Last week, I sat with my spouse and let her take the wheel in performing the steps to getting paid in retirement¹. And although I’ve built an impressive² set of tools and spreadsheets in an effort to make the steps easy to follow, it’s clear the process involves too many logins, too many screens, and too many manual steps to make this a true DIY project for my spouse. I’ll list a few of the issues I’m facing here.

RRIF withdrawals are automatic. Cash availability is not.

Problem: Both Questrade and Wealthsimple allow the recurring withdrawal of RRIF payments on a monthly basis. Both assume that I have taken steps to ensure that cash is available to enable that withdrawal.

I initially thought that Questrade’s Flow feature was going to solve this problem for me. And, in theory, it could. There are practical limitations with Flow right now that prevent me from using this in its current state, but at least the product team is listening to feedback.

One other possibility came to the forefront of my crowded mind courtesy of a recent post by one of my favourite bloggers, The Loonie Doctor. BMO’s Target Cash Flow ETFs were discussed last year in ZGRO versus ZGRO.T, and I did mention that ZGRO.t would actually be a pretty good idea in a RRIF. ZGRO.t provides monthly payouts (currently targeting a 6% yield) and it pays them out on the 2nd working day of every month:

In order to take advantage of this, I’d have to

• confirm that the monthly payout from ZGRO.t would cover my RRIF minimum payments in each RRIF account
• convert my XGRO into ZGRO
• turn off DRIP for ZGRO in my RRIF account
• monitor cash in RRIF accounts to deal with excess cash

I did a quick check; unfortunately this wouldn’t work in all my RRIF accounts. The current payout of $0.058/unit wouldn’t be enough to cover RRIF minimums in every RRIF account I have. So unfortunately, this isn’t an option either.

Anthropic’s Claude is another possible pathway but it’s limited to Questrade. Most of my monthly payments use Questrade, but there is that one Wealthsimple RRIF account I still have. I could bring that account to Questrade, but I like keeping an eye on a few brokers to make sure I’m getting a good user experience.

But a bigger problem is the non-registered account portion of my monthly salary

My RRIF is only paying about 35% of my monthly salary. The rest comes from two non-registered accounts held by me and my spouse. These accounts will hang around for at least a few more years; the current decumulation is shown in the chart below:

It’s clear my non-registered accounts will be hanging around for a while yet.

What I choose to sell every month in my non-registered accounts depends on:

• How far my asset allocations have drifted from their targets: most of my holdings in the non-registered account are a single asset class (Canadian equity, US Equity, International equity) so if any of those asset classes get too large, that’s a factor to consider
• What my forecast is for my net income versus that of my spouse: this is the more important consideration since it impacts my tax bill. The idea is to keep our net incomes as close as possible. Capital gains are realized every time a sale in made in the non-registered account, but if I’m careful, I can split those capital gains such that our net income becomes pretty close by the end of the year³. Right now, I’m playing catchup — my spouse’s net income is currently forecast to be below mine, so I need to generate capital gains from her investments for the remainder of the year.

And then, there’s the broker UIs

Questrade is terrible when it comes to trying to use one login to do trades. Accounts for which you have trading authority are only visible for trading if you use the Questrade Edge interface, which is a lot less welcoming than the default web interface.

And then there are the infuriating limitations placed on trading authority. This is only a problem when we have to use my spouse’s non-registered accounts to pay our monthly salary.

• You can’t move money between accounts unless you are the primary owner. For joint accounts on Questrade, that effectively means one spouse (the secondary owner) can’t get money out of a jointly held account. And since my monthly routine generally makes changes to our jointly held cash-cushion, I have to be the one to make those changes, or I have to do weird things like moving money out of Questrade to a bank account, and then moving money back in. It’s so silly.
• Trading authority does not extend to withdrawing money. So if we need to sell my spouse’s non-registered investments, I can. make the sale, but then my spouse has to login with her own credentials to actually withdraw the money.

Wealthsimple has recently added trading authority support, but I haven’t tested what can and can’t be done from this feature.

I don’t have answers to my issues at this moment in time. I will have to continue experimenting; I will spend some time revisiting passiv.com to see if that makes things better.

1. The monthly steps are described in detail over at The Mechanics of Getting Paid in Retirement: 2026 Edition ↩︎
2. To me, at least ↩︎
3. I use https://moneyengineer.ca/tools-i-use/#:~:text=Canadian%20Tax%20Calculators to help me figure this out ↩︎