Quick Tip: Tax Loss Harvest by December 30!

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Tax loss harvesting is the strategy whereby assets in non-registered accounts are sold to generate a capital loss1. These losses can be used to offset capital gains, either this year, in previous years (up to three years back), or in future years (forever)2.

Since CRA uses the settlement date of your asset sale, and since most (all ?) brokers take a day to settle a trade, this means to get your capital loss in fiscal 2025 you have to sell by December 30 to settle on December 31, the last business day of 2025.

  1. After the current buoyant year in the markets, there’s probably not too many examples of this, but if you bought bonds in 2022…. ↩︎
  2. All this and more detailed over at https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individuals/topics/about-your-tax-return/tax-return/completing-a-tax-return/personal-income/line-12700-capital-gains/capital-losses-deductions.html ↩︎

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Dec 2025)?

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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:

  • 6 RRIF accounts (2 for me, 3 for my spouse, 1 for me at an alternative provider as a test)
  • 2 TFSA accounts
  • 4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint)

The target for the overall portfolio is unchanged:

  • 80% equity, spread across Canadian, US and global markets for maximum diversification
  • 15% Bond funds, from a variety of Canadian, US and global markets
  • 5% cash, held in savings-like ETFs.

You can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On December 23, this is what it looks like:

Retirement holdings, December 2025

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars; anything not on that page is held in a non-registered account and won’t be fiddled with unless it’s part of my monthly decumulation. Otherwise I’ll rack up capital gains for no real benefit.

There aren’t really any notable changes this month — AOA’s contribution was down a bit this month, largely due to an unfavourable change in the USD/CAD exchange rate (down about 3% month over month, back down to a level not seen since around May this year). I recalculate the FX rate every month1 since I track my net worth in CAD so I always have an apples-to-apples comparison. I don’t stress too much about the FX rate as it tends to cut both ways. Sometimes it’s a lift to my numbers, sometimes not. In the end, I suppose it all evens out. I tracked my snapshot FX rates starting in February2, just for illustration:

Monthly USD/CAD rates on payday day

Plan for the next month

The asset-class split looks like this

Retirement portfolio by asset class, December 2025

It’s looking pretty close to the targets I have, which are unchanged:

  • 5% cash or cash-like holdings like ICSH and ZMMK
  • 15% bonds (almost all are buried in XGRO and AOA)
  • 20% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX)
  • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500)
  • 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

The end of the year will mean more distributions from my holdings; in my RRIF accounts they are set to DRIP since I only hold AOA/XGRO/ICSH in these accounts. The rest I redeploy to the asset classes that are short funds; typically this means investing in one of the *EQT funds since the bond complement of the portfolio frequently moves above the 15% target.

Overall

Net worth overall is down slightly month over month, but up a little over 10% from the start of the year. Hard to be unhappy about that.

My VPW-calculated salary took a slight decline, breaking the 7 month growth streak. It ends the year a shade under 6% larger than my first paycheque. Not bad. I don’t recall many years where I got a 6% raise 😉

Next month will end my relationship with QTrade as I move the final 3 RRIF accounts to Questrade; I had thought December would be the final month, but as you’ll see in my next post, a (hopefully) small wrinkle has delayed this.

  1. Using =googlefinance(“USDCAD”) of course ↩︎
  2. February because I only thought to start tracking that a month in. January’s rate will be lost to the sands of time. Or I could add it back using the official FX rates, I suppose. ↩︎

XEQT, TEQT, VEQT, ZEQT, HEQT Fee Showdown

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Summary: Although iShares(XEQT/XGRO) and Vanguard(VEQT/VGRO) get all the love, the all-in-ones from BMO and TD are actually the current winners in the “lowest all-in-one fee award”. Given how similar they are to their competitors, I see no reason not to park money there.

I’m a fan of all-in-one1 ETFs in my retirement portfolio. If you’re new to the world of all-in-ones, you might want to start here. There’s at least five competing families of products out there, courtesy of iShares (XEQT, XGRO, XBAL et al), TD (TEQT, TGRO, TBAL et al), Vanguard(VEQT, VGRO, VBAL et al) BMO(ZEQT, ZGRO, ZBAL et al) and GlobalX2 (HEQT, HGRO, HBAL et al). We’ve taken a look at some of them “under the hood”, so to speak, but didn’t really find super-significant differences.

One facet I haven’t looked at yet is the fees each of these companies charge. As I’ve shown elsewhere, small differences can add up if you have significant investments or are holding them for a significant time.

With the news that iShares is reducing their management fees, (BMO did earlier this year) I figured it was time to do a head-to-head fee comparison for the four major families.

Here you have it:

CompanyRelevant TickersManagement Fee3
iSharesXEQT, XGRO, XBAL et al0.17%, effective Dec 18, 2025
VanguardVEQT, VGRO, VBAL et al0.17%
TDTEQT, TGRO,TBAL et al0.15%
BMOZEQT, ZGRO, ZBAL et al0.15%
Global XHEQT, HGRO, HBAL et al0.18%

TD and BMO are the low fee winners at the moment, but the gap has narrowed significantly from earlier in the year. I like low fees, and so I’ve started to invest in these families.

  1. Technically called “asset allocation” ETFs, which is good, since asset allocation is how I view my own portfolio. ↩︎
  2. Formerly known as Horizons, which explains the stock tickers used here. ↩︎
  3. Most of the time I use MER (Management Expense Ratio) to report on fees, but since a few of these companies have lowered their Management fees this year, and since MER is only calculated annually, the MER values only become relevant again on Jan 1. They are a few basis points higher than the management fee, but just a few. Most of the cost is buried in the management fee. ↩︎

News: HISA Table updated, TD adds free-to-trade ETFs

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High Interest Savings Page Updated

As reported last week, the USA cut their prime rates while Canada did not. The latest rates are now reflected in the HISA and short-term bond table (Canada & US). No changes for at least 6 weeks at this rate. Most cash I hold in my retirement savings is invested in an ultra-short-term bond fund, namely ICSH (one of my ETF all-stars) so I can squeeze out a few more basis points on my cash holdings.

TD Cuts Trading fees on 100 ETFs

TD seems to be upping its game. Not only are they throwing free money around, but an observant reader (thanks, big brother 🙂 ) alerted me to a recent change. You can read all about it here, but the skinny is that they cut trading fees on a list of 100 ETFs. Paying trading fees of any kind seems to be a dying business model, so it’s nice to see TDDI join the free club, at least a little bit. Some of these ETFs are even worth holding; I’ll save you the trouble and show you which ones:

NameSymbolWhat it holds
Vanguard S&P 500 IndexVFVLargest US Companies
SPDR S&P 500SPYLargest US Companies in USD
Vanguard 500 IndexVOOSame as SPY
iShares Russell 2000IWMSmall cap US Equity in USD
TD all-in-onesTEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON100% Equity, 90% Equity, 60% Equity, 30% Equity. Read more here and here.
TD Aggregate Bond IndexTDBCanadian gov’t and corp bonds.1
TD International EquityTPEDeveloped international market equity.2
TD US EquityTPU/TPU.USimilar to VFV/SPY3
TD Canadian EquityTTP300 Canadian stocks (aka “the Canadian market”)4
TD Cash Management TCSH/TUSD.UUltra short term debt in CAD/USD5
Vanguard all-in-onesVEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS100% Equity, 80% Equity, 60% Equity, 40% Equity
Vanguard Canadian Agg BondVABCanadian gov’t and corp bonds6
Vanguard FTSE GlobalVXCAll equity ex-Canada (65% US Equity)
Vanguard FTSE DevelopedVIUAll developed equity ex-North America7
Vanguard US Total MarketVUN/VTI~3500 US Stocks in CAD/USD (aka “The US Market”)8
Vanguard FTSE Canada VCNTop 200 Canadian Stocks, so similar to TTP9
Newly free-to-trade ETFs at TDDI that are moneyengineer.ca approved

All the above funds would be worthy of consideration since they adhere to my rules about being passively managed, low cost, and aligned with my asset-allocation strategy. The simplest purchases here would be one of the TD or Vanguard all-in-ones (new to all-in-ones? read about them here) best aligned with your risk profile. There’s a bunch of other ones that aren’t of interest to me — bitcoin, leveraged, actively managed, segment-based…nah, I’m good.

  1. Used in TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  2. No “emerging” market exposure. Used in TEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  3. TPU is used in TEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  4. Used in TEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  5. Similar to my use of ZMMK/ICSH ↩︎
  6. Used in VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎
  7. Used in VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎
  8. Used in VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎
  9. Used in VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎