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)¹
  • 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)

You will notice that QTrade is no longer in the mix. I successfully moved the last RRIF accounts during the month; I learned a lot in the process. QTrade was the victim in the chase for free money offered by Questrade last year; based on current offerings, I’d say that QTrade still has an edge in terms of user experience over Questrade. I’ll go into more detail in a future post.

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On February 28, this is what it looks like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, (and if not an all-star, they are probably on the Magnificent Seven ETFs list) but if you’ve been following along, you’ll see a few changes.

• I dropped XAW since I realized I didn’t need it if I was smarter the ratios of holdings I already owned (XEQT/XIC/XCB). Less is more.
• I sold XIC instead of HXT in my non-registered account this month to help pay the bills because I reasoned that eliminating its dividend payouts would be better from a tax perspective².

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% bonds³ (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, rest are in XCB)
• 20% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX — HXT and XIC)
• 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500)
• 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

I am mulling over making a small tweak to these percentages, increasing US equity exposure at the expense of International equity based on some calculations I’ve done⁴ but this is neither urgent nor will it be massively impactful to the overall picture.

Overall

There is a bit of an anomaly this month that I should mention. A number of readers have questioned my wisdom of contributing monthly to a TFSA in retirement. From a tax-free growth perspective, it would be far better to make the contribution at the beginning of the year. And many studies have shown that lump sum investing provides better returns than spacing them out. And so, I have taken their advice⁵ and made all my TFSA contributions for the year this month. And since my TFSA is part of my net worth, there’s a bump being caused by that contribution.

And so, net worth overall is up month over month, a two month winning streak.

My VPW-calculated salary also continues its upward trend.

1. One spousal, one individual. One at Wealthsimple because (a) I like their user experience and may consider them as my primary broker in the future and (b) they offered me free money and a laptop to move some fees their way. I can be bought. ↩︎
2. HXT does not pay dividends and instead uses swap contracts to convert them into capital gains, which receive better tax treatment for me ↩︎
3. Referred to as “Income” on the chart above ↩︎
4. I’ll share those in a future post ↩︎
5. With thanks to Steven and Sylvain ↩︎