Retirement Portfolio Annual Review

January 1, 2026 RobHLeave a comment

Happy New Year! A new year means it’s a good time to take a look at what went on in the retirement portfolio.

Let’s start by comparing the makeup of my portfolio at the beginning of the year versus my last update:

Position	January 2025	December 2025	Notes
AOA: USD 80/20	52.2%	51.3%	Used for RRIF payments¹
XGRO: CAD 80/20	20.2%	18.6%	Used for RRIF payments
ICSH: USD short term bond	0%	4.4%	Cash cushion, plus additional “cash” inside RRIF²
ZMMK: CAD short term bond	0%	0.6%	Cash cushion CAD funds
SCHF: International Equity	2.8%	1.9%	Used for monthly salary; held only in non-registered
XEQT: CAD 100% Equity	0%	6.5%	Mostly in TFSA
HXT: CAD Equity	7.4%	6.3%	Used for monthly salary; held only in non-registered
XIC: CAD Equity	5.3%	6.1%	Did not add or subtract from this holding this year
DYN6005: USD HISA	3.7%	0%	Replaced by ICSH
DYN6004: CAD HISA	2.6%	0%	Replaced by ZMMK
HXS: USD Equity	2%	0%	Sold off from non-registered accounts to fund monthly expenses
VCN: CAD Equity	1.8%	1.1%	In TFSA; reduced in favour of XEQT

What didn’t change much

The portfolio is still dominated by XGRO and AOA (not coincidentally, these are two of my ETF All-Stars) and they both had excellent years, as shown by this tool:

What also didn’t change is my overall approach: decisions for shifting funds is totally dependent on maintaining my asset allocations that haven’t changed either:

5% in cash or “cash like” holdings
15% in bonds
20% in Canadian Equity
36% in US Equity
24% in International Equity

This approach meant that what I sold off in my non-registered portfolio to fund my day to day expenses changed throughout the year; as the year progressed I sold HXDM, then HXS (reducing this to zero), and then finally HXT, all in the service of keeping my assets in line with my targets.

What did change

As a result of changing brokers (QTrade to Questrade), I lost the ability to cheaply hold HISAs. And so I had to change tactics and hold “HISA-like” ETFs instead. (which, on Questrade, like all ETFs, can be bought and sold at no charge). At the same time, I realized that I could increase my returns by shifting more to the US market. Significantly higher interest rates in the US means that I can get more for my “safe” funds, with the small annoyance that I have to deal with USD. You can see the latest rates on my frequently updated page.

As I sold off “pure” equity funds from my non-registered accounts, I had to make changes to keep my bond percentages aligned with my targets³. This is the reason XEQT (a global 100% equity fund) now makes an appearance in the overall picture. The nice side-effect of adding XEQT is that my portfolio is now 76% held in all-in-one funds, up about 4% from the beginning of the year. All-in-ones do the rebalancing for you, which is a good way to avoid bad behaviours.

Behind the scenes I also tried to better focus each of the account types to make things simpler and clearer:

TFSAs are now 90% equity, with the rest held in bonds. The rationale here is that TFSAs will be the last things I touch to fund retirement, and hence have the longest time horizon. There are still too many individual ETFs here, and my January resolution is to simplify this further.
RRIFs now have only three funds: AOA, XGRO and ICSH.
Investment accounts will remain a bit chaotic as most of my retirement expenses are coming out of these. It also happens to be the place where my “free money” payments end up and so there is a small amount of inbound cash to purchase things with. The 2026 plan is to continue to draw down my non-registered funds since my spouse is still working and would be taxed higher on her capital gains.

What’s ahead in 2026: RRIF

My own calculations⁴ show that my household RRIF-minimum income will be up 19% YoY, a result of good returns in the RRIF (roughly 11% YoY by my calculation) and being a year older. Selling XGRO every month will cover the required payments, and quarterly I will shift a portion of AOA into XGRO, converting the USD to CAD using Norbert’s Gambit.

What’s ahead in 2026: TFSA

January will see an effort to reduce the number of ETFs here. There are multiple CAD equity ETFs which I should consolidate into one, for instance.

We continue to contribute monthly to the TFSAs. The goal is to maximize equity percentage while minimizing the number of funds held. Once the cleanup is done, I expect to purchase XEQT monthly. Questrade introduced automated investing which I’ll likely set up to accomplish this.

What’s ahead in 2026: Non-Registered Accounts

The same strategy as 2025 will continue. Shortfalls in my monthly salary will be covered by selling assets in the non-registered accounts. I ended last year up 2% YoY in my non-registered accounts; I don’t really expect a repeat there. All things being equal, I should be down in my non-registered accounts at this time next year.

Indirectly. I haven’t tried to do a USD withdrawal for a RRIF payment, but in theory it should be possible. Instead I convert my AOA into XGRO a little at a time using Norbert’s Gambit. ↩︎
My VPW cash cushion is about 50% of my cash position in the retirement portfolio. The other 50% of my cash position is inside the RRIF in order to avoid taxation on those monthly distributions. ↩︎
AOA and XGRO are both 20% bonds, not 15%, and so mathematically this has to be offset with 100% equity somewhere in the portfolio. ↩︎
My providers will give me the real numbers sometime in the coming weeks. How much hassle this will be is TBD. ↩︎

RRIF transfers at year-end: Cautionary Tale

December 26, 2025December 22, 2025 RobH4 Comments

As previously noted, I’m in the process of closing off my last accounts with QTrade. No particular reason I did that other than to chase free money and to reduce complexity by reducing the number of brokers I deal with.

There were four RRIF accounts to move. I moved my own RRIF account to Wealthsimple in late October to take advantage of (you guessed it) free money, which left 3 other accounts to move to Questrade before the end of the year.

The Wealthsimple transfer was really simple, initiated online in about 5 minutes, requiring no follow-up on my part, and completed inside of 2 weeks. Wealthsimple even went so far as to proactively refund the $150 transfer out fee charged by QTrade. I received my first free money payment 2 weeks ago. Couldn’t have been easier.

For the last three RRIF accounts, I waited until my November RRIF payments had been made from QTrade in the normal way before initiating the transfer to Questrade¹ on November 30th. But of course, for these three, there was a problem. Questrade is famously opaque in its transfer out messaging, but I provide the message provided from them verbatim:

Please be advised that RRIF/LIF account transfers are subject to the industry-wide cut-off date, November 28, 2025. This cut-off date is not specific to Questrade, but is arranged and agreed upon by all Canadian financial institutions to ensure yearly payments are made in an orderly and timely manner to all account holders.

After a number of phone calls to both QTrade and Questrade, it seems that the meaning of the above message is that RRIF transfers between brokers are not possible during the month of December. I found a few references to similar problems with different brokers from years gone by.

Anyway, that’s yet another bit of weirdness associated with RRIFs that I’ve encountered:

That you should not expect a DPSP to move to a RRIF immediately
That transferring out a RRIF requires the sending institution to pay out the RRIF minimum payment for the year in full²
And now, that transferring out a RRIF cannot be done during the month of December

I could uncover no reason for why this restriction exists³, but I’m guessing it was once a problem in the days of manual calculations and mainframes that has never been changed. I am hoping at this point that the first week of the new year will get my RRIF moving again, but I don’t have any certainty that this will be the case.

Anyway, dear readers, take note: if you’re planning on moving a RRIF, make sure you initiate it by the beginning of November! And if anyone out there can tell me the reason, happy to be educated. Just drop me a line at comments@moneyengineer.ca.

You may wonder why I didn’t just move all my accounts to Wealthsimple. It was because they didn’t (at the time) support spousal RRIFs for DIY investors. They do now. Part of me wonders if Wealthsimple is going to end up with this money. ↩︎
Even if you take monthly payments from your RRIF as I do ↩︎
And, having exceeded the recommended annual exposure to clueless level one support agents, I thought the better of it for my mental health. ↩︎

Quick Tip: Tax Loss Harvest by December 30!

December 24, 2025 RobHLeave a comment

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.

After the current buoyant year in the markets, there’s probably not too many examples of this, but if you bought bonds in 2022…. ↩︎
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)?

December 23, 2025 RobH5 Comments

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:

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.

Using =googlefinance(“USDCAD”) of course ↩︎
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

December 22, 2025 RobHLeave a comment

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:

Company	Relevant Tickers	Management Fee³
iShares	XEQT, XGRO, XBAL et al	0.17%, effective Dec 18, 2025
Vanguard	VEQT, VGRO, VBAL et al	0.17%
TD	TEQT, TGRO,TBAL et al	0.15%
BMO	ZEQT, ZGRO, ZBAL et al	0.15%
Global X	HEQT, HGRO, HBAL et al	0.18%

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.

Technically called “asset allocation” ETFs, which is good, since asset allocation is how I view my own portfolio. ↩︎
Formerly known as Horizons, which explains the stock tickers used here. ↩︎
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. ↩︎

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