How can I minimize the impact of the HST?
The HST is a sales tax levied on most goods and services. It is important to realize that in both BC and Ontario, the new HST does not (in most cases) result in an increase in sales tax paid. For example, in Ontario the PST is 8% and when combined with the GST the sales tax is 13%. With the HST, the GST and PST are replaced by a single HST of 13% so the tax bill does not change. Some services that were previously not subject to PST (such as mutual fund service fees and labour) will now be subject to the HST. So some things will increase. Over time, this should not have a material impact on the consumer due to the way businesses remit GST/HST.
One way to reduce the monthly payment due each month is to do everything to eliminate one of the loans. Make the minimum payment to the others, but put everything into eliminating one of the loans. Of course this assumes that you have separate loans for each year of school.  Make sure that in trying to get aggressive on the loan repayment that you don't neglect the saving for a down payment. Each dollar you can put down will save you money on the mortgage. It might also allow you to reduce the mortgage insurance payments. If you pay one student loan back aggressively but can't eliminate it you might be worse off because you spent your savings but it didn't help you qualify for the mortgage. One way to maximize the impact is to not make the extra payments until you are ready to apply for the mortgage. Ask the lender if you qualify with all the student loans, or if you need to eliminate one. If you don't need to eliminate a loan, then apply the extra funds to a larger down payment or pay points to reduce the interest rate. Taxes are insanely cheaper than West Coast and Northeast.  I believe they are requiring a city with at least 1 million pop and existing public transit (I read that as train/subway). That eliminates a lot of cities. You are correct that  it is rapidly catching up to some of the big names on prop cost, etc. You could use HBB and other similar funds that exchange distributions for capital gains.  There's HXT and HXS which is Canada and US equity markets.  The swap fee + mer is a little more than some funds except for HXT which is very cheap. There's a risk for long term holders that this may eventually get banned and you're forced to sell with a gain at the wrong time, but this won't matter much if you're planning on selling in a few years.  You have to pay the capital gains tax eventually.  Note, the tax on distributions is really a long term drag on performance and won't make a big difference in the short term. Raise wages by 20%, and cut the work force by 25%.  Drive suppliers from expensive countries if production, like China, and to lower cost options like Vietnam to cut costs by another 1-2%.    None if this is hard or complicated.  Your job: don't end up relying on this sort of job to provide for yourself.  Stay in school, kids.  And, pay for school in cash, which you can earn by working for $12 per hour at Target before you go making babies and what not.  If you can manage to control yourself for a few years. Until there is a significant price pressure, it’s always going to be cost prohibitive to build high in earthquake prone zones.  Those mitigation measures don’t come cheap at all.  As for the skyline, eh, that’s subjective. If the local culture values a “small town” or even bucolic feel, keeping buildings below tree lines isn’t regressive at all. Reducing your income by 20k is guaranteed to lower your tax bill by less than 20k (because there are no tax rates greater than 100%).  Your goal shouldn't be to minimize taxes but to maximize total net income. "I've seen various blog posts (mostly from Penelope Trunk) refer to ""optimizers"" versus ""settlers.""  The optimizers are the go-getters, the ones always on the move, trying to optimize their time, their life, their experience, etc.  They tend to be younger, on average, live in bigger cities, and on the whole, tend to be less happy.  The settlers are the ones who settle for what is, live in smaller cities, and tend to be happier, albeit ""less interesting"". Assuming that your idea of ""slowing down"" refers to moving away from that maximizer lifestyle, yes, I think you'll probably save money.  Apparently it costs money to be unhappy!  Going out for meals everyday, going out with friends every evening, shopping for the latest and greatest whatever, buying the newest gizmo, trading up your car every 3 years, traveling every other weekend to far-off places, making your life ""interesting"" - these all cost, and far more than their opposites. Take time to be happy with what you have - enjoy your comfortable and broken-in shoes, enjoy your paid-off car, enjoy some quiet alone time with a good (library) book, appreciate the delicate tastes of a homecooked meal over the in-your-face greasebomb of restaurant food, take a walk, shut off the latest Apple iDevice, and just be.  You'll save money, find calm, and feel refreshed. *Apologies for waxing philosophical - though the connotations of ""slowing down"" sort of insist on it :)." If you are restricting yourself to Scotiabank (Both retail banking and iTrade), your choices are pretty limited.  If you are exchanging more than CAD$25,000 to EUR without margin, you can call Scotiabank and ask for a quote with much lower spread than the published snapshots.  The closest ETF that you are talking about is RWE.B on TSX, which is First Asset MSCI Europe Low Risk Weighted ETF (Unhedged). You will be exposed to huge equity market risk and you should do it only if you intend to hold it for 3-5 years.  Another way of exchanging cash is without opening an account is through a currency exchange broker (search “toronto currency exchange” for relevant companies). First you send an email asking for a quote for the amount you wanted, then you send the CAD to them via cheque, and they would convert to EUR and deposit it to your EUR account at Scotiabank (retail banking). This method costs around 0.7% compared to 2.5% charged by Scotiabank. An example of these brokers is Interchange Currency Exchange in Toronto.  If you are hedging more than 125000 EUR, the proper method is to open an account that supports trading Currency Futures on Globex (US CME group). You can long Euro/Canadian Dollar Futures on margin.  The last method is to open an account at Interactive Brokers, put CAD in it, then borrow more CAD to buy EUR. This method costs a few dollars upon trading and the spread is negligible. You need to pay 2.25% per year margin interest through. I'll break it down into steps. Total gain/ loss for the whole thing is 5 CAD. You only have to worry about these calculations if you keep some USD and convert it at your leisure.  Or if you have a US dollar in your wallet from your last vacation. Don't forget to subtract commissions (converted to CAD of course). *Some people just use an average exchange rate for the whole year, which you can also get from the BoC. ^There's $200 of tax free gains allowed for pure currency transactions.  This allows small gains to be ignored. "I made an investing mistake many (eight?) years ago. Specifically, I invested a very large sum of money in a certain triple leveraged ETF (the asset has not yet been sold, but the value has decreased to maybe one 8th or 5th of the original amount). I thought the risk involved was the volatility--I didn't realize that due to the nature of the asset the value would be constantly decreasing towards zero! Anyhow, my question is what to do next?  I would advise you to sell it ASAP. You didn't mention what ETF it is, but chances are you will continue to lose money. The complicating factor is that I have since moved out of the United States and am living abroad (i.e. Japan). I am permanent resident of my host country, I have a steady salary that is paid by a company incorporated in my host country, and pay taxes to the host government. I file a tax return to the U.S. Government each year, but all my income is excluded so I do not pay any taxes. In this way, I do not think that I can write anything off on my U.S. tax return. Also, I have absolutely no idea if I would be able to write off any losses on my Japanese tax return (I've entrusted all the family tax issues to my wife). Would this be possible?  I can't answer this question but you seem to be looking for information on ""cross-border tax harvesting"". If Google doesn't yield useful results, I'd suggest you talk to an accountant who is familiar with the relevant tax codes. Are there any other available options (that would not involve having to tell my wife about the loss, which would be inevitable if I were to go the tax write-off route in Japan)? This is off topic but you should probably have an honest conversation with your wife regardless. If I continue to hold onto this asset the value will decrease lower and lower. Any suggestions as to what to do? See above: close your position ASAP For more information on the pitfalls of leveraged ETFs (FINRA) What happens if I hold longer than one trading day?  While there may be trading and hedging strategies that justify holding these investments longer than a day, buy-and-hold investors with an intermediate or long-term time horizon should carefully consider whether these ETFs are appropriate for their portfolio. As discussed above, because leveraged and inverse ETFs reset each day, their performance can quickly diverge from the performance of the underlying index or benchmark. In other words, it is possible that you could suffer significant losses even if the long-term performance of the index showed a gain." - This is a simple solution because you don't have to monitor a person's trades over time, or even their frequency. Implementing this in the modern computer exchanges seems trivial to me. Asking an exchange to monitor each trader's trades to ensure no HFTs seems full of loopholes (ask a computer to execute HFTs across multiple trader IDs, for example), and I think is a distraction suggestion.  - The reason that I think these taxes don't get implented is, as ChaosMotor correctly states, these taxes empower the government, which is something that a lot of political players (republicans, libertarians, and anarchists) don't want. I have always wondered what would happen if these fees were imposed by the government, implemented by the exchanges, but all money went to, say, the American Red Cross. I think that that would be a pretty good idea.  - Finally, I also want to mention that the government plays a large role in markets already. For example, enforcing contracts, managing bankrupcties, and preventing fraud are all things that the government does to ensure that markets work well. This is another simple thing the the government can do to reduce market uncertainty and make our financial markets work better. In my opinion, I would: If the income is from this year, you can tax shelter $59,000 plus somewhere between $50,000 and $300,000 depending on age, in a 401(k) and defined benefit plan. This will take care of the current tax burden. Afterwards, set aside your remaining tax liability in cash. The after-tax money should be split into cash and the rest into assets. The split depends on your level of risk tolerance. Build a core portfolio using highly liquid and non-correlated ETFs (think SPY, TLT, QQQ, ect.). Once these core positions are locked in. Start lowering your basis by systematically selling a 1 standard deviation call in the ETF per 100 units of underlying. This will reduce your upside, extend your breakeven, and often yield steady income. Similarly, you can sell 1 standard deviation iron condors should the VIX be high enough. Point is, you have the money to deploy a professional-type, systematic strategy that is non-correlated, and income generating. In general you must charge HST on and after July 1, 2010. However, in the case of delivered sales, you must charge HST if the transfer of goods will happen on or after July 1,2010. Example:  A person comes into my hypothetical store on June 29, 2010 and buys a couch.  They opt to have it delivered by my truck on July 2, 2010.  I should charge HST on this purchase, not GST/PST. References: My super fund and I would say many other funds give you one free switch of strategies per year.  Some suggest you should change from high growth option to a more balance option once you are say about 10 to 15 years from retirement, and then change to a more capital guaranteed option a few years from retirement. This is a more passive approach and has benefits as well as disadvantages. The benefit is that there is not much work involved, you just change your investment option based on your life stage, 2 to 3 times during your lifetime. This allows you to take more risk when you are young to aim for higher returns, take a balanced approach with moderate risk and returns during the middle part of your working life, and take less risk with lower returns (above inflation) during the latter part of your working life. A possible disadvantage of this strategy is you may be in the higher risk/ higher growth option during a market correction and then change to a more balanced option just when the market starts to pick up again. So your funds will be hit with large losses whilst the market is in retreat and just when things look to be getting better you change to a more balanced portfolio and miss out on the big gains. A second more active approach would be to track the market and change investment option as the market changes. One approach which shouldn't take much time is to track the index such as the ASX200 (if you investment option is mainly invested in the Australian stock market) with a 200 day Simple Moving Average (SMA). The concept is that if the index crosses above the 200 day SMA the market is bullish and if it crosses below it is bearish. See the chart below:  This strategy will work well when the market is trending up or down but not very well when the market is going sideways, as you will be changing from aggressive to balanced and back too often. Possibly a more appropriate option would be a combination of the two. Use the first passive approach to change investment option from aggressive to balanced to capital guaranteed with your life stages, however use the second active approach to time the change. For example, if you were say in your late 40s now and were looking to change from aggressive to balanced in the near future, you could wait until the ASX200 crosses below the 200 day SMA before making the change. This way you could capture the majority of the uptrend (which could go on for years) before changing from the high growth/aggressive option to the balanced option. If you where after more control over your superannuation assets another option open to you is to start a SMSF, however I would recommend having at least $300K to $400K in assets before starting a SMSF, or else the annual costs would be too high as a percentage of your total super assets. If peak oil is a concern, hedge against the effects of high oil prices.  Reduce your dependence on the gas pump by moving closer to the places you normally drive, or adjust your lifestyle so that you need less.  Buy things now that depend on fossil fuels (there's a long list). If instability is a concern, invest in a place where the chance of instability is less. If a freak event is a concern, think through what the consequences would be, and hedge accordingly. Etc. Etc.