Comfort with Money

The concept of “a trust” as opposed to the fairly simple concept of “trust” dates back for well over a thousand years. It is solidly entrenched in all civilized legal systems and I suspect solidly entrenched in uncivilized systems as well. The essence is simple – a person or an organization holds property, including money of course, in their own name but it doesn’t belong to them; they are simply a trustee for some other person or organization, namely the “beneficiary”. The d

In financial terms, opportunity cost is best defined as the money you did not make but could have made if you invested it in something that made and will continue to make an income (including value accretion), instead of indulging in a money splurging whim or, more likely, in buying goods or services that you do not NEED (or perhaps it should be do not WANT?). If you’re driving a Lamborghini instead of a Holden the dollar difference in price would probably provide sufficient

The introduction of “Imputation Credits” into the tax system a few years ago got rid of the most blatant and long-standing examples of double taxation in our economy. Even governing politicians could no longer live with the fact that if a company had paid tax on its earnings it was unreasonable to tax after tax earnings (aka dividends) again. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to think of any situation in which taxing the same income twice is justifiable. BUT there is one cur

Dollar-cost averaging refers to the practice of systematically investing equal amounts, spaced out over regular intervals, regardless of price. I’m sure that it is more than 20 years since I first heard the term and after repeating what I had heard, namely that it “is a foolproof system”, I arranged to prove to myself that the system is indeed foolproof. All the guesswork is taken out of using the system and it works as well with a single investment as it does with a managed