Trevor Abes: Writer

December 27, 2020

For the Best

I asked you for regular alone time after our time

My anxiety needed it to properly relax after work

 

I didn’t have the foresight to factor in how that meant 

We’d have less nights to lose track of time together

 

I was thinking about what I needed to feel rested

I wasn’t worried about you no longer making room for my loner self

About each of us winding down the night alone

Birthing a little emptiness in you, slowly spreading

 

I mistook you not mentioning it for contentment

You may have wanted me to seek you out more on my own

 

I’m sorry we weren’t more careful about solitude and socializing 

Our opposing energy sources

 

How I’d ask you more if I could make you happier 

If I had the chance

 

Which would have probably led us to break up sooner

Knowing I can’t rewire myself to share you and be happy

It would have been for the best

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December 23, 2020

An Introvert’s Guide to Falling in Love With an Extrovert

Be ready to let them go. 

While you’re OK with them being your whole world, their happiness is based on exploration.

Remember, they’ll be at their most defensive when they feel trapped while you’re too blissed out on having nailed down a commitment for forever to notice that you’re likely to confuse it with a guarantee and rarely revisit to refortify.

Pay attention to that feeling of dread you get about having to be social for an extended period of time. Now think about them feeling your absence each time you’re not at an outing exploring with them. Internalize the compromise implied here. To stay together, you will have to be uncomfortable for them a lot of the time.

You will have to be that dashing romantic Casanova person more often than you think you need to. Giving each other space is all well and good, but you need to let your person know what they mean to you in more spontaneous ways. 

Palm the small of their back and gently pull them into you when you get home, even though your slushy boots are messing up the foyer floor. 

Touch and profess without formality, breath in their ear, peck on the neck. Let them feel you instead of merely knowing you are there. Make unexpected plans, 

But don’t neglect the need for a backup, a support network that is wide enough for them not to fall into the illusion that they’re almost exclusively responsible for your sanity.

Regularly imagine ways your lives can truly resemble interlaced fingers knowing they get their energy from other people while you get yours from being alone.

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December 22, 2020

Young Canadian Investor #17 — Why I Write With Young People in Mind

It may or may not be obvious by now, but as a young person time is still capable of being very kind to you. It can still heal all your non-lethal wounds, just by letting it pass, because you have so much of it still to spend.

Go forth and get yours, lil cub.

When it comes to investing, having healthy time reserves is essential to actually making money. Stocks have a positive expected return only over very long periods—somewhere around 7% per year for a globally diversified stock portfolio over a couple decades—but they’ll go up and down unpredictably year to year. You’re in a fantastic situation here because, as a twenty- or thirty-something, you can simply keep investing and let those up and down years eventually add up to money in your pocket while you focus on living your life.

Another reason I’m interested in helping young people like myself invest is how boring all this stuff can get. I happen to be someone who’s blessed with an appreciation for economics, personal finance, and business analysis, but 90% of the people my age that I know can’t take more than a few minutes of investing talk without their eyes going glazy. I think it feels like work or grade school, something you’re obliged to partake in without particularly wanting to. My intention with Young Canadian Investor is to convey basic investment knowledge in accessible language to hopefully knock that 90% down in a meaningful way.

One more point worth mentioning is how nonurgent it can feel for a 27-year-old to put money away they’re only going to use 10-30 years from now. It’s much more enticing to splurge now than to delay gratification for your future self by investing 40 of those $60 in your wallet. And make no mistake, you should splurge to a degree. Life is short and it’s a gift meant to be savored. You just want to take steps to continue savoring comfortably well into your old age, and investing is one way to ensure that happens by minimizing your chances of going broke.

Being young is only full of advantages if you know how to recognize them. I’m just here to point one of them out for you. It’s the same reason I wrote my little book, Nine Steps to Successful Investing: A Guide for Young Canadians. I wanted to make it easier for people my age to cushion the expansive futures before them with more financial security, at least compared to not investing at all. Feel free to give it a shot and to ask any questions you may have in the comments.

And I do mean any, no matter how basic, because we all gotta start somewhere.

I’m also available to teach you 1-on-1 over Zoom if you prefer.

Disclaimer: This article is meant for general education purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice as I am unaware of your personal situation. Consult with a professional who abides by a fiduciary standard before making any investment decisions.

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December 19, 2020

Young Canadian Investor #16 — The Costs of Not Investing

Why I Invest

I don’t know about you, fellow twenty or thirty-something, but my main goal right now is to have the freedom to do what I want with my time.

As a writer, I know that working alone isn’t going to get me that freedom—unless something I create takes off, catches loads of public attention, and grows to complement my history of barely livable wages and price-per-word rates. That means I need to be creative about the number and nature of income streams I put into place. That’s where investing comes in.

Here I am being writerly at Word Sound Power Open Mic in Toronto.

I’ve been diligently investing into a couple tax-free savings accounts for the past two years. I own mostly exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that hold the global stock and bond markets with about a fifth of my portfolio in individual stocks. As businesses improve and their stock prices rise over the long term, my investments will grow for me on their own while I focus on the rest of my life. It’s a small total right now—the entire portfolio provides me with about $1000 of dependable income per year— but it will eventually become enough to let me focus on putting words together full time. That’s why I do it.

Here are five more general reasons I invest and you should too.

  1. Inflation is the phenomenon of the prices of things going up over time. In Canada, it’s about 2 percent per year—about 3.3 percent when you factor taxes in. In other words, your cash buys you about 3 percent less stuff every year you hold on to it. Conversely, it’s reasonable to expect that owning the global stock and bond markets through ETFs will earn you around 7 percent per year over a couple decades. By simple addition, investing puts you 7-3.3=3.7 percent ahead.
  2. If you don’t invest, you may have to confront the reality of Unfulfilled Goals. And we’re talking big goals here, like a car, a down payment on a house, tuition for a degree, or the head start you need to start that family. It’s a lot easier to accumulate 20 thousand dollars over a handful of years if that money is invested and growing, as opposed to you putting it in a savings account that makes you 0.01 percent per year.
  3. The difference between peace of mind and Financial Insecurity is having enough money to meet your basic needs, say for six months, just in case you fall on hard times. This emergency fund is insurance against the ups and downs of life and everyone should work toward building one. But once you have that emergency fund sitting safely in cash, it’s important to start investing and building your nest egg for the future. The simple fact is this: when it’s time for a pivot in your professional or personal life, having tens of thousands of dollars around to help you achieve it will make a huge difference.
  4. Living paycheck to paycheck entails A Poorer Quality of Life. One where there isn’t a whole lot of breathing room at the end of the month after accounting for expenses. That said, a diligent investing plan is one way to generate more room for you to spend your time as you please. What would life be like if your investment portfolio provided you with even $200 of extra income per month? What kind of pressure would that relieve? If you start investing today, you can get there.
  5. The biggest consequence of not investing is the Inability to Retire. A good rule of thumb is to multiply your current salary by 25 to get a sense of how much you need to stop working at 65 years old. Whatever that number is for you, counting on investment growth to reach it is a lot easier than putting your cash in a savings account or under your mattress where it’ll lose money to inflation over time.

If you’re interested in learning the ins and outs of investing prudently to meet your financial goals, you can read my new investing guide for young Canadians. It’s short, to-the-point, and will set you up for making the most of your money regardless of how much you have. Feast your eyes on the luxuriously cheesy cover below.

 

I’m also available to teach you 1-on-1 over Zoom if you prefer.

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments!

Disclaimer: This article is meant for general education purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice as I am unaware of your personal situation. Consult with a professional who abides by a fiduciary standard before making any investment decisions.

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December 12, 2020

Young Canadian Investor #15 – Trusted Financial Sources

You can’t infer trust from any random person dressed in formal wear eager to tell you where the stock market is headed. This is especially true in a world where financial television stations like CNBC, Bloomberg, and BNN bestow their airtime on experts who pull economic predictions out of their behinds and aren’t held accountable for being unreliable.

What you’re looking for are financial professionals who can be objective with you because they don’t have to choose between giving you useful advice, or selling you products and services, even if you don’t need them, to ensure that there’s food on the table.

It’s hard to comb through the media landscape to identify people who focus on the needs of everyday investors, the ones who never learned money management in school, and treat the financial field as they do the medical one—with unwavering trust—when most financial advisors in Canada are actually under no obligation to put your bottom line before theirs. In the interest of facilitating the process, get to know a handful of people who have shaped my investing mind with solid fundamentals for long-term success.

common sense investing

Ben Felix is a financial advisor who runs a YouTube channel called Common Sense Investing. It’s great for in-depth but digestible explanations of core investing concepts, plus a fair amount of content that will take you far into the investing weeds. I like Ben’s work because he backs his points up with academic research and isn’t afraid to call out active managers for lining their pockets with client money before bothering to grow what’s left over. He’s also very blunt, which I find refreshing. All he’s trying to “sell you on” is the upside of taking the reins of your financial future.

canadian couch potatoOne reason Ben can be so forthright about his peers is that he works for a firm that is way more transparent about its strategies and fees than the major Canadian banks. One of his colleagues there, Dan Bortolotti, is the creator of the Canadian Couch Potato, a pioneering blog and podcast dedicated to helping everyday Canadians understand the benefits of investing through index funds. Unlike picking individual stocks and relying on your research to ensure satisfactory returns, index funds allow you to own a piece of the global stock market for cheap, thus hitching your money for a ride on capitalism and human progress as you save more of it. Dan is one of the leading index fund proponents in Canada; a contrarian stance in a country where most advisors steer clear of index funds because they get paid the least for recommending them.

plain bagel

Richard Coffin, an investment analyst in Ottawa, operates a YouTube channel called The Plain Bagel. He uses his platform to run through basic investment concepts, much like Felix, but in a broader, more accessible style that emphasizes humor and entertainment. His Q&As and April Fools videos are prime examples of this. If you’re as new as it gets to stocks and bonds, I’d say start here.

money school canada

Preet Banerjee, a popular financial consultant and speaker known for his many media appearances, sits somewhere between Coffin and Felix when it comes to pedagogical use. On Money School Canada, he pairs his slow and measured approach to unraveling terminology with your favourite teacher’s enthusiasm and production value that helps break everything down into constituent elements.

Does anyone worthwhile come to mind to complement this post? Feel free to drop their name in the comments. Everyone’s journey to financial independence will have its own unique twists and turns and I’d love to know who’s been there to help you along the way.

If audio is more your thing, check out my favourite investing podcasts part one and part two.

If you’ve been searching for a short, no-nonsense guide to walk you through the process of index investing, you can pick up a copy of my new book, Nine Steps to Successful Investing: A Guide for Young Canadians.

I’m also available to teach you 1-on-1 over Zoom if you prefer.

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments!

Disclaimer: This article is meant for general education purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice as I am unaware of your personal situation. Consult with a professional who abides by a fiduciary standard before making any investment decisions.

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December 5, 2020

Young Canadian Investor #14 – The Downsides of Stock Picking or Active Management

If you’ve ever thought it’d be a good idea to pick your own stocks, as opposed to investing in broad index funds, I’m here to dissuade you.

1200px-Wall_Street_bubbles_-_Always_the_same_-_Keppler_1901

Illustration by Udo Keppler.

  1. For one, if you invest in a fund that tracks the global stock market, it’ll never go to 0 unless the world ends. If you buy $1000 worth of shares in a single company you believe in, on the other hand, it could fall on hard times, causing the share price to plummet, and with it your ownership stake.
  2. The only way stock picking can work out is if you treat the endeavor like index investing, by which I mean owning stakes in a diversified group of businesses and holding them for decades. To follow through here, your research needs to support the long-term success of these businesses in spite of temporary drops in prices per share. It’s common for great investments to drop by 50% or more on their way to paying off for you. Will you be able to keep your convictions and hold on, or will you cave at the first whiff of trouble, make up an excuse, and panic sell at a low price like most self-directed investors? What makes you so sure that the investments that have caught your eye aren’t just the latest overpriced fads everyone and their grandmothers are joining the herd to own?
  3. To produce high-quality research, you need to take the time to learn how to evaluate a business as it stands to make a judgement about its future prospects. If you’re interested in building up savings over the long term so you can live with dignity through your golden years, this is not something you can do casually when the fancy arises. You’ll have to immerse yourself in the intricacies of balance sheets, income statements, cash flow statements, and quarterly and annual reports at a minimum to give yourself a chance.
  4. As an active investor trying to earn returns above the global stock market as a whole, or at the very least your national stock market, history is decidedly against you. Over 10 years, you’re looking at about a 20% success rate among professionals, with the percentage dwindling the farther out in time you go. Compare this to participating in your national stock market by owning an index fund that tracks it, which will provide you with that market’s return year in and year out minus a very small fee.
  5. Speaking of fees, one of the hardest parts about making active investing profitable is keeping commissions under control. You usually pay $5-$10 per transaction when buying or selling stocks, while index funds can be bought on Questrade for free.
  6. It’s also important to realize that, if you buy individual stocks in your RRSP or TFSA and they permanently tank, you can’t get that contribution room back. It might be hard to feel strongly about the benefits of accounts where investments can grow tax-free, especially if you’re young and justifiably all about the now, but it’s basically free money. You’d be doing your future self a huge disservice by letting it go to waste.

Still feel like building wealth by buying shares in individual companies? It’s not that it’s impossible to do well for yourself in this way. There are plenty of examples out there of people who dedicate their lives to investing through in-depth research and make a decent living off gains, as opposed to investment management fees they’re paid whether or not they produce satisfactory returns for their clients. If you’re consumed by your passion for picking stocks, by all means, have at it. But if you’re not, I wish you more than luck.

If you’re interested in learning how to invest through index funds and you’re looking for a concise guide to see you through the process—from establishing financial goals, to opening an RRSP or TFSA, to purchasing your investments and caring for them year to year—you’ll likely find my new book to be of service. It’s called Nine Steps to Successful Investing: A Guide for Young Canadians. It uses plain language, and draws from some of Canada’s leading voices in personal finance, to set you up with the fundamentals you need to grow your money as a self-directed investor.

I’m also available to teach you 1-on-1 over Zoom if you prefer.

Feel free to drop your questions in the comments.

Disclaimer: This article is meant for general education purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice as I am unaware of your personal situation. Consult with a professional who abides by a fiduciary standard before making any investment decisions.

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November 28, 2020

Young Canadian Investor #13 — The Benefits of Delayed Gratification

Far be it from me to tell you to not indulge in the pleasures of youth, whatever those amount to for you. You need to fill your time with experiences now to be able to look back fondly on them later when energy, passion, and priorities have evolved you into a different person. Don’t worry, I’m not here to be a wet blanket.

What I’m here for is to illustrate how investing is the bridge between your horny, idealistic, sleep-deprived self to the person you’re going to become after you’ve lived your fair share. It may not be immediately worth it, but investing now can lead to opportunities that aren’t presently available to you.

“The answer is dreams” — Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart.

If you follow through on some of my suggestions about saving money, invest in stocks for at least a decade, and stick to making regular contributions, that extra 40 or 50 grand just lying around, while unimaginable now, will be available for you to take the next major step in your life. That may be starting a business, starting over somewhere new, or putting a down payment on a house, really any fantasy turned into tangible reality due to the benefits of compound interest and living below your means.

If I may get a little heady and sentimental, what do you dream about? If I may get a little more to the point, you already know that time is an inexorable progression toward pushing daisies, so what are you waiting on to move closer to the life you want?

It’s really all about rustling up your first $1000, investing it in a TFSA, and contributing to it from there until you reach your target number. If you think this investing business is too complicated for you, I beg to differ. My new book, Nine Steps to Successful Investing: A Guide for Young Canadians, will walk you through the process in plain language in no more than an afternoon. Give it a go if you’re ready for your nest egg to grow at a considerably greater clip than the pennies your bank throws into your savings account every month.

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments!

Disclaimer: This article is meant for general education purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice as I am unaware of your personal situation. Consult with a professional who abides by a fiduciary standard before making any investment decisions.

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November 21, 2020

Young Canadian Investor #12 – How to Save $1000

The smallest amount of money you can invest in Canada without having to pay a fee for the privilege—usually $25 per quarter—or commissions on transactions—$5-$10 a pop—is a grand at a brokerage house called Questrade. A brokerage house simply provides a platform where investment buyers and sellers can make their orders.

The problem here is that, if your investments fall below $1000 in any given quarter, Questrade will charge you the fee unless you make one trade in any amount. To avoid all this time wasted monitoring your balance, what you really need is to start investing with an amount that could fluctuate in value, due to the ups and downs of the stock market, without much of a risk that you’ll fall below the threshold. Seeing as 50% drops occur about once every decade or more, this post should be called How to Save $2000, stock market history considered.

If you have cable, you’ve probably seen Questrade’s commercials where young 20- or 30-somethings sass some sense into older, crustier financial advisors for their high fees. As the broker with the lowest minimum in the land, this is entirely by design. Compared to the big banks, where $5000, $10000, and $15000 minimums are prohibitively in place, youngins have nowhere else to turn. To be fair, you could invest in a TFSA at CIBC with no fee and a $500 minimum, but you’d still have to pay $7 per transaction. Question is, how do you get that two grand in your hand in the first place? Ponder my suggestions below.

  1. If you receive a regular paycheck, shift 5%-10% of it into a savings account each time. The amount should be small enough that you won’t feel like it’s missing.
  2. Think about the money you spend on personal entertainment like books, music, games, and eating out, and make small cuts such that you end up with a reasonable bit of cash, say $100, by the end of three months. Obviously up the amount if you are able.
  3. If you eat out as a matter of course, learn to cook. Seriously, be willing to mess up, experiment until you find your comfort zone, and it will pay off. When you cook from home, you don’t charge yourself extra to pay for rent and staff salaries. That means your fried chicken dinner will cost you $5 instead of $15.
  4. Remove brand influences from your life by shopping for generic brands and netting yourself the savings, which can be 25% or more.
  5. Consider subjecting yourself to ads and using the free version of Spotify for a good long stretch. You could also cancel your Netflix or Crave subscription and opt for your local library’s free streaming service. You’ll probably only get to stream a limited number of recordings per month, so complementing your viewing with creative YouTubing would become a must.
  6. Adopt a big-picture perspective and identify things you spend money on but don’t use and/or need. Beyond mere entertainment, this could include balance protection insurance on your bank account, a gym membership, or extra cellphone plan features bloating your monthly bill.
  7. Give yourself time to accomplish this goal, even if it’s a year or more. Your means are what they are and improving them requires you to simply begin.

While this list is by no means exhaustive, it should add up to meaningful savings over a reasonably short timeframe if you put it into practice as a whole.

If you’re curious about investing and have been searching for a short, no-nonsense guide to help you get started, have a look at my new e-book, Nine Steps to Successful Investing: A Guide for Young Canadians.

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments!

Disclaimer: This article is meant for general education purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice as I am unaware of your personal situation. Consult with a professional who abides by a fiduciary standard before making any investment decisions.

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November 15, 2020

Young Canadian Investor #11 — My New Investing Guide for the Youngins (of Which I Am One)

Quite thrilled to announce that I have a new book out called Nine Steps to Successful Investing: A Guide for Young Canadians. Its purpose is to walk you through the investing process, from figuring out what you’re saving for, to opening an RRSP or TFSA, to putting your money to work in the world’s stock and bond markets through index funds.

I tried to be efficient with words and not wander down many rabbit holes to avoid trying your attention with subject matter that tends to put most youngins to sleep. Explanations are just as long as they need to be with links to digestible sources for anyone interested in learning more.

If you’ve been thinking about investing, have the sense that you’d like to approach it yourself—as opposed to hiring a financial advisor—and prefer a lean primer as opposed to 300 pages of fluff, this book will put you on the right track in no more than an afternoon.

You can find copies here.

 

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August 22, 2020

I have three fiction pieces in The Temz Review!

Catch me with some flash fiction in the latest from The Temz Review out of London, Ontario. Read it here.

temz

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July 30, 2020

Past Contributor Reading Series: Trevor Abes

Here I am reading my poem, “Oh, Just Browsing”, as part of untethered magazine’s Past Contributor Reading Series. The poem is included in my prose collection, The New Frontiers of Conceptual Art, which is available through the ‘Shop’ tab above.

untetheredmagazine's avataruntethered magazine

Today in PCRS, Trevor Abes reading his poem “Oh, Just Browsing” from untethered vol. 2.1

Trevor Abes is an artist from Toronto with a fondness for writing essays and poetry. He was part of the winning ensemble at the 2015 SLAMtario Spoken Word Festival, and competed in both the National Poetry Slam and the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word as part of the Toronto Poetry Slam team. His work has appeared in Torontoist, (parenthetical), untethered, Sewer Lid, Spacing Magazine, Descant Magazine, The Rusty Toque, The Theatre Reader, Mooney on Theatre, The Toronto Review of Books, Hart House Review, and Sequential: Canadian Comics News & Culture, among others. His first full-length collection of prose, The New Frontiers Of Conceptual Art, is available through trevorabes.com. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @TrevorAbes

Watch and read this piece below!

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May 8, 2020

New Book Out Today: The New Frontiers Of Conceptual Art

My book of fictional ekphrases, The New Frontiers Of Conceptual Art, is now available as a digital copy.

It’s inspired by the people I met while working at the gift shop in Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital.

In case the term is unfamiliar, an ekphrasis is a literary description of or commentary on a work of art. In the case of NFCA, the artists and artworks are fictional but based on real people.

You can read sample pieces and grab your copy here.

nfca cover

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