I sold a bunch of stocks to pay my mortage faster!

A quick update on my investments: knowing that interest rates will probably rise before I have to renew my mortgage and also being concerned about the current heights of the stock market, I decided to act. I've sold a bunch of non-RRSP stocks a few weeks ago (before stocks started going slightly down actually). I took all that money and put it on my mortgage. I've also increased my bi-weekly payments from 15% extra to 20%.

The net result of this operation? I shaved off 5 years from my mortgage schedule! As much as I didn't like selling the stocks, getting rid of a big chunk of debt does feel good :-)

Maybe one day I'll think about the controversial Smith Manoeuvre to save some taxes, but for now I'm content to be shrinking my mortgage ...

MoneySense top 100 income trusts

Despite last year's meltdown in Canadian income trusts, the MoneySense magazine comes back with the top 100 Canadian income trusts. They seem to favor trusts that have a lower distribution to cash flow ratio. That makes sense since these trusts are more likely to keep the same distributions when the new tax takes effect.

Here are the top rated trusts with their yield:

• Canetic Resource Trust (CNE.UN): 15.1%
• Interpipeline Fund (IPL.UN): 8.7%
• Mullen Group Income Fund (MTL.UN): 8.7%
• Shiningbank Energy Fund (SHN.UN): 12.7%

These yields still look very nice and might be a good complement to a diversified RRSP portfolio. Note that all these trusts are in the resource sector. It's also important to consider that even though MoneySense gives them a good rating, it remains a risky investment.