Many investors consider annuities when they are planning their retirement investing. There are basically three types of annuities: Term-certain annuities are payable to you, or your estate, for a fixed number of years. Your estate will receive the payments even if you die. You could outlive this type of annuity....

On his Wealthy Boomer web site, Financial Post personal-finance columnist Jonathan Chevreau recently made the link between the time you start saving for retirement and when you will be able to start your retirement in earnest. Click here to read the full article on the Wealthy Boomer. Chevreau has been the personal-finance columnist at the Financial Post since 1996, and is the author or co-author of eight financial books, including The Wealthy Boomer and Findependence Day, released last fall. His Wealthy Boomer blog features interviews with investment experts (including Pat McKeough)....

We’ve been asked a number of times over the years about how we manage in our investing advice to recommend so many stocks that get taken over at a big profit. Some readers, especially those of our Successful Investor newsletter, tell us that they never had a stock taken over at a profit until they began following our investing advice. And some of these takeovers have generated big profits, indeed: Fording Canadian Coal jumped 163.2% in five months on a takeover offer after we recommended it to Successful Investor readers in January 2008....

When investors are considering hiring us to manage their portfolios through Successful Investor Wealth Management Inc., they sometimes ask about the difference between portfolio management and financial planning.

It’s a good question....

Members of my Inner Circle service often ask me for stock advice about picks they are thinking of buying that we don’t cover in our newsletters. A large number of these stocks fall into a grey area. Sometimes my stock advice is that they are “okay to hold,” but we wouldn’t advise buying them. When Inner Circle members ask about one of these companies, that’s what my stock advice would be: it’s “okay to hold.” Others don’t inspire our confidence at all, and our advice would be to avoid them or sell them if you own them. Here are three recent examples of our Inner Circle stock advice: YELLOW PAGES INCOME FUND (Toronto symbol YLO.UN) is the largest telephone-directory publisher in Canada, where it owns the Yellow Pages and Pages Jaunes trademarks. Aside from phone directories, it prints free, advertising-based publications, including Auto Trader, Buy & Sell and Renters News, through 98%-owned Trader Corp. It also operates web sites devoted to classified advertising....

Lately, a number of readers have been asking me whether it’s worth holding onto their U.S.-stock holdings if the U.S. dollar keeps falling. Some wonder if they should follow their brokers’ suggestions and hedge against the risk of a drop in the U.S. dollar, using options, futures or other investment products. If you knew that the U.S. dollar would keep falling, the best portfolio management strategy would be to sell all of your U.S. stocks and buy them back when the dollar stabilizes. However, you don’t know where the U.S./Canada exchange rate is going next — you never do. The financial industry has a variety of products that can insulate your U.S. investments from a drop in the value of the U.S. dollar. These products obviously cost you money. In addition, they reduce the long-term value of your U.S. investments. After all, you invest in U.S. stocks for two key reasons. One is that the U.S. stock market offers certain types of investment opportunities that are rare or non-existent in Canada, such as giant multi-national consumer companies like Procter & Gamble or McDonalds. The other key reason for U.S. investment is that it gives you currency diversification. That’s crucial to a sound portfolio management strategy....

One of the questions we often get from clients of Successful Investor Wealth Management involves financial contingency planning. That is, how do you set up your finances and investments so that someone else can handle them if you can’t? When you’re doing this kind of retirement planning, we think it’s always a good idea to have such an arrangement in place. The first step is to find someone you thoroughly trust to step in on your behalf. You should also resist the urge to leave fixed instructions. Instead, give that person as much latitude as possible. This goes against the first instinct of many investors. But there is good reason to take a more hands-off approach.

Flexibility is a plus

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Should you stick with your current stock broker or switch to a discounter? To answer that question, you need to consider your own experience and abilities, and those of your stock broker.

Brokers, good and bad

A good stock broker (one who is experienced, knowledgeable, and oriented toward the long term) is worth the top commissions you are likely to pay. For instance, suppose your average commission is 2% and you replace one-third of your portfolio every year (both figures are on the high side). In this case, you’d pay 1.34% of your portfolio’s value each year in commissions. That’s less than the 2% to 3% management fee on a typical mutual fund....

Asset allocation funds are mutual funds that distribute their assets in accordance with all investors’ goals (consistent returns, diversified investments, etc.). Unlike balanced funds, they can shift their portfolio allocations between stocks, bonds and cash in order to capitalize on perceived investment opportunities in any one of those classes. If a fund’s name includes the term “asset allocation,” it means the fund’s managers, or sponsors, feel that they can enhance returns and/or reduce risks by switching back and forth among stocks, bonds and cash equivalents, often using a so-called “black box” – a computer program that makes trading decisions based on a pre-selected set of rules for interpreting financial statistics. For example, if the managers feel that the bond market is depressed and poised for an upswing, they may overweight the portfolio in fixed-income investments for a few months to take advantage of the change. Computer modelling makes this investment approach sound scientific, but it is just as likely to detract from a portfolio’s long-term return as it is to add to it....

Here are two simple retirement investing strategies that can help you maximize your investments in RRSPs.

High-risk retirement investing

Planning your retirement investing and picking stocks for your RRSPs can be difficult. It can be tempting to pick higher risk (and potentially higher return) stocks for your RRSPs. However, we believe these investments are generally unsuitable for this type of retirement investing, and that higher-risk stocks should be held outside of an RRSP. That’s because if higher-risk stocks lose money in your RRSPs, you have a triple loss:...