough money for a weedwacker or a new lawn mower.

Anyhow, they think it's a stupid idea, but I personally think that even if it doesn't work out and I don't get any customers, then I have nothing to lose from it, and if it does work, then I get cash, and actual work experience to put on my resume (because right now I basically only have my mandatory high school volunteer hours).

I personally do think that there is a chance that they might be correct, but I personally think that I'd have to actually try it before I could be totally sure.

Plus, I believe one of the main reasons why I'm in this situation now is because in High School they always told me things like that I was stupid, and too slow and clumsy to work in fast food or grocery stores (and other jobs that high schoolers normally take) and should just focus on getting A+ grades to get accepted into the best universities and get a job as a programmer, and I fully believed them and instead of trying to get a job during the summers, I took summer school courses which just ended up in me filling up the resulting empty spots with elective courses and so I graduated high school at the same time as everyone else - and so looking back I do think that I should have just ignored my parents and got myself a job during the summer in high school. During my first few years in university, I was also under the impression that getting a job was not too hard and didn't take really that long as it's actually taking for me and that I could just get a programming job right now or when I graduate - and turns out I was wrong.

By the way, I also live in Durham Region, Ontario (which is in the GTA on the east side).

Any advice on this? Do you think that this may actually work?

Also, if I do end up mowing lawns for money with the equipment I have, would a price of around 20 - 25 CAD per mow be reasonable?

I am currently a university student in Ontario, Canada, looking to get a summer job (at least minimum wage would be just fine for me). I've been sending my resume out for like almost half a year now, but with no luck (not even a phone call).

Yes, I have tried applying to McDonalds, TimHortons, grocery stores, countless other places, and even places where my friends work/worked at. I have also gotten my resume looked at by both an employment agency and my friends. I have also went in in-person to a lot of places. One of my friends says that one of the main reasons why I might not any phone calls back is that I don't have any real work experience other than my mandatory high school volunteer hours.

I am also a Computer Science student and yes, I have been considering going for a web development job. However, a lot of the job postings I see require stuff like Wordpress, and JavaScript frameworks which I don't know. I also want a job as soon as possible (because of my finances).

I have also found a list of local staffing agencies at my local employment center. Should I go for these? How likely am I to get hired once I go?

The past few weeks have been wild for Wall Street. So wild, in fact, that we decided to devote this entire issue of TLDR to unpacking what happened, and where it leaves us. Because there are lots of questions about the latter right now. We’ve got a pre-election issue in the works for next week, then we’ll return to our regular programming. —The Editors

From my reading so far I'm looking at ETFs with WS, and that I should start with the TFSA. Am I on the right track and what do you recommend?

😬 Stocks always go up…right?

THE WEEK IN MARKETS Everything But America The markets were mostly flat last week, but the storyline of 2025 has come into clear focus: the resurgence of EBA — Everything But America. Since January 1, U.S. stocks are down 5%, Canadian stocks are up a smidge, and global stocks outside the U.S. are up 9%. During the tech-driven rally of the past few years, investors were so smitten with U.S. tech companies, and so cool on everyone else, that TINA — “there is no alternative” to U.S. tech — became something of a mantra. Now market analysts are hyping up new global tech super-groups with names like the Terrific Ten that stand to rival the Not-So-Magnificent Seven.

What changed? For one, Trump 2.0 mayhem — his tariff barrage, his plans to gut civil services, his shift away from NATO — alongside cresting fears that U.S. tech stocks have become overvalued. Or, maybe this whole EBA storyline will end up being wrong. We’re only three months into the year, after all, and this is far from the first time global observers have clucked about the end of U.S. dominance.

THE WEEK IN ONE NUMBER $25 If every household spent this much on Canadian, rather than American, goods every week, our economy would grow by 0.7% and support 60,000 new jobs.

I've just heard of someone doing that and it ended badly, but that was because the person over contributed. I wonder if it would be legal/smart for me to do that? I don't make enough to max out my TFSA and don't take risks investing (only invest in global ETFs and bonds).