Thanks for the ongoing information. My husband and I committed to sitting down for at least an hour a day and continuing to learn more. An hour doesn't sound like a lot, but when you feel overwhelmed by something it is a long time to feel confused. We slowly started to understand things better by making notes and tagging each other in resources we found on the net. We use googledocs and have a shared folder so that if one of us found something we could notify the other even if we were in different locations for the day. My husband wraps his head around this a lot better than I do and is very patient about explaining it to me. I am actually very smart and understand when I read enough and discuss it. Much like how I am managing our experiment in CC churning, he is taking the lead on investing. We ensure the other knows what we are thinking and we each get a chance to question or add to, the other's recommendations. Right before we made the leap, we sat down and evaluated whether we should move our money from BMO investorline to Qtrade...after looking at the offer ($150 from Qtrade --or Qesttrade, can't remember) to move our accounts, but in the end we didn't think our activity was quite as busy right now to justify it and since we've been sitting on our asses doing very little with the money for a few years, we decided to stick with BMO until we became more confident. So, after a lot of discussion we've invested half of our stache (the half in RRSPs) in a modified version of one of the Canadian Couch Potatoes model portfolios. We've made a pact that no matter what, we will not panic, as we both think that the market hasn't quite bottomed out in Canada. My husband continues to keep reading investment sources for Canada. As an engineer he is very good at evaluating what he reads, how it applies to us in terms of what we have to invest, our level of sophistication and being able to evaluate what we still don't know before we make any other decisions. Now it is on to the other half of the first phase stache...
Our second phase of investing is to finally start divesting ourselves of our former business equipment. There is probably $100,00 in old equipment we hung on to while we figured out if we would ever want to restart the business. But in the last few months we've been able to definitively answer that with a big fat "NO". So if anybody out there is interested in a German-made machined log-notching system for a cut rate price, let me know! It was built for about $80,000, we bought it for much less than that at a foreclosure and we're letting it go for a song! ($20,000!) Located in BC Canada. :)