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, and the charts that follow reflect the view post-payday, which happens around the end of the month. On September 30th before the markets opened, this is what it looked like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, aka the Magnificent Seven ETFs list.

As you can see, I’ve now successfully kick USD out of my retirement portfolio; it’s completed faster than I originally planned thanks to Questrade’s offer of free Norbert’s Gambit to all Questrade users for a few months. The demise of USD-denominated assets does not mean a demise in the holding of US assets, in case you were wondering. The portfolio is still well exposed to the US equity market, since my asset allocation targets have remained unchanged:

• 5% cash/ultra short term bonds
• 15% bonds
• 23% Canadian Equity
• 37% US Equity
• 20% International Equity

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

This chart is an almost-perfect reflection of my asset targets, with all categories within 0.5% of the intended allocation.

Plan for the next month

Nothing looming, which given the time I’ve had to spend moving USD out of the portfolio, is a welcome change.

The only thing I’m keeping an eye on is the relative size of my RRIF holdings compared to that of my spouse. From a planning and tax perspective, it’s much easier to manage if the size of our RRIF holdings is equal. At present, my spouse’s RRIF is 0.25% larger than mine, so probably that’s close enough. All I can really do to control this (since one cannot add to a RRIF) is to allocate more equity to one over the other, and cross fingers that the equity portion outperforms the bond/cash portion. Historically this has been the case, but one never knows when the timelines are measured in months!

Overall

Part of using VPW as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. My net worth stayed stagnant month over month but it’s still 20% above when I started on my retirement journey.

My VPW-calculated salary has now increased for 9 straight months; it’s nice getting a monthly raise!