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 retirement, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On May 29 before the markets opened, 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; AOA is up a bit mostly because the USD has been on a bit of run this month, increasing almost 1% month over month :

Plan for the next month

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

Here I have some work to do, since I’ve recently revisited the target allocations I have for each asset class:

• 5% cash or cash-like holdings like ICSH and ZMMK
• 15% bonds/income (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, rest are in XCB)
• 23% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX — HXT and XIC); this is up from the old 20% target
• 37% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500); this is up 1% from the old target
• 20% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets); this is down 4% from the old target

At the same time, I’m looking to get rid of my USD allocations since they are adding needless complexity and I no longer have a way to easily spend USD anyway. This is going to be a multi-month process¹, but I want to be USD free by the end of the year.

So, next month, I will begin. I’ll first tackle ICSH in my non-registered account, which I’ll do once it pays out its monthly dividend in the first week of June. And I’ll begin replacing AOA with XGRO².

Overall

Part of using VPW³ as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. And once again, a new all-time high:

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

1. Multi-month because I want to make sure I don’t get burned by a sudden change in USD/CAD FX rates. By converting some every month, I can smooth out any weird spikes. ↩︎
2. The biggest difference between AOA and XGRO (besides the native currency) is the amount of Canadian Equity content. AOA has a very small amount (about 3%) whereas XGRO has 20% ↩︎
3. Variable Percentage Withdrawal, my chosen decumulation strategy. ↩︎