My entire retirement strategy is built around the idea of maintaining my asset allocation¹ within the 5 categories I’ve (somewhat arbitrarily) decided to care about, namely:

• Cash and ultra short term bonds, which make up 5% of my retirement portfolio
• Bonds, which make up 15% of my retirement portfolio
• Canadian Equity, which makes up 23% of my retirement portfolio
• US Equity which makes up 37% of my retirement portfolio
• And International Equity (anything that’s not the US or Canada) is 20% of my portfolio.

Tracking these percentages across the multitude of accounts² me and my spouse hold, across multiple brokers requires some external tool help. For many years, it was based on the multi-asset tracker I have linked on the Tools I Use page. But in the past few months, I’ve migrated to a “new, improved” version of that tracker that has been re-architected so it is now based on pivot tables. Here’s some screenshots:

Pivot tables make maintaining the values in my portfolio much, much easier, and having structured tables makes it really easy to create new ways to analyze my holdings.

For instance, with the old asset tracker, say I wanted to compare the total value of my RRIF accounts with that of my spouse. Since we’re too young for income splitting, I’m motivated to try to keep the values between them relatively equal, so that we’re both withdrawing roughly the same dollar amount every year (thankfully, my spouse and I are the same age).

I could do this with the old asset tracker, but it would involve creating a new sheet, linking to the relevant values, (not so easy when you’re working from a single screen) making the calculations and looking at the result. And I would make it quick and dirty, since I wouldn’t know at the time whether it was something I wanted to track long term or not.

With the new asset tracker, it’s just a pivot table away. Takes seconds.

I’ll be posting a more thorough walk-through of it in the coming days, but if you want to check it out, it’s available here.

1. If you want to learn more about asset allocation, this is a good starting point: Investment basics: Asset Allocation ↩︎
2. TFSAs for both. RRIFs and Spousal RRIFs for both. Non-registered accounts for both. An extra non-registered account that serves as a cash cushion, and an extra RRIF at Wealthsimple because I needed a new laptop 🙂 ↩︎