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From finiki, the Canadian financial wiki

Welcome to finiki, the Canadian financial wiki

Where Canadian Investors Meet For Financial Education and Empowerment
There are currently 275 articles here.

Getting started and planning basics

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Starting out with banking and investments can be a baffling and humbling experience. It can be difficult to understand the material and to distinguish good information from bad. We are hopeful you find the information here on the wiki helpful.

You are invited to begin your journey with getting started. It is the staring point on this wiki to provide information in a simple and understandable format.

Our objective is to help you be able to handle your personal finances and investments on your own and at minimal cost.

Important personal finance topics include:

En français

Le wiki contient un nombre limité d'articles en français. Veuillez commencer par Prendre en main ses finances et commencer à investir.

Investing

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Investing involves building and managing a portfolio that typically holds several asset classes such as equities, fixed income and cash.

This is done to meet the investor's goals, which are defined as part of a financial planning process. The asset classes are combined into an asset allocation, which implements your investment policy statement.

The article portfolio design and construction serves as a general entry point for topics in the investment management category. Other important articles include diversification, investment strategy, investment styles, rebalancing, risk and return, simple index portfolios.

Commonly employed portfolio building blocks include exchange-traded funds (including asset allocation ETFs), and mutual funds (including index funds and balanced funds).

Retirement planning and living in retirement

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Retirement is one of the major events in many people's lives, involving not only a change in lifestyle but in many cases a reduction in income or change in sources of income. It should be part of your financial plan.

These changes generally require consideration well before you are planning to retire.

Once you are living in retirement you should know that Canada's retirement income system has three main tiers or "pillars".

Life events and the financial lifecycle

The typical stages of the financial life cycle are outlined in the following articles:

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Still looking for answers or have a question?

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The Financial Wisdom Forum (FWF) is a vibrant discussion community about Canadian financial matters. Savers and investors can pose questions about financial matters of all kinds, help answer others' questions, and provide information that might be of interest to do-it-yourself investors. We hope this will help you to invest on your own, or at least to have more informed conversations with financial advisors.

We encourage newcomers who may have little knowledge of finance. There are no stupid questions. We were all beginners once.

Ultimately, many financial questions do not have a right or wrong answer, but rather a range of options. It is up to you to weigh the pros and cons in light of your specific situation. We are not registered financial advisors or planners but we do have a lot of collective wisdom to share.

About the wiki

finiki is a collaborative knowledge base of Canadian financial subjects intended to for the education and empowerment of Canadian investors. It is primarily based on knowledge from our Financial Wisdom Forum (FWF) discussions, and where possible, peer-reviewed papers. The information here is easy-to-navigate and searchable. The wiki has 275 articles. In case you are wondering, the name finiki is a play on financial + wiki.

We are proud that finiki is strictly non-commercial and free from advertising and sponsorship.

finiki can be read by anyone. Unlike Wikipedia, finiki requires you to have an account before you can edit.

We can always use more contributors, so if you've been thinking about it, be bold, we could use your help. Interested? Read our guide for contributors.

The fine print

Navigation on finiki

The site is organized along major financial categories: You can also look at our navigation page, use the Search box if you are looking for something specific, or see the Complete list of articles.

Sister projects

Our sister site in the US, the Bogleheads® discussion forum and their wiki, share a similar focus, many like-minded members, and may be of interest as well.