My retirement savings¹ are spread across multiple kinds of accounts: primarily RRIF, but there’s also TFSAs and non-registered accounts. Here’s today’s snapshot, courtesy of my multi-asset tracker:

For tax reasons², about 2/3³ of this year’s salary is actually funded by my non-registered accounts. But I hold a bunch of assets in both my and my spouse’s non-registered accounts, each with their own adjusted cost base, each in a position to generate a capital gain when sold, each representing a tax obligation for one of us. Assuming I’m trying to reduce CRA’s take, how do I decide which asset to sell at any given time?

Let’s start with some principles that I try to keep in mind as I work through that decision.

Principle #1: Try to equalize our taxable income

Why equalize? Because Canada’s tax system is graduated (i.e. it has tax brackets), the more you earn, the higher your overall tax rate is. It therefore follows that the minimal possible tax bill is generated when both members of the tax household make close to the same taxable income. A quick example: here I’m using the advanced Canadian Tax Calculator, and assuming that all income below is employment income, with no special deductions, and using Ontario as the location of the primary residence:

My Income	My Tax Bill	Spouse’s Income	Spouse’s Tax Bill	Total Tax bill
100k	17.1k	0	0	17.1k
80k	14.1k	20k	.1k	14.2k
70k	11.1k	30k	2.5k	13.6k
60k	8.3k	40k	4.4k	12.7k
50k	6.25k	50k	6.25k	12.5k

In each case (row) above, the total household income is 100k, but the lowest tax bill comes when each spouse is earning 50k. Equalizing the income makes for the smallest tax hit.

In retirement, income looks a bit different. Taxable income for our household comes primarily from four sources, which I summarize for you:

Income Source	Me	My Spouse
Employment	Essentially 0	not 0
RRIF payments	Yes	Yes — the same as me4
Capital Gains	Yes – variable	Yes – variable
Dividends, Interest	A bit	Even less
Total	RRIF + variable capital gains + a bit of dividend/interest	Employment + RRIF + variable capital gains + even less dividend/interest

Employment and RRIF payments are known at the beginning of the year, and dividends and interest can be estimated within an acceptable range (they are small compared to other chunks of income, anyway). That leaves the capital gains portion of the income to worry about, and it’s variable because of course it depends on what I sell, when I sell it, and who gets the tax attribution.

What’s clear from my table above is that my capital gains attribution needs to make up for the extra income my spouse earns — an employment salary — if I want to meet my goal of equalizing our income.

Principle #2: Get rid of tax obligations early

I figure it’s better to pay taxes sooner rather than later. In the case of my non-registered assets, given that they are 100% equity, they are only going to grow (on average) over time and give me a larger tax liability down the road. And dying with non-registered assets is the worst from a tax perspective, since CRA treats that as a “deemed disposition”, meaning that dead you is effectively taxed as though you sold everything all at once. A tax time-bomb.

So to help with that, I not only track my adjusted cost base per unit for each asset I own, but I track the capital gain per dollar liquidated. Let’s look at some examples:

Asset Symbol	ACB per share (A)	Current Price (B)	Capital gain/share (B-A)	Capital gain / Dollar (B-A)/B
HXS	58.20	106.79	48.59	.455
HXT	48.36	96.23	47.87	.497
HXDM	39.12	64.43	25.31	.393

• ACB per share: I track ACB of all my non-registered assets using adjustedcostbase.ca
• Current price: Current as of market close November 5, 2026 per googlefinance()
• Capital gain per share: The difference between the market price and my average cost. Your actual capital gain reported to CRA for a given “sell” transaction is this value multiplied the number of shares you sold.
• Capital gain per dollar: helps me decide which shares to liquidate. Higher means a higher capital gains for the same amount of money, meaning a higher tax liability. Since I’m selling shares with the intent of generating part of my retirement paycheque, knowing the capital gain for liquidating (say) $10000 of HXS is way more meaningful to me than knowing the capital gain involved in selling 100 shares. And it quickly gives me a way to quickly calculate the impact of a given sale on taxable income.

So if I needed $10,000 I could:

• Sell 93.64 shares of HXS and generate a capital gain⁵ of 10000*.455 = $4,550
• Sell 103.38 shares of HXT and generate a capital gain of 10000*.497= $4,970
• Sell 155.21 shares of HXDM and generate a capital gain of 10000*.393 = $3,930

You could say that selling HXDM is the correct approach since it generates the lowest amount capital gains, but I usually select the one with the worst outcome, in this case HXT. Why? Stocks tend to go up over time⁶, and I figure by trimming the biggest gains first will save me tax money in the long run.

What it effectively means

The strategy therefore becomes pretty easy to articulate: every tax year, sell assets in my non-registered account until such time as my taxable capital gains equal my spouse’s salary⁷. After that, try to finesse any remaining monthly payments so that our taxable incomes are (roughly) equal. I’m working on automating some of those calculations.

1. You can read about how I classify what counts as retirement savings over here: What’s included in your “retirement bucket”? ↩︎
2. My reasoning is to get rid of “extra” sources of income early in retirement, before CPP and mandatory higher RRIF payments kick in. And having fewer accounts to manage as I get older seems like a good idea, too. ↩︎
3. 63% if you want to be exact ↩︎
4. Both me and my spouse are the same age, and our RRIFs are very nearly equal in size. Score one for me on the planning side. ↩︎
5. That’s raw capital gain, not taxable capital gain. For every $10000 my spouse earns, I get $20000 in raw capital gains to equalize. ↩︎
6. Not steadily, of course, but I don’t claim to be able to predict near term futures. ↩︎
7. This is only possible because my wife only works part time, so her salary contribution to the overall household income is modest. ↩︎