This is a monthly look at what’s in my retirement portfolio. The original post is here.

Portfolio Construction

The retirement portfolio is spread across a bunch of accounts:

• 5 RRIF accounts
  • 3 for me (Questrade, Wealthsimple)
  • 2 for my spouse (Questrade)
• 2 TFSA accounts (Questrade)
• 4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint, all at Questrade)

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement¹, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On April 24 at mid-day, this is what it looked like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, (and if not an all-star, they are probably on the Magnificent Seven ETFs list). The charts look almost identical to the previous month, in spite of some conversion of AOA to XGRO. (I use Norbert’s Gambit to move USD denominated funds into CAD on a quarterly basis since my spending is all in CAD).

Plan for the next month

The asset-class split looks like this; you can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.

It’s looking pretty close to the targets I have, which are unchanged:

• 5% cash or cash-like holdings like ICSH and ZMMK
• 15% bonds/income (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, rest are in XCB)
• 20% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX — HXT and XIC)
• 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500)
• 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

The alignment with target is what drives my investment decisions; and here I see that the international equity portion of my portfolio has drifted 1% below target, which is usually the threshold whereby I start to pay attention. Do I need to take action to increase my International Equity portion, or is my target something to reconsider? I have some thinking to do.

Overall

Part of using VPW² as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. Last month’s meltdown is yet another speed bump that we’ve managed to survive, and April 2026 brings me to another all time high of my retirement net worth, as compared to January 2025³.

My VPW-calculated salary continues to increase, albeit at a more modest rate, as expected.

1. Questrade, although my RRIF settings are for the last day of the month, seems to need a lot of time to process the payment; I’ve learned that unless I have cash in the account at least 3 business days prior to the last business day, the automatic payment won’t happen. ↩︎
2. Variable Percentage Withdrawal, my chosen decumulation strategy. ↩︎
3. In constant dollars. I should really adjust my net worth to show inflationary impacts but it’s more calculating than I feel like doing at the moment. ↩︎