Save, invest, prosper with My Own Advisor. A Modern Adjusted Cost Base App for Canadian DIY Investors When investing or making trades in a taxable (or non-registered) investment account, you may realize what are known as “capital gains” or “capital losses”. Basically, you made money or lost money. In this article, I’ll share some back-to-basics adjusted cost base concepts that apply to… Join the million dollar portfolio journey. The article A Modern Adjusted Cost Base […]

Apparently hundreds of thousands of Brits don’t ever switch their mortgage. This is despite the fact that staying on an old deal instead of remortgaging promptly can be horribly expensive. And I don’t mean ‘splurging on a fancy lunch’ expensive, either. More like ‘buying a brand new VW Golf and driving it straight into the sea’ expensive. Even delaying remortgaging by just a couple of months could cost you the same as a family holiday. […]

I realize that it’s late to do a financial recap of 2025, but that’s what happens when you get three months ahead in posts…you simply slot the next one into the first available slot…and this is what was available. Haha. If it helps, I’m writing this in early January, so all is fresh to me. It’s just that you’re reading it much later than that. All that said, I wanted to share a financial update […]

On rare occasions, I read something so powerful I have to share it here. Today is one such occasion. Dan Haylett is one of my favorite writers, and a heckuva nice guy.  His podcast, Humans vs. Retirement, is the #1 retirement podcast in the UK for good reason. (Sign up for his free weekly email here) While his podcast is great, I can’t get enough of this guy’s writing.  Every week, I read his email […]

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Here is my 2026 1st Quarter portfolio update that includes all our combined 401k/403b/IRAs and taxable brokerage accounts but excludes our house and small side portfolio of self-directed investments. Following the concept of skin in the game, the following is not a recommendation, but a sharing of our real-world, imperfect DIY portfolio. “Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have in their portfolio.” – Nassim Taleb How I […]

Booking a hotel room at 18 can be a massive headache. Since there is no federal law about hotel age limits, every… The post Hotels That Allow 18-Year-Olds to Check In (+ Avoid $250 Holds) appeared first on MoneyPantry.com.

The Short Version: Real estate spreads vs. corporate credit are back to 20-year historical norms after 20-25% repricing from 2021 peak 2021 pricing was the anomaly (free money, 3% rates, ZIRP), not 2026 pricing meaning current valuations are normal Institutional investors (Morgan Stanley, Apollo) are actively deploying into multifamily, senior living, and industrial “Waiting for rates to drop” misses the point… entry pricing matters more than interest rates, and today’s pricing is the opportunity CNBC dropped an interesting piece this week. Family offices… the private investment firms that manage money for ultra-wealthy families… are “snapping up domestic real estate” while other investors sit on the sidelines. This caught my attention because family offices don’t chase trends. They don’t panic buy. They have teams of analysts, decades of experience, and time horizons that stretch 20 or 30 years. When they move aggressively into an asset class, it’s worth asking why. And right now, they’re moving into real estate while most retail investors are frozen, waiting for rates to drop or the economy to stabilize or some signal that it’s “safe” to invest again. What Family Offices Are Actually Doing Declaration Partners just closed their second real estate fund at $303 million. They signed a $50.1 million master lease for three storefronts in SoHo, New York… properties where the current tenants are paying below-market rents. The lease spans 25 years with an option to extend to 2091. That’s not a flip. That’s a generational hold. Elle Family Office is buying distressed office buildings in Atlanta. Chaz Lazarian, who runs it, acquired the former Home Depot headquarters building and its debt for about $21 million… roughly 18 cents on the dollar compared to what the previous private equity owner paid in 2019. (Eighteen cents. Let that sink in for a second.) These aren’t lottery tickets. These are calculated bets by people who’ve seen multiple cycles and know what distress looks like from the inside. Why They Can Move When Others Can’t Here’s the part that matters for the rest of us. One of the investors CNBC quoted explained the gap between family offices and institutional funds: “A lot of institutional funds look at opportunities like that and say, ‘If I can’t execute a business plan in a year and a half or two years or three years, that’s not quick enough.’ It required somebody who had the longer-term perspective to say, ‘I’m willing to hold longer term to wait out the expirations of those leases.’” That’s the whole game right there. Institutional funds have mandates, quarterly reports and impatient LPs who want returns on a schedule. When the math doesn’t work in an 18-month window, they pass. Family offices don’t have that constraint. They can buy an asset that looks ugly today because they’re underwriting it over a 10 or 15-year horizon… and over that timeframe, the math looks very different. Most individual investors also don’t have 18-month mandates. We don’t have quarterly reports