Author: RobH

people exchanging money in cantor

Retirement Portfolio is now USD-free

RobHLeave a comment

On September 4th, I sold my last units of DLR1 within my RRIF account and completed my multi-month activity of kicking USD out of retirement portfolio. I ended up doing this about 3 months faster than I anticipated, but that’s because Questrade offered a free two-month trial for Questrade Plus, which included as many free journaling activities2 as you wished during the trial. And since I’m a cheapskate, I figured saving the journaling fees was worth me upping the pace of my USD to CAD conversions.

I asked Claude to take a look at the various gambits I undertook3 and evaluate them. Claude was quite upbeat:

  • Claude calculated an effective blended rate of 1.39946.
  • Claude said I beat the spot rate by roughly +0.15% overall
  • And, as expected, Claude assessed that every single gambit landed within a few basis points of the spot market, much better than what Questrade would have charged me (1.5% or so).

So now, here’s what my various account types look like, in terms of assets. There’s no USD listed ETFs anymore. Here’s what the three kinds of accounts look like.

Let’s recap the major changes, per account type.

Non-Registered accounts

I’m always a bit reluctant to mess around with non-registered accounts since making trades here inevitably lead to capital gains. But the impact in the end was pretty minor.

There’s actually three separate accounts being considered here. Two are legacy investment accounts that have long-term holdings. The other is my so-called “cash cushion” account that is an integral part of my decumulation strategy, called “VPW”. You can read about the mechanics of it here.

So for the cash cushion, I had to get rid of ICSH in favour of ZMMK. I’m giving up roughly 1.2% in annual return by doing this, but I figure at some point the Bank of Canada and the US Federal Reserve will get closer in terms of their interest rates. This had a minor capital gain impact, which was as expected. Both ICSH and ZMMK keep a pretty stable price point (around $50/unit) and pay out monthly.

The bigger issue was getting rid of SCHF from my non-registered holdings, which I had held for a very long time. Selling that was going to trigger a large capital gain that I hadn’t accounted for in my tax calculations. The solution I came up with was pretty nifty, if I do say so myself. SCHF in my model is largely “International Equity” so clearly I was going to have to replace that international equity contribution somewhere. I ended up replacing SCHF with VCN (a Canadian equity holding) and replacing XIC (a slightly different Canadian equity holding than VCN) with VFV in the TFSA account. In essence, I moved my international equity stake out of my non-registered accounts and put it in the TFSA instead.

By buying VCN (a new fund for me) in my non-registered account, I reset the ACB of that fund so selling units a few months from now shouldn’t really attract too much in the way of capital gains. In fact, the first month4 I sold VCN to pay my monthly salary, I took a small loss. So my tax planning should also stay intact.

TFSA accounts

There were no USD assets in my TFSA to begin with, so no changes were needed on that account. I had to do some asset class shifting here while maintaining 100% equity allocation in the TFSA. As mentioned above, XIC (Canadian Equity) was dismissed from the TFSA, and replaced with VIU (which is international equity).

I do have a small desire to covert the TFSA into a custom index (a Questrade feature) to save a bit on the MER imposed by XEQT here. I may yet do this. It will expand the number of ETFs in these accounts since I’ll need to decompose XEQT into its constituent components. This is again a case of me adding complexity in order to save a few bucks…But don’t I owe it to my readership to give it a try?

RRIF accounts

Mainly, the RRIF accounts replaced AOA with XGRO and ICSH with ZST. But since XGRO holds a lot less US Equity than AOA did, the AOA to XGRO conversion wasn’t exact. I had to replace some of the AOA with a US Equity holding (VFV). I chose to use ZST instead of ZMMK in the RRIF for two reasons:

  • I wanted a different ETF in my RRIF as compared to my non-registered. This helps me avoid CRA superficial loss rules.
  • ZST is ever so slightly riskier than ZMMK, which is fine, since the cash position in the RRIF is much more static than the cash position in my non-registered account.

The way ahead

Getting rid of USD assets has simplified my portfolio and my workflow thinking. I no longer have to worry about USD/CAD exchange rates, and my need to use Norbert’s Gambit should be over. It also opens up my universe to other DIY brokers. I’ve been a fan of Wealthsimple, but couldn’t use them for my RRIF accounts since they contained USD assets. Now I can consider Wealthsimple for all my investing needs5.

Working through the mechanics of slowly moving my assets to an all CAD lineup has caused me to probably spend way more time than is healthy looking at my portfolio and making trades. This should come to an end — with DRIP set up across all registered accounts6, the holdings should be more or less on autopilot with only monthly checkins to make sure my asset allocations haven’t drifted too far from my targets.

I’ve updated my posts that talk about ETF all stars and the “Magnificent Seven” ETFs as well, for reference.

  1. Selling DLR is the last step of a Norbert’s Gambit when you’re converting USD to CAD. You can read about the gambit on Questrade here. ↩︎
  2. “Journaling” is the step that turns units of DLR.u (which are priced in USD) into units of DLR (which are priced in CAD). If you’re not a Questrade Plus subscriber, journaling costs $9.95 plus HST every time you do it on Questrade. ↩︎
  3. Ok, not all of them — Claude only connects to the accounts I own, and not those of my spouse. And the last trades haven’t settled yet, so the one I did on September 4th wasn’t showing up in my transaction history. I don’t expect the story is too different if I include the gambits I ran in my spouse’s RRIF account. ↩︎
  4. After making sure 30 days had passed in order to avoid a “superficial loss” in CRA’s parlance. ↩︎
  5. And if they offer a promotional offer that throws free money my way, I’d seriously consider switching brokers again. ↩︎
  6. I don’t use DRIP in non-registered accounts because non-registered transactions need to be logged for adjusted cost base adjustments; I’d prefer to keep these fully under my control to minimize the number of transactions. I don’t mind carrying a bit of cash in non-registered accounts in order to avoid excess trades. ↩︎

a robot holding a cup

Questrade: Custom Indexing extends to CAD stocks, more AI platform support

RobHLeave a comment

Questrade has been beavering away on a raft of new features, some of which were promoted with great fanfare in an online event last month. I covered that in some detail in a previous post. There are already some significant developments to these features so I thought I’d mention them here so you have the latest view.

Custom Indexing now includes Canadian Equities

Custom Indexing, in Questrade’s estimation, allows you to

“Combine the control of picking stocks with the ease of owning ETFs to put your own spin on the market. Then, keep the whole thing in sync with one click.”

Questrade website: Custom Indexing

Custom Indexing wasn’t actually part of last month’s event, but was quietly released earlier in the year. I covered its first release in this post. In essence, it gives you the ability to create your own all-in-one fund. In its first release, I thought it showed promise but as it only permitted the inclusion of US Equities, the feature was of limited use to most people. (Including me, since I’m nearing the end of my multi-month initiative to kick USD out of my retirement portfolio.)

Now that Custom Indexing supports Canadian equities, you can build your own all-in-one fund, and save on the additional management fees these funds typically attract (I broke down how much a fund like XEQT costs in a previous post). It’s quite easy to set up, I built an equivalent to XEQT in about 5 minutes using its underlying funds (XTOT, XIC, and XEF). And with one click you can reset the desired percent allocations of each fund)1.

I could see using this in my TFSA accounts as a result; I’d really like to use this in my RRIF accounts, but you can’t have a RRIF that uses custom indexing, inexplicably.

Questrade’s MCP expands

If you missed it, the MCP is what allows your Questrade accounts to be connected to an AI platform. I’ve been experimenting with Anthropic’s Claude. I talked about my experiences using it previously. But already it’s expanded in scope.

  • The MCP now supports ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex and VS Code
  • The MCP now supports trading — all trades have to be approved via push notification

I continue to tinker with this feature. There’s a lot of promise here to get rid of some of the manual tasks I have to execute on a monthly basis. Using free versions of these AI platforms is in itself a bit limiting2, but since I’m still learning, I don’t mind.

  1. For longtime Questrade customers, this will seem eerily familiar; “one click rebalancing” is one of the features of Passiv Elite, a service that used to be offered gratis to Questrade users. ↩︎
  2. For example, I can’t connect both my wife’s Questrade accounts and my Questrade accounts to the same instance of Claude without paying for a Claude subscription. But I can use multiple AI programs, no big deal. ↩︎

vibrant crayola crayons in box on white surface

What’s in my retirement portfolio (August 2026)?

RobHLeave a comment

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)
    • 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)

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, and the charts that follow reflect the view post-payday, which happens around the end of the month1. On August 27th before the markets opened, this is what it looked 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).

More progress has been made on my plan to kick USD out of my retirement portfolio; it’s proceeding faster than I originally planned thanks to Questrade’s offer of free Norbert’s Gambit to all Questrade users for a few months. I’m expecting that it’ll all be gone by the end of September.

AOA is largely being replaced by XGRO, but because AOA is so heavily US Equity weighted, I always have to pick up VFV to make up the difference — I’m kicking USD out of my portfolio, not the US market. ZST is my pick for the RRIF to replace ICSH. It’s a similar idea to ICSH, but since Canadian interest rates are lower, I expect I’m sacrificing a bit of return there. I hope this will work itself out in the long run.

And I’m trying to respect my asset allocations at the same time, which remain unchanged:

  • 5% cash/ultra short term bonds
  • 15% bonds
  • 23% Canadian Equity
  • 37% US Equity
  • 20% International Equity

The asset-class split looks like this; you can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here. Every time I get rid of some AOA or ICSH, it gives me an opportunity to make sure I respect the splits. Here’s what it looks like:

Plan for the next month

With the asset class splits under control, next month will see the last vestiges of USD gone from the portfolio. And I expect I’ll do a bit of shifting to bump up the Interational Equity portion of the portfolio, which is a little light. And I plan to celebrate a bit, because the removal of USD from my retirement portfolio should reduce complexity significantly.

Overall

Part of using VPW2 as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. Net worth clawed its way back to June’s levels, but no complaints — it’s still 20% above where it was when I started on my retirement journey 20 months ago.

My VPW-calculated salary has now increased for 8 straight months, it’s nice getting a monthly raise!

  1. The exact day is variable because of the timing of the end of the month. Payday has to fall on a trading day. ↩︎
  2. Variable Percentage Withdrawal, a structured way to decumulate your portfolio. ↩︎
person driving a person flying an aircraft

A new asset tracker

RobHLeave a comment

My entire retirement strategy is built around the idea of maintaining my asset allocation1 within the 5 categories I’ve (somewhat arbitrarily) decided to care about, namely:

  • Cash and ultra short term bonds, which make up 5% of my retirement portfolio
  • Bonds, which make up 15% of my retirement portfolio
  • Canadian Equity, which makes up 23% of my retirement portfolio
  • US Equity which makes up 37% of my retirement portfolio
  • And International Equity (anything that’s not the US or Canada) is 20% of my portfolio.

Tracking these percentages across the multitude of accounts2 me and my spouse hold, across multiple brokers requires some external tool help. For many years, it was based on the multi-asset tracker I have linked on the Tools I Use page. But in the past few months, I’ve migrated to a “new, improved” version of that tracker that has been re-architected so it is now based on pivot tables. Here’s some screenshots:

Pivot tables make maintaining the values in my portfolio much, much easier, and having structured tables makes it really easy to create new ways to analyze my holdings.

For instance, with the old asset tracker, say I wanted to compare the total value of my RRIF accounts with that of my spouse. Since we’re too young for income splitting, I’m motivated to try to keep the values between them relatively equal, so that we’re both withdrawing roughly the same dollar amount every year (thankfully, my spouse and I are the same age).

I could do this with the old asset tracker, but it would involve creating a new sheet, linking to the relevant values, (not so easy when you’re working from a single screen) making the calculations and looking at the result. And I would make it quick and dirty, since I wouldn’t know at the time whether it was something I wanted to track long term or not.

With the new asset tracker, it’s just a pivot table away. Takes seconds.

I’ll be posting a more thorough walk-through of it in the coming days, but if you want to check it out, it’s available here.

  1. If you want to learn more about asset allocation, this is a good starting point: Investment basics: Asset Allocation ↩︎
  2. TFSAs for both. RRIFs and Spousal RRIFs for both. Non-registered accounts for both. An extra non-registered account that serves as a cash cushion, and an extra RRIF at Wealthsimple because I needed a new laptop 🙂 ↩︎