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
  • 3 for me (Questrade, QTrade, Wealthsimple)
  • 3 for my spouse (Questrade, QTrade)
• 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, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On January 26, this is what it looks like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, but if you’ve been following along, you’ll see a few changes.

• As mentioned in a previous post, I did some shifting around and you now see XAW and XIC increasing their contribution to the portfolio at the expense of XGRO.
• I also tidied up some extra funds that aren’t needed — VCN was replaced with XIC¹, and I turfed some small holdings.
• I sold more HXT than I needed to for my monthly paycheque, and when I discovered the mistake², I just bought XIC instead.
• And, I did my quarterly Norbert’s Gambit to shift some AOA to XGRO. And again, I came out ahead!

Plan for the next month

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

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 (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, some are in XCB)
• 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)

Overall

Net worth overall is up month over month, reversing a 2 month losing streak and hitting a new all-time-high:

My VPW-calculated salary resumed its upward trend, also hitting an all-time high.

My QTrade RRIFs should move perhaps this week, but I’m no longer confident about that. More on that once resolved.

1. Which, in my mind, are equivalent. This post goes in lots more detail. ↩︎
2. I had to do some quick manual calculations because I had already updated my auto-calculating spreadsheet to reflect fewer RRIF accounts. My RRIF transfers are 2 months in progress and counting. I guess trying to move a RRIF near the end of the year was a bad idea. ↩︎