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:
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. ↩︎
One of the confusing questions I got from my international colleagues when I announced my retirement was “what’s the retirement age in Canada”? And, after thinking about it, said, “There isn’t one that I know of”, which is, strictly speaking, correct.
However, for many Canadians (and, I suppose, for many people around the world), “retirement age” equates to “the age where I can collect my pension”. For me, the equivalent statement was “the time when my retirement savings were sufficient1” (you can read about the steps I took here). I don’t have a private pension through my employer, so CPP, OAS and my own savings are all I have to sustain my needs throughout retirement.
CPP (Canadian Pension Plan) and (possibly2) OAS (Old Age Supplement) are two sources of income that will eventually make up part of my retirement income, but not for a while. For the time being, my retirement income comes from a mix of non-registered asset sales (about 2/3 of my 2025 household income) and RRIF payments (about 1/3 of my 2025 household income)3. My advisor suggested waiting as long as possible to collect on CPP/OAS, which is age 70 for both.
But maybe, if you haven’t retired yet, you haven’t really thought too much about these things4? Here’s a quick primer.
What’s CPP and what’s it worth to me?
CPP applies to anybody who has contributed to the plan; how much you contribute annually is captured on your T4 slips. You can see your lifetime contributions5 by logging into your My Service Canada Account. It is the history of these contributions6 that ultimately determine what your annual pension will be in the year you first start taking it.
The first year you are eligible to receive CPP is the year you turn 607; every month you wait after turning 60 increases your monthly payment. The absolute maximum CPP you could collect would be waiting until you turn 708. The Feds lay it all out here.
The absolute maximum monthly CPP you could possibly get as a 65 year old is $1507.65 in January 2026 per the Feds9. Since I retired early, and 18 year-old me worked a part-time minimum wage job, my CPP will be less than that. (The CPP calculation takes your best 32 years of earnings into account).
What’s OAS and what is it worth to me?
OAS (“Old Age Security”) applies to anybody who has lived in the country long enough10. OAS can start at age 65, and be delayed until as late as age 70. Like CPP, OAS rewards those who start payments later than age 6511. You get an OAS supplement of 10% when you hit 75.
The absolute maximum monthly OAS payment in the first quarter of 2026 is $742.31 if you’re under 75 and $816.5412 if you’re over per the Feds. (These amounts are adjusted every quarter in accordance with inflation rates.)
The wrinkle with OAS is that it’s income-tested. If you make too much money, you’re going to have to pay some of it back. If you really make too much money, you’ll have to give it all back. This is commonly known as “OAS Clawback”13.
The magic of CPP and OAS
CPP and OAS payments are both indexed to inflation, for as long as you collect it. This is key for me personally — none of my other income sources are inflation-proof, so the more I can get that is inflation-protected, the better. That’s part of the reason I’m planning on delaying collecting CPP and OAS until I’m 70 — that way, I can maximize the inflation-protected income. The other reason I’m delaying these payments is to try to avoid OAS clawback. The earlier I take RRIF money out, the lower my RRIF income will be later in retirement, when I have to start adding CPP to my income. I have no idea if I will avoid the clawback because it depends on the performance of specific elements of my portfolio. But try I will.
Estimating CPP and OAS for VPW
My decumulation strategy is based on VPW (Variable Percentage Withdrawal). I’ve talked about it previously over here and here. VPW requires, as an input, the value of a future pension. So how do I go about estimating that? Any reasonable estimate might want to ignore what the feds put on the periodic CPP summaries they send out because those estimates are assuming you’re retiring at 65, and working at a similar salary level (of course, if that’s your plan, then it’s perfectly fine — but it wasn’t mine :-))
All good estimates start from the lifetime contributions table you can find at My Service Canada. From there I’ve given a few tools a spin:
This tool has a lot of neat features, but be careful. The model bakes in both inflation estimates and wage inflation estimates that are changeable, but not immediately obvious.
This is one I recommended previously in Tools I Use, but the upload feature has been broken for a while now. It still works by entering it manually, but I now prefer the tool below….
The Finiki tool is now my favourite because it’s available as a worksheet (Google Sheets, Excel and Libre Office all supported), and all you need to do is enter in your pension contributions. The current version (2.3) hasn’t been updated with the latest YMPE values, but it’s a trivial exercise to update them.
“sufficient” means different things for different people. You have to have a budget, and you have to have an idea what sort of estate, if any, you’re intending to leave behind. ↩︎
I figure my odds are 50/50 that my combined CPP+RRIF income when I hit 70 will render me ineligible for OAS. ↩︎
I am not planning on actually working for a living anymore; there are all kinds of rules concerning the interplay of CPP and employment income, but I’m not talking about them here because that scenario doesn’t apply to me. ↩︎
Or, if you were a cynic like me, figured that it wouldn’t exist by the time I got to an age where I’d be collecting it. Seems like the pension plan is currently in pretty good shape. ↩︎
You would have to be at maximum pensionable earnings for 39 years between the ages of 18 and 65 to get this amount. (47 years less the 8 worst years of earnings). ↩︎
Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is 10% more than the benefit for someone under age 75. ↩︎
OAS is progressively reduced if you make more than $95k in 2026. You get no OAS at all if you make more than ~$155k at ages 65-74, $160.5k for ages 75+. These numbers are modified 4 times a year based on inflation. ↩︎
Something I never paid much attention to when I was building my retirement savings were the delays built into the system when it comes to moving money around. The Mechanics of Getting Paid in Retirement: 2026 Edition shows the steps I use to get a monthly paycheque, but it doesn’t show the delays. When I was working, I could predictably expect a paycheque twice a month. No guesswork. Now that I rely on these money movements to do things like pay bills, I’ve become a lot more attentive to where things slow down. Stressing about them isn’t helpful, but knowing about them in advance means you can build them into your plan so you don’t get caught in a cash flow crunch.
I should preface this by saying that I use Questrade and Wealthsimple for my providers, and how your provider handles things can be quite different, so take these as examples, not as absolutes. So where have I seen things slow down?
Time between selling an asset and having useable cash
Here I’m talking about cash as cash, not cash to immediately do another trade, i.e. sell ETF “a” and then use the proceeds to buy ETF “b”. For that example, I think most brokers allow you to sell to buy immediately after the trade executes, at least in my experience.
Here I’m talking about selling ETF “a” so you have the cash to pay your credit card balance. This is usually a multi-step process. The first step is having access to the cash you gain from the proceeds of a sale. This is generally speaking a business day after the trade executes. So if you sell on Monday, the cash appears in your account on Tuesday. If you have a margin account (which I do for my non-registered holdings), then it has the nice side benefit of providing access to the cash immediately after the trade executes.
So now that the cash is there in your trading account, you then have to get it to a place where you can spend it. And here there will be a lot of variability depending on who your broker is, who you bank with, and how you actually move the money (EFT, wire transfer, physical cheque).
For me, I use EFT withdrawals to my CIBC chequing account. And this has delays too.
As an example, I executed a trade in my Questrade non-registered account to help fund my December paycheque.
December 23rd: sold some HXT in the morning, immediately requested a withdrawal to my CIBC account using an EFT. The money was available instantly because I have margin in that account.1
December 29th: deposit received to my chequing account
# of business days: Dec 23rd (0.5) Dec 24th(1), December 29th (2)= 2.5 days to get my $$$
I also sold some funds in my Wealthsimple account on December 23rd. I wasn’t able to withdraw anything until the following day since this account isn’t a margin account. But on the 24th, when I made the request via EFT, the money appeared in my chequing account in minutes. This was 1.1 days2 to get my $$$$.
I do recall when I managed my parent’s BMOI account cash in a non-registered account could immediately be used for bill pay, cheque writing, eTransfers or ATM withdrawals, thanks to their “AccountLInk” service.
Delays in moving money between accounts at the same brokerage
In my VPW-driven decumulation methodology, I have a non-registered Questrade account that is exclusively used as the “cash cushion” — about 5 months of rolling average salary, invested in ZMMK and ICSH, two funds that are on my ETF All-Stars page. Every month, I either get paid from this account or I move money into it from my non-registered account. Getting paid undergoes the same delays as I mentioned above: about 2.5 days, but moving money into this account from another account (one would think) is instantaneous, no? No, not with Questrade.
Typically, it takes a day before the money becomes useable in the destination account. Not so with Wealthsimple, where transfers are instantaneous.
Delays in getting dividend payments
All ETFs publish their dividend schedule. For example, here’s what ICSH’S looks like:
“Ex-Date”, at least for my provider (Questrade) is the date used to indicate a “dividend event” notification. But “ex-date” isn’t when you should look for your dividend payment; you have to own the ETF in question by ex-date to take part in the next dividend payment. And so “Payable Date” is the one of interest, and the lag between the ex-date and the payable date is highly dependent on the ETF in question. Since most of my ETFs pay out either quarterly or monthly, often declaring ex-dividend on the last business day of the month, the first week of January will be active with new dividend funds rolling into my various accounts.
Delays: Just Roll with it
While I do find it irritating that my own money gets tied up for days at a time for no discernible reason, I’ve adapted my expectations accordingly and don’t worry about it. In the early days of retirement, be aware that things may not happen as quickly as you expect, so it’s probably a good idea to have a bit of cash flow leeway in the first month or two as you work out the kinks in your own decumulation system.
And no, I don’t get charged interest when I do this. I’m not sure why, but if I did, I would simply wait a day. I just like being able to make the move in the moment — still logged in, the amounts are fresh in my mind…. ↩︎
Fast transfers seem to be part of the Wealthsimple ethos. ↩︎
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.
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. ↩︎
DIY investing also means DIY decumulation. In 2026, I’ll be paying myself from my various RRIFs as well as from non-registered funds. I’ll refer to the letters in the diagram below so you can follow along1:
A: Calculate Net Worth over all retirement accounts
“Retirement accounts” include 3 non registered accounts, 2 TFSAs and 5 RRIF accounts. All of these are at Questrade except for one RRIF account held at Wealthsimple. My net worth calculation ignores my day-to-day spending accounts, and any other assets (my house, for example). In 2026 I could look up this number using Passiv, but I’m not 100% clear on what the fate of my Passiv account will be once Questrade cuts ties with them (March 2026). I still have a spreadsheet with lots of details and pretty graphs based on my multi-asset tracker.
B: Use VPW Methodology to Calculate Monthly “Suggestion”
VPW stands for “Variable Percentage Withdrawal” and it’s the playbook I use to guide my monthly withdrawals from my retirement accounts. I talk a bit about it here. The suggestion is generated by a VPW spreadsheet, but the inputs are pretty simple:
future pension amounts, and age you’ll be when you take them3
asset allocation breakdown (%stocks versus %bonds)
This “suggestion” represents the maximum value of the assets I am advised to sell this month. You could take more or you could take less. It’s merely a suggestion. For me, I take the suggestion at face value and sell the assets needed to meet the value of the “suggestion”.
C: Calculate the Salary
The “Suggestion” in step B is NOT your salary. The VPW methodology enforces one more step to calculate that. The VPW methodology requires the use of a “cash cushion”, which has the effect of making sure you don’t need to make drastic month-to-month changes in your salary, either upward or downward. The cash cushion is roughly 5x the “suggestion”4 and your salary is 1/6th of “suggestion” plus “cash cushion”. The “salary” represents the amount that will eventually turn up in your chequing account.
To make things easier to track, my “cash cushion” is a totally separate non-registered joint account that holds one of four things: Canadian dollars, US dollars, ZMMK or ICSH. I keep a little cash floating around in this account to avoid having to do monthly trades. It just makes tax reporting and ACB tracking a bit simpler, at a small loss of interest income. Also, Questrade doesn’t support fractional shares of either ZMMK or ICSH, and since they routinely trade at roughly $50/share, mathematically, I’ll always have $25 CAD and $25 USD on average 🙂
D/D’: Compare the Suggestion to the Salary and act accordingly
Since the cash cushion is effectively a 5-month moving average Salary, the Suggestion could be more than or less than the Salary. If my net worth is down (or up) month over month, then it follows that the Suggestion will also be down (or up) month over month. My Salary may or may not be down (or up), depending on how long the downturn has lasted. Just to give you a sense of how the cash cushion smooths out the market gyrations, you can see the comparision of net worth versus salary below. (Taken from my most recent monthly “What’s in my Retirement Portfolio” update.) The net worth moves quite a bit month-to-month (generally upward, which is nice), but my salary is much smoother (but also generally upward).
Anyway, what all this means is that I’m either going to move some of the Suggestion money into the cash cushion (because my Salary is less than the Suggestion), or I’m going to pay myself from the cash cushion because my Salary is higher then the Suggestion5. It’s one or the other; as yet, I haven’t had the Salary be equal to the Suggestion, but it is mathematically possible, of course.
E/E’: Make sure the 4 Questrade RRIFs have cash to cover the monthly payment
At the end of 2025, I’m expecting some sort of communication6 from Questrade as to what my minimum monthly7 RRIF withdrawal needs to be for 2026 for each of the four RRIF accounts in my household8. This is a standard “feature” of anyone holding a RRIF — your provider makes a calculation based on the value of your RRIF on the last day of the year and your age (or your spouse’s age) at the end of the year. That’s RRIF minimum — the minimum amount you’re obligated to take. This coming year, I’ll stick with RRIF minimum again to avoid having to deal with spousal attribution rules.
So for 2026, I will know exactly how much cash I will need every month in every Questrade RRIF account. And since I’ve done such a good job in simplifying my RRIFs9 (pats back) I can also calculate exactly how many shares of XGRO need to be sold in each RRIF account every month, in real time10.
So generally, this step involves placing 4 sell orders to put cash in the account.
The E’ step — moving cash from the RRIF to the chequing account — I’m expecting to be automatic, but since I haven’t had to do this with Questrade before, I’m not certain.
F/F’: Generate cash equal to RRIF minimum in the Wealthsimple account and move it to the chequing account
Like with Questrade, I’m expecting Wealthsimple to communicate my RRIF minimum. From what I can see from their website, it appears that they actually make it really obvious.
The same good work I did with my Questrade accounts is even better in my Wealthsimple RRIF account since I hold no USD at Wealthsimple. So here, and thanks to fractional shares, 100% of my RRIF is invested in XGRO, with no additional cash.
Their help article makes it sound like both F and F’ are under my control, which is fine. I’ll just do this step at the same time I do the Questrade step. Maybe I only have to do F’ once and pay out in “Installments”? Not sure.
G/G’: Use the non-registered account(s) to generate cash equal to Suggestion minus all the monthly RRIF payments
I already know my five RRIF minimum payments will fall well short of the VPW “Suggestion”, so every month I have to sell assets from the non-registered accounts to make up the shortfall. This cash will either go 100% to my chequing account or some of it may be diverted to the cash cushion.
Normally this comes from my, not my spouse’s, non-registered account. Since my spouse is still working, I leave hers alone to avoid generating capital gains. Unfortunately, my non-registered accounts are a bit of a dog’s breakfast, and although I’ve made efforts to use spreadsheet formulas to make automated suggestions11, it’s proving a bit more difficult.
In the end, this is again a sale of one or more assets. For step G’, I can then immediately use Questrade’s “Withdraw Money” to move the cash into my chequing account, or “Move Money” to move cash into the Cash Cushion account.
Conclusion
And that, my friends, are the steps I take monthly in retirement. I try to perform these steps in the dying days of every month while allowing enough time for trades to settle to ensure cash is well and truly in hand before I move it to my chequing account.
In my household, a very large portion of this process gets spit out as a step-by-step “do this, do that” set of instructions I’ve built into a macro-enabled spreadsheet. The trades required for Step G are still decided on the fly, manually. Of couse, given that Questrade has APIs, I could conceivably make automatic trades based on the work I’ve done, but I’m not sure I want to take that step. Retirement project?
I don’t really know if any of my readers find this particular articl useful, exasperating or confusing. But for me, it’s useful to write down how it works! ↩︎
For me, CPP, OAS and the OAS supplement. The current plan is to defer CPP/OAS until age 70 to maximize my inflation-indexed income. ↩︎
which, in my case, since I withdraw monthly, is about 5x my salary ↩︎
I’ve run this algorithm ten times so far this year: 3 times I had to pay myself out of the cash cushion and 7 times I added to the cash cushion. That’s the general upward trajectory of this year’s market in action ↩︎
My last provider, I actually called them to check. I had of course calculated it myself (and they were very close) but my numbers don’t matter to the CRA. I’m hoping Questrade makes it a bit more obvious, but I’m pessimistic. ↩︎
I had set it up as monthly. I could’ve chosen quarterly or annually. I like monthly. ↩︎
My RRIF accounts hold one of five assets: Canadian and US dollars (because I can’t buy fractional shares), ICSH, AOA, or XGRO. ICSH is held in RRIFs to keep me at 5% cash in my retirement overall, and I routinely convert (quarterly) AOA into XGRO using Norbert’s Gambit. ↩︎
And yes, I have a macro-based spreadsheet that tells you exactly how many shares to sell at that moment based on share price and current cash in the account. ↩︎
The most appropriate thing to sell in any given month is an asset for which I’ve become overweight per my multi-asset tracker. But when you hold all-in-ones in the portfolio, it’s a bit trickier to work that out. I just need to set aside some time to come up with a spreadsheet-based solution. I would much prefer this decision to be made algorithmically. ↩︎
The Money Engineer 