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This week in Ontario we had our first snowfall. The temperature hovered around the freezing mark as the white stuff flew from the sky in heavy wet clumps. Instead of throwing out my back moving the 2 inches of white slush shovelling, I fired up the snow blower to clear our driveway. The temperatures are falling and the beautiful late autumn weather we experienced appears to be gone. As the weather cools I tend to spend more time inside, and lucky for me, the blogosphere provided me with some excellent reading this week! As such, our Weekend Reading has been revamped this week to include the numerous articles I found intriguing over the past seven days.
Ashley Hamilton at SocialFinance.ca examines sustainability indices in her post The Sustainability Index—Friend or Foe? bringing to light issues such as the “best in industry” evaluations, the dangers of using such indices as “the holy grail of sustainability” and points out that these indices describe prior behaviour and not future behaviour. Here at SPF we have also questioned the indices, funds, etfs and companies included in Social Responsible Investing and I personally found Ashley’s article concise and intriguing.
As a frequent guest poster at Million Dollar Journey, Ed Rempel has once again brought to light sound advice on financial planning. This week Ed reminds us that We Should Not Forget Stocks Go Up. History has shown that over time stocks increase in value despite the ups and downs. Many investors are pessimistic after the last crash 20 months ago, but in a short time the market has rebounded very nicely and those who continued to buy, those who held instead of selling, will reap the benefits of the buy-and-hold strategy.
As a guy who is trying to learn as much as he can about everything DIY, I found Frugal Dad’s article on self sufficiency very valuable. In his post How To Become More Self Sufficient Frugal Dad provides a number of tips and hints on how the everyman/everywoman can figure out how to DIY.
Not every Personal Finance blogger is willing to put their predictions for investment opportunities that are currently considered bearish. InvestItWisely has written about 3 Unconventional Investment Moves to Make in 2011 and I believe in two of the three. To each their own of course.
Following up our Weekend Roundup from last week, Mike at The Dividend Guy concludes his four part series on Socially Responsible Investing this week by concluding That SRI successfully is plausible and possible, but to take the concept with a grain of salt. Coupled with Ashley Hamilton’s article previously mentioned, I agree.
Next up, more great articles I read this week, by category.
Sustainability
- Trent Hamm posts on OpenForum about Buying Locally and Where the Money Goes. We try to buy locally as much as possible and Hamm presents some interesting ideas about the concept.
- PrarieEcoThrifer gives us an update on their Garden Harvest. As an aspiring self-sustaining gardner, the results are very positive!
Green-Eco
- BioFriendlyBlog discusses how to keep your Environmental Health For the Holidays with suggestions on being friendly to Mother Earth during a period of mass consumption.
- CleanBreak brings a more analytical approach to the recent announcement that Ontario will Hike Electricity Costs Substantially over the Long Term. The arguments make sense from a financial and sustainable perspective.
- PrarieEcoThrifter suggests ways to Use Kitchen Scraps Efficiently. I commented that we all remember to compost to get great enriched dirt in addition to Miss T’s great ideas.
Personal Finance
- CoupleMoney brings to light a how-to on Vacationing Debt Free. Wise words, as always from CoupleMoney.
- Ellen Roseman posted at Moneyville about the psychology behind Why We are Wired to be Lousy Advisors. 165,000 years of human evolution versus 400 years of markets - the facts are there.
- CanadianFinanceBlog lets us know that the all-in-one financial tracking suite Mint.com is now available in Canada.
Investing
- Adam Spence posts about A Primer on Impact Investing which, in my opinion, are under-appreciated vehicles to improve the communities we reside in.
- Posting at SeekingAlpha, Ton Konrad looks at solar stocks and whether or not Now is the Right Time to Invest after speaking to many industry experts. Tom is not ready to jump in given this industries recent woes, and neither are we.
- Be careful about seeking out cheap stocks. Some are worth it, some, not so much.
Frugality
- FinancialHighway gives some great ideas on how to Save on Holiday Decorating. Great ideas here, and never forget what all those lightbulbs do to your electric bill.
- Did you participate in the Black Friday deals? Was it worth the stress? BankNerd takes a closer look.
- Who doesn’t enjoy a good meal on the town? Boomer and Echo gives some solid advice, based on personal experience working in the industry on How to Save Money Eating at Restaurants.
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Thanks so much for mentioning my articles. Your blog is looking great. I love using up kitchen scraps as you can see.
Hi Miss T. Your articles are very much worth mentioning. We REALLY like your site and content you post. I’ve also linked you into our blog roll as one of our favs. If you’d only stop posting so much cool content i’d only need to link to one of your posts a week, but I think this is 2 weeks running i’ve included more than one post in our weekly roundup! Thanks again for checking us out.
Thanks for the mention! You mentioned that you agree with “two of the three”. Which ones? ;)
Very nice roundup, btw!
I’m not bullish on the US Dollar. The QE and the printing of money (out of thin air) has really damaged the USD in the International market. Perhaps 2012 it will rebound, but i’m not keen on it for 2011. Thanks for the props on the round up! Some awesome articles published last week! It took me some time to put this one together.
I don’t know. Maybe all of that is already priced in. When everyone becomes convinced something is going to happen… maybe all the information is already there, and it has nowhere else to go but up. ;)
I personally am not making the bet because I don’t like to speculate in that way, but it’s some food for thought. In the long run the USD will probably continue a downwards trend so long as there are no big game changers, either in US government entitlements/spending or technologically. We shall see ;)
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Speaking of socially responsible investing, I’ve often heard the argument that it makes no sense to try to avoid “bad” companies or invest in “responsible” companies when you’re investing in equities: unless you happen to be purchasing an initial offering, most purchases of equities are from other investors in the market. So you’re not actually helping or hurting the companies whose shares you’ve bought, because you haven’t actually given them any money. So for example, if I buy a bunch of shares of BP or Exxon/Mobil, I’m not helping them do bad things, I’ve just purchased some shares that another investor already owned and sold on the market. Similarly, if I buy shares of a company that is doing good things from a sustainability standpoint, I might not actually be helping them at all if I’m just purchasing shares that some other investor is selling on the market.
I’d love to see this argument explored further. It makes sense to me, but I don’t know enough about how markets work to know how true it is. It seems like direct investing (e.g., venture capital or community investing) might be a better approach if you want to actually support companies and projects that foster sustainability, and maybe it doesn’t matter what companies are in our equities portfolios.
Hi Brad, thanks for the detailed and thoughtful feedback.
In some future posts we will discuss our investment strategies and they may come to a bit of a surprise to some who are SRI advocates in the truest sense of the definition of SRI. Our goal is to be sustainable, both in our lifestyle, ethics and our investments - and this may not mean we always pick the “greenest” companies. We strive for balance in our life and financial realms. For instance, we drive a car. Should we, if we want to be truly “green” - nope. But we do have a car and use it minimally. We balance out the use of our car by participating in a slew of other activities to try to off-set this not-so-green activity (driving). Same with investing. Stay tuned for that post. I hope to post after we achieve a few more regular readers as I think it will be a very interesting discussion!
I don’t know. When you buy and sell a stock you are also affecting the market price. By buying stock, you are sending a signal to the market that you value that company at that price, and you are increasing demand which increases price. An increasing price might encourage other people to jump on, and if the company decides to issue new shares at the higher price then they can obviously raise more revenue.
Therefore, I think it does make a difference in the end since your mere act of buying or selling causes this butterfly effect to ripple out. :)
Thanks for the mention and for your comment on our site the other day. I’m checking out your blog, very interesting…keep it up!
Hi Echo! I really enjoy your blog and when it fits in with what we’re discussing on this site you can be certain we’ll comment and include you in our weekly round up!