Money Sense has been a very inspirational magazine to me. Whenever I find the latest magazine in my mailbox I stop whatever I’m currently reading to read it from cover to cover. Their articles cover everything related to money, including leveraged investing, financial makeovers, real estate and rating stocks. They also have interesting articles on buying cars, surviving the current recession and rating the best places in Canada to live. One of the most eyeopening articles has been their Couch Potato strategy.

When I first read about the Couch Potato strategy I realized how simple investing can and should be. The basic premise is that by investing in ETFs or TD’s eFunds you can build a portfolio that equals the various indexes, 20% in Canadian equities, 20% in US equities, 20% in international equities and 40% in Canadian bonds. All with management expense ratios (MER) under 0.5%. While you won’t do any better than the market, you also won’t do any worse, just average. This is better than it sounds since, as a whole, the market is the average, but in regular mutual funds you’re getting the average minus expenses that equal more than 2%.

I highly recommend that you have a look at Money Sense magazine.