Wealth without health can be a pyrrhic victory—epitomized by the old warning you don’t want to be the richest person in the cemetery.
Our cover package takes a look at personal finances through the lens of health and fitness. It’s spearheaded by senior editor David Hodges and contributor Preet Banerjee, who won a PMAC award for his “How you doin’?” article in the June 2012 issue of MoneySense. In his upcoming book Stop Overthinking Your Money! Preet also tackles the parallels between wealth and health.
If you’re into physical fitness, odds are you used a personal trainer, at least when you were starting to familiarize yourself with the equipment in the gym. On the financial side, we’ve long believed you need a money coach or a fee-only financial planner to make sure your investment portfolio is healthy. Watch for our new fee-only online directory coming this fall.
The issue also features our third annual look at credit cards, directed by deputy editor Sarah Efron and Mark Brown, managing editor, reports and rankings. This is a huge undertaking and generates significant web traffic for us all year round.
Next, senior editor and Home Owner columnist Romana King unveils MoneySense’s new approach to evaluating real estate. Romana takes a different tack than our “Best deals in real estate” packages from previous years. She hones in on five major cities, finding where the best real estate values are in and around those centres. There’s little point declaring the best deals are in Calgary if your job and family are in Montreal, or telling those in British Columbia that Ottawa homes are priced better than those in Vancouver. Most of us live in a particular geographical region because we have a home and job in that location, and usually family, friends and other ties. It’s more useful for Torontonians to know homes are better valued in Wychwood than nearby Casa Loma, rather than cities two or three time zones away.
Sarah has revamped the Living section at the back, rebranding it Smart Spender. It’s shorter, snappier and more visual. By packaging content on consumption here, we can focus the front of the magazine (the Intel section) more on the money-making and money-saving side of personal finance.
Also in this issue, some of our regular columnists switch roles. We gave Norm Rothery time off for good behaviour on his Value Investor column, while fixed-income columnist Pat Bolland weighs in on preferred shares and Index Investor columnist Dan Bortolotti addresses the false perception that investors in bond funds are losing money. Look out for the new third edition of Dan’s MoneySense Guide to the Perfect Portfolio.
We’ve also just published the new MoneySense Beginner’s Guide to Personal Finance, which seeks to raise the financial literacy of young (and not-so-young) people who may not be regular MoneySense readers. Long-time subscribers may know friends or relatives who could benefit from this overview of personal finance basics. It just might make the perfect Christmas or graduation gift for a financially-challenged loved one!!
Finally, later this year we plan to run a feature called The Great TFSA Race. We’ll highlight those who have grown their Tax Free Savings Accounts the most. Email us at [email protected] if you’d like to be profiled for this.
Jonathan Chevreau is the author of Findependence Day and co-author of Victory Lap Retirement. Reach him at
[email protected], where he is the founder of Financial Independence Hub.
