First time investing advice (Canada)
Question One: Question Two: Your best reference for this would be a brokerage account with data privileges in the markets you wish to trade. Failing that, I would reference the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group (CME Group) website. Question Three: Considering future tuition costs and being Canadian, you are eligible to open a Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP). While contributions to this plan are not tax deductible, any taxes on income earned through investments within the fund are deferred until the beneficiary withdraws the funds. Since the beneficiary will likely be in a lower tax bracket at such a time, the sum will likely be taxed at a lower rate, assuming that the beneficiary enrolls in a qualifying post secondary institution. The Canadian government also offers the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG) in which the federal government will match 20% of the first $2500 of your annual RESP contribution up to a maximum of $500. Two to three years? That is one long gestation period!  :^) Welcome.  Congratulations on taking savings into your own hands, you are a winner for taking responsibility for your, and your family's life. If I was you my first priority would be to pay off your car and never buy one on time again.  Or you could sell it and buy something with cash if that would be easier. It is tremendous that you are thinking and planning.  You are already ahead of most people.  Are you working on your basement as you have time/money like when work might be slow?  If so great idea.
A) Wrong subreddit. There's probably a legal advice Canada one you should check out.   B) You're a cashier. No one cares about your involvement in taxing products/customers. Unless you're directly pocketing money the most you could be is out of a job.   C) If you're part of a chain store there is a REALLY good chance they have their inventory/sales numbers looked at regularly by extremely qualified people.   Conclusion: Customer was being a dick for no reason. First, as others have commented, the idea that getting a mortgage to buy a house is always a good idea is false.  It depends on a number of factors including the current interest rate, what you think the future interest rate will do over the life of your mortgage, the relative cost of renting vs. buying, and how long you would stay in the house that you bought. To the extent that a mortgage for a house is more often recommended than buying other goods on credit, it is for these reasons: Except for #1 above, you could and can find other situations where taking a loan makes more sense than buying in cash.  This more true if you have the resources and the skill to invest money at a rate that beats the interest rate you pay to the creditor.  The general advice not to try this rests in the fact that most people don't have the resources or the skill to actually make this pay off, especially on high-interest rate loans or over short time periods. Having lived in both places, I have to say you can find a higher income in the US for the same job and can live in a small town versus having to live in a big city in Canada to find decent salaries.  For similar sized cities, the cost of housing is significantly lower in the US than Canada.  That is your biggest factor in cost of living.  If you are thinking of NYC or San Francisco, there are no comparable size cities in Canada and you would probably be better off in Canada.   My tax preparer was amazed at how much I paid in Capital Gains taxes when I left Canada.  Maybe it is different now but I doubt it. The biggest free lunch in the US is a generous capital gains exemption when you sell your primary residence without any lifetime cap or cap on the number of times you can do it.  There are rules on how long you have to live in it before selling. For investment real estate, all expenses are deductible in addition to fictional depreciation so with a mortgage you can have positive cash flow and pay no income tax.  You can keep doing tax deferred exchanges into bigger and bigger rentals.  When you are close to retirement, you can exchange into your ultimate beach home, rent it out a few years, then convert to a primary residence. "Its important to note that aggression, or better yet volatility, does not necessarily offer higher returns.  One can find funds that have a high beta (measure of volatility) and lower performance then stock funds with a lower beta.   Additionally, to Micheal's point, better performance could be undone by higher fees.   Age is unimportant when deciding the acceptable volatility.  Its more important as to when the money is to be available.  If there might be an immediate need, or even less than a year, then stick to a savings account.  Five years, some volatility can be accepted, if 10 years or more seek to maximize rate of return. For example assume a person is near retirement age.  They are expected to have 50K per year expenses.  If they have 250K wrapped up in CDs and savings, and another 250K in some conservative investments, they can, and should, be ""aggressive"" with any remaining money.     On the contrary a person your age that is savings for a house intends to buy one in three years.  Savings for the down payment should be pretty darn conservative.   Something like 75% in savings accounts, and maybe 25% in some conservative investments.  As the time to buy approaches they can pull the money out of the conservative investments at a optimal time. Also you should not be investing without an emergency fund in place.  Get that done first, then look to invest. If your friend does not understand these basic concepts there is no point in paying for his advice." I would read any and all of the John Bogle books.  Essentially:  We know the market will rise and fall.  We just don't know when specifically.   For the most part it is impossible to time the market. He would advocate an asset allocation approach to investing.  So much to bonds, tbills, S&P500 index, NASDAQ index.  In your case you could start out with 10% of your portfolio each in S&P500 and NASDAQ.  Had you done that, you would have achieved growth of 17% and 27% respectively.  The growth on either one of those funds would have probably dwarfed the growth on the entire rest of your portfolio.  BTW 2013 and 2014 were also very good years, with 2015 being mostly flat. In the past you have avoided risk in the market to achieve the detrimental effects of inflation and stagnant money.  Don't make the same mistakes going forward. "Don't do it until you have educated yourself enough to know what you are doing. I hope you won't take this personally, but given that you are wandering around asking random strangers on the Internet how to ""get into investing,"" I feel safe in concluding that you are by no means a sophisticated enough investor to be choosing individual investments, nor should you be trusting financial advisors to choose investments for you. Believe me, they do not have your interests at heart. I usually advise people in your position to start by reading one book: A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel. Once you've read the book by Malkiel you'll understand that the best strategy for all but the most sophisticated investors is to buy an index fund, which simply purchases a portfolio of ALL available stocks without trying to pick winners and losers. The best index funds are at Vanguard (there is also a Vanguard site for non-US residents). Vanguard is one of the very, very, very few honest players in the business. Unlike almost any other mutual fund, Vanguard is owned by its investors, so it has no profit motive. They never try to pick individual stocks, so they don't have to pay fancy high-priced analysts to pick stocks. If you find it impossible to open a Vanguard account from wherever you're living, find a local brokerage account that will allow you to invest in the US stock market. Many Vanguard mutual funds are available as ETFs which means that you buy and sell them just like any other stock on the US market, which should be easy to do from any reasonably civilized place." Are you trolling right now? If you knew what you were doing when you made that bet, you might consider reinvesting that money.   24yr olds don't buy first-time houses anymore. Houses today are meant for existing landowners and wealthy foreign investors willing to pay cash. It's a good question, I am amazed how few people ask this. To summarise: is it really worth paying substantial fees to arrange a generic investment though your high street bank? Almost certainly not. However, one caveat: You didn't mention what kind of fund(s) you want to invest in, or for how long. You also mention an “advice fee”. Are you actually getting financial advice – i.e. a personal recommendation relating to one or more specific investments, based on the investments' suitability for your circumstances – and are you content with the quality of that advice? If you are, it may be worth it. If they've advised you to choose this fund that has the potential to achieve your desired returns while matching the amount of risk you are willing to take, then the advice could be worth paying for. It entirely depends how much guidance you need. Or are you choosing your own fund anyway? It sounds to me like you have done some research on your own, you believe the building society adviser is “trying to sell” a fund and you aren't entirely convinced by their recommendation. If you are happy making your own investment decisions and are merely looking for a place to execute that trade, the deal you have described via your bank would almost certainly be poor value – and you're looking in the right places for an alternative. ~ ~ ~ On to the active-vs-passive fund debate: That AMC of 1.43% you mention would not be unreasonable for an actively managed fund that you strongly feel will outperform the market. However, you also mention ETFs (a passive type of fund) and believe that after charges they might offer at least as good net performance as many actively managed funds. Good point – although please note that many comparisons of this nature compare passives to all actively managed funds (the good and bad, including e.g. poorly managed life company funds). A better comparison would be to compare the fund managers you're considering vs. the benchmark – although obviously this is past performance and won't necessarily be repeated. At the crux of the matter is cost, of course. So if you're looking for low-cost funds, the cost of the platform is also significant. Therefore if you are comfortable going with a passive investment strategy, let's look at how much that might cost you on the platform you mentioned, Hargreaves Lansdown. Two of the most popular FTSE All-Share tracker funds among Hargreaves Lansdown clients are: (You'll notice they have slightly different performance btw. That's a funny thing with trackers. They all aim to track but have a slightly different way of trading to achieve it.) To hold either of these funds in a Hargreaves Lansdown account you'll also pay the 0.45% platform charge (this percentage tapers off for portolio values higher than £250,000 if you get that far). So in total to track the FTSE All Share with these funds through an HL account you would be paying: This gives you an indication of how much less you could pay to run a DIY portfolio based on passive funds. NB. Both the above are a 100% equities allocation with a large UK companies weighting, so won't suit a lower risk approach. You'll also end up invested indiscriminately in eg. mining, tobacco, oil companies, whoever's in the index – perhaps you'd prefer to be more selective. If you feel you need financial advice (with Nationwide) or portfolio management (with Nutmeg) you have to judge whether these services are worth the added charges. It sounds like you're not convinced! In which case, all the best with a low-cost passive funds strategy.