Has the real estate crisis (and its subsequent waste land mentality in the markets) gotten you to the point where you just feel like buying a safe and keeping your money in a way typically seen mostly in rap videos? If so, you’re not too different from millions of other people out there. America is a great country, but we’ve done some embarrassing things with our wealth lately. Between financing two wars for nearly a decade and going a little crazy over stocks (back in the 1990s) and then real estate (from about 2002 to 2008).

By sheer coincidence, did you know that one of the most financialy stable nations on the planet is just north of us? Canada may have a small population and a lot of bitter cold, but they also have a class of trusts which have been converting into regular corporations, but still paying fat, stable dividends. Being a resource rich country, Canada has leveraged its potential “in the ground” wealth through pipelines and natural resource trusts aplenty. And those trusts have a habit of paying 6% to as high as 14% dividends, irrespective of what “the market” is doing on any given day.

If you’re harboring concerns about foreign countries, Canada is a pretty mild bet. It’s almost as old as the U.S., they’ve found a way to make universal health care actually work, their government has both a budgetary surplus and a trade surplus and it appears that nothing heats up all that well up there because their real estate market has been pretty stable the past few years. Oh, and did you know that Canada’s banks didn’t do all the crazy lending that American banks did? Good news that you can invest in!