Why CairnTree exists
I'm not a financial professional. I'm just someone who figured this out the slow way.
CairnTree is what I wish someone had handed me thirty years ago — instead of the sales pitch I actually got
How I got here
I started investing in the 1990s the way a lot of people still do today. I walked into my bank to open a chequing account, and I walked out with mutual funds I didn't fully understand and fees I wasn't told about. I didn't know enough to ask the right questions. Almost nobody did back then.
​
Over the years, I made plenty of mistakes. I moved money around, tried a money manager, dabbled in individual stocks, and watched some of those stocks keep me up at night. Slowly, I learned what actually worked: low-cost, broad-market ETFs, held for the long term, without much fuss. It wasn't exciting. It was just steady — and it quietly outpaced almost everything else I tried.
​
Along the way, I started helping family and friends do the same thing. Opening a brokerage account, picking a simple broad-market fund, and leaving it alone turned out to be something almost anyone could do with a bit of guidance. So that's what CairnTree is: the guidance I wish I'd had, written the way I'd explain it to someone I actually care about.
What this site is for
CairnTree exists to help you understand your own options — fees, account types, how to move your money, how investing mechanics actually work — so you can make your own decisions with more confidence and less guesswork.
​
A few things worth saying plainly:
​
-
I have no financial credentials, licences, or designations. What I have is decades of hands-on experience managing my own money and helping people close to me do the same.
​​
-
Nothing on this site is personalized advice. It's general education — the kind of plain-language explanation that's often missing when people first look into managing their own investments.
​​
-
I have no products to sell you and no funds to put you into. There's no in-house fund here, and there never will be.
A cairn marks the path. A tree represents growth. That's really all this site is trying to do — mark a path that already exists, so you don't have to find it the slow way I did.