I f you’d like to get your own anonymous Financial Facelift contact financialfacelift@globeandmail.com A few years ago, Zoe and Eberhard were pretty well retired. The partnership she was involved in dissolved, and the couple travelled for most of 2005. When they returned to their condominium bungalow in small-town British Columbia, Eberhard, an engineer, did some consulting and Zoe helped him with his work

A re we going to see a Happy New Year for the Wealth Management Industry? After a strong year for stocks and bonds, could 2010 deliver unexpected upside returns for the Canadian wealth management industry? For a potential clue, we look at recent filings at Canadian asset management and trust player AGF Management Ltd

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Y our desk is a mess. You can’t dig out your to-do list from the overflowing pile, never mind tick off any items on it. You have dozens of e-mails waiting to be read.

S ome cold, hard advice for 2010: Avoid chasing hot trends, hold your fund managers accountable, beware a rising dollar and consider paying down debts instead of investing. Let’s start with the new themes, hot stocks and fabulous funds you’re bound to read about as the investing world looks to the year ahead. Investment adviser Scott Tomenson of Wellington West Capital warns against getting caught up in this sort of hype because it’s often meant to sell products rather than build sound portfolios.

W e’ll be turning the calendar to a new decade in a few days and I’ve been asking people for their take on it. The response has been underwhelming. Seems nobody has thought about it and a few were even caught off-guard, saying only, “Has it really been 10 years since we partied in the new millennium?” There is no reason why our thinking should be bound by the calendar but, as investors, it’s instructive in this case to do a comparison between the starting points of the last and next decades

Total money market mutual fund assets rose by $2.59 billion to $3.272 trillion for the week, the Investment Company Institute said this week. Assets of the nation’s retail money market mutual funds fell by $1.91 billion in the latest week to $1.071 trillion. Assets of taxable money market funds in the retail category fell by $1.72 billion to $865.64 billion for the week ended Wednesday, the Washington-based mutual fund trade group said