Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of November 27, 2012

Article Excerpt

Investors sometimes ask what to do with an inheritance or any lump sum: buy stocks or pay off the home mortgage. From a purely financial perspective, it’s best to pay off the mortgage first then borrow money to buy stocks. That way, you are borrowing to invest, so you get to deduct your interest expense from your taxable income. With interest rates where they are today, this can expand the after-tax return on your initial investment by 2% a year compounded. That can give your long-term investment returns an enormous boost, and it’s theoretically risk-free. In practice, however, you need to take behavioural finance into account to weigh the risk. Behavioural finance is the academic study of the way that all-too-human errors can creep into investing decisions. This is particularly relevant to emotion-laden decisions like the sanctity of the family home and the outlook for the stock market. If you fail to take it into account before making serious financial decisions, you put…