Explore Financial Resources
Financial Resources: The tools and third-party sites we use ourselves for Canadian money decisions. Please note, we also have other resources embedded into subject-specific articles so feel free to check those out as well.
RESP Calculator – Estimator:
Understand how your contributions will add up by playing around with a rate of return estimate along with your contributions over time.
Resources for Low-Income Seniors:
Discover financial programs for seniors and explore essential assistance and savings for you or your loved ones that’ll help today!
Canadian Benefit Payment Dates:
Understand the 2023 dates the following benefits will get distributed: Canada child benefit (CCB), Goods and services tax / harmonized sales tax (GST/HST) credit, Ontario trillium benefit (OTB), Climate action incentive payment (CAIP), Advanced Canada workers benefit (ACWB), and Alberta child and family benefit (ACFB).
HouseSigma.com:
This is by far one of the sites we spend a lot of time on! It’s the black hole equivalent of spending time on YouTube except for all your Canadian real estate needs, especially in the Ontario markets. This site is an aggregation of a lot of real estate information! You can look up how much a home was listed and sold for, if the price had dropped, how many times it was listed and delisted for, the historical transactions on the home, pictures of the home, there’s a mortgage calculator, cash flow analysis, schools nearby and their rankings, the rental guage, community/demographic statistics (including household income, age, ethnicity, construction timing, and more), rental values including a rental analysis to see if it’ll be cash-flow positive, market demand (buyers market, balanced market, or seller’s market). Everything you can get on realtor.ca, plus the kind of information you’d usually get from a real estate agent. Do your own research before using a realtor to validate your thinking. Like I said black hole of real estate research!
Bank Of Canada – Policy Interest Rate Hikes:
Want to see how we ended up at 5% interest rates as of July 12, 2023. Including this page and reference to the Bank Of Canada site makes our blood boil since all these hikes are hurting lower and middle-income Canadians due to the Federal Government overspending during the Covid years nevertheless, it’s important to see how we got here and if things turn around when it does.
CEO.CA:
If you ever wanted to get thoughts from other investors about a stock or debate your position as to why it’s a buy or sell this is the place. There are a few others like Yahoo Finance’s Conversation tab, however, the quality might be a bit better here. (Disclaimer: don’t listen to what others have to say or use their input and do your own due diligence.) One of the reasons I like this site is that they also aggregate a lot of information like short positions, SEDAR documents, SEDI insider filings, and more. However, one downfall of the performance is their stock updates are 15min behind actual trading prices.
Check Your Credit Score and Understand Your Current Situation:
Two service providers Equifax and TransUnion are the ones we’d recommend. And we’d also suggest paying for the score plus a summary of your account to see your full details. We’d avoid the “free” ones if it’s not from Equifax or TransUnion. Those third-party score providers’ “free” versions will just end up promoting credit products to you, they have to make money somehow.