Category: Online Brokers

The Mechanics of Getting Paid in Retirement

RobH8 Comments

DIY investing also means DIY decumulation. I recently completed a change in online broker from QTrade to Questrade and this is how I get paid in retirement; I’ll refer to the letters in the diagram below so you can follow along.

How I get paid, April 2025

A: QTrade? What?

I know I started by saying I completed the transfer from QTrade to Questrade, but due to an unexpected snag, I still have 4 accounts with QTrade which are currently paying a monthly obligatory RRIF-minimum contribution to my salary. I talked about the snag here, but suffice it to say I could have moved these accounts too, but at the expense of foregoing monthly payouts for the remainder of 2025, which I didn’t think was worth it.

Next year, those accounts will disappear and Questrade will handle the RRIF minimum payments.

B: Yes, there are multiple RRIF accounts

When I started the paperwork to open RRIF accounts, I was surprised that the same choices were offered as were offered for RRSPs — individual and spousal. I’m sure that some of the reason is due to the attribution rules for spousal RRIFs, but anyway, there are 4 RRIF accounts generating 4 individual payouts every month. This is automatic, so I have to make sure that there is cash available in the 4 accounts each month, or else my provider will happily charge me an arm and a leg1 to do the necessary asset sale.

The asset sale takes a few seconds; and with T+1 settlement, the cash is available the next day. Right now I try to do all my moves on the 22nd of the month, but admittedly, this is more time than strictly necessary.

C: Opening the RRIF account includes providing your banking information

I don’t know whether there is any provider out there who permits RRIF payments to be paid to a non-registered account, but so far it seems that they all prefer to make EFTs into a bank account. That’s not a problem for me but this may not be what you’re expecting. The money just shows up like a paycheque on or near the last day of the month.

D/E: The sum of all RRIF payments isn’t enough to fund my desired lifestyle

I’m withdrawing RRIF minimum payments and funding the rest of my monthly paycheque by liquidating assets held in my non-registered account. Another approach would be to increase the RRIF payments, but then that attracts withholding tax, which I hate. The monthly liquidation of assets in my non-registered account generates taxable capital gains each time, naturally. The advice I got from my retirement planner suggested I should be able to maintain an overall 15% tax rate by making sure that I have a mix of favorable taxable income (capital gains and dividends) along with the unfavorable2 RRIF income.

I keep an eye on my 2025 tax bill by using the tax calculator I mention on https://moneyengineer.ca/tools-i-use/. I can always choose to switch gears if needed.

In Questrade, movements of cash are done from their aptly-named “Move Money” menu. Setting up your bank account in Questrade was a bit clunky3 and relied on some app like Plaid to get the job done. Moving funds in this way isn’t instant, expect a delay of at least two business days in each case.

Another oddity with Questrade is that any joint non-registered account is set up as a margin account, which means it’s shockingly easy to borrow money you don’t have4.

One unknown with Questrade — I was able to move money instantly after an asset sale. It’s not clear to me whether this uses margin or not5. I’ll know more once I get my April statement, I guess. If I get charged margin interest, I’ll have to hold off moving money until the day after the asset sale.

F: Variable Percentage Withdrawal (VPW) requires the use of a cash cushion

I described the methodology I use to calculate my take-home pay in a previous post, but in essence my salary is related to my real-time net worth, filtered through a 6-month moving average so an anomalous month on the stock market doesn’t impact my take-home pay quite so quickly. VPW makes a “suggestion”, this suggestion is added to the cash cushion, divide by 6, and presto, the “suggestion” is converted to a monthly “salary”.

In any given month, the cash cushion is either being augmented by the sale of some assets in my non-registered account (the suggestion is larger than the salary), or the cash cushion is being depleted to make up the shortfall in my calculated salary (the suggestion is less than the salary). All of those movements are manual. Transferring cash between non-registered accounts is supported by Questrade, but it wasn’t supported by QTrade6.

All in all, this process should take less than 15 minutes a month. The first time included a learning curve and extra setup, but now that pre-work is done. Next step is making sure my spouse knows how to do this, too!

  1. Assuming your arm and leg are worth $40. ↩︎
  2. Unfavorable because it’s treated as straight income, and since RRIF-minimum, no witholding tax. I’m expecting a decent tax bill come April next year. ↩︎
  3. Bank accounts showed up in my mobile app but not on the web portal. To get them to show up there I had to set up my account — again — and successfully transfer a nominal amount. Only then would the web app remember my bank accounts. ↩︎
  4. Which I inadvertently did, paying myself from the wrong non-registered account. Sigh. ↩︎
  5. Since the transfer isn’t instantaneous, and since the cash really is available the day after, one could make the case that this doesn’t require margin. But I really have no idea. ↩︎
  6. For QTrade I had to use my bank account to get around this restriction. ↩︎

Switching online brokers recap

RobH3 Comments

Switching online brokers is a time-consuming process; I just lived through moving from QTrade to Questrade to take advantage of Questrade’s 3% cash-back promotion. I covered the basic steps you need to take to switch brokers here. It took even longer than I expected, and here I break down some of the reasons it took as long as it did1.

Form filling was error-prone

The Questrade process to request a transfer looks something like this:

  1. You navigate to the Questrade account that is going to get the transfer (e.g. your TFSA)
  2. You initiate the transfer request by hitting a link. This, behind the scenes, creates a formal Transfer Request ticket that is processed by the front and back office.
  3. You are asked a series of questions online (sending broker, account numbers, kind of transfer)
  4. A pdf is automatically created2 that you then have to print, sign, and then…
  5. Upload.

The first problem was unique to the dying days of the promotion as me and every other person on the planet was trying to complete the same steps. Step 5 sometimes did not work, and you were left with a generic error message which encouraged you to try, try, again. Which I dutifully did. Unfortunately, this meant there was an explosion in the number of Transfer Request tickets that I mentioned in step 2, which I am sure completely overwhelmed the humans on the other side of the ticket.

The second problem was a bit more subtle. Sometimes, it seemed that the answers provided in step 3 were not populated on the resultant pdf. And hence, in some cases, forms were submitted with some mandatory fields missing. This would have been prevented had I bothered to carefully review the pdfs from step 4, but when you’re asking for a dozen different account transfers, it’s easy to miss a radio button that’s not filled out.

This problem was particularly noticeable on the RESP transfer forms, which are different from all of the others since there is a CRA form that also needs to be filled out. I believe I attempted to fill out the form correctly 3 times before getting it right. Rejection of an incorrectly filled form takes DAYS to process so timelines rapidly extend.

There’s not a lot of transparency in transfer progress

It took me a while to figure out where the transfer requests are hidden on the Questrade portal (you have to go to Move Money: Move Money History: Transfer: Transfer account to Questrade history)3 and here you see one of three states: Transfer Complete, Transfer in Progress, Action Required. There’s no detail beyond that.

  • “Action Required” is code for “call us, there’s a problem”; the old broker probably rejected the transfer for some reason. One reason is specific to RRIFs, but I covered that previously.
  • “Transfer in Progress” means one of:
    • Your filled out your transfer form correctly
    • We are initiating the request to your old broker
    • Your old broker is working on the request
    • Your old broker has accepted the request, but we don’t have it yet

Questrade also helpfully provides automated emails indicating when the Transfer starts and is nearing completion (they have your stuff, it’s just not showing up in the system yet), but — and this is a major irritant — the automated emails don’t include what account is being discussed. When you’re moving as many accounts as I did, this is not much better than noise.

One other small clue I had that my old provider got the request from Questrade is that they were usually pretty fast to charge their $150 transfer-out fee, plus HST4. So when I saw that I knew that my old provider was the one holding up the process…and if I didn’t see a transfer-out fee, I could safely assume that Questrade was to blame.

Did I say it was done? Well, almost…

I noted in a few cases that not 100% of the funds moved to Questrade. Unfortunately, the timing of the transfers meant that the likelihood of a quarterly dividend payout overlapping with the process was high. And yes, I see some residual cash left in my old broker in some cases for this reason. I suppose i’ll have to chase that down at some point, but the vast majority of stuff is now taken care of…well, except for my Canadian dollar RRIF, which is going to stay with QTrade a little longer until more of my mandatory RRIF payments have been made.

  1. My TFSA was the fastest, with the transfer request being accepted on February 26 and the holdings showing up on March 21. The joint investment account was the last to be processed, with holdings showing up in my Questrade account on April 15. ↩︎
  2. Whether a pdf is created or not I think is partially dependent on who the sending institution is. Not sure about that. ↩︎
  3. And although I show this as a menu structure, it’s not really. Move Money is a menu, but Move Money History is included on the page about halfway down. I’m not a big fan of how Questrade structures their web experience; it’s useable but it took a while to figure out where to find things and then remember where those things were… ↩︎
  4. Covered by Questrade, except for the HST part. But that’s another document submission to prove that the old provider charged the transfer out fee. Which is a bit ridiculous since ALL providers do this. ↩︎

Useful: Trading Authorization for online accounts

RobHLeave a comment

Having Trading Authorization (often called “TA”) is useful in a number of scenarios, but it doesn’t cover every angle either. It’s a minor hassle to set up, but altogether a useful endeavour.

What is Trading Authorization?

Well, you can start with a formal definition here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trading-authorization.asp. In essence, it gives you control and visibility over another person’s investment accounts (non-registered, TFSA, RRSP, RRIF, it doesn’t matter what kind).

Wait, what? Isn’t that what is normally called “Power of Attorney”?

Well, sort of. Power of Attorney (a handy — and free — guide can be found here) gives you the right to have this sort of control over any sort of account (bank, investment) but most institutions will still require you to fill in THEIR paperwork.

Trading Authorization forms normally require you to specify which accounts, specifically, are being authorized, meaning it’s entirely possible to have TA for a person’s TFSA but NOT their RRSP.

Here are some links describing the process for a number of brokers1:

Scenarios Where I’ve used Trading Authorization

Managing Family Finances

Since I’m the prime manager of our family’s retirement funds, I have trading authorization over my spouse’s accounts. The prime reason to do this is so I can see all the accounts from my login3 — even if they are held exclusively in my spouse’s name. This just makes things faster and simpler to do portfolio rebalancing, or even more practically, to get paid in retirement.

My spouse still needs her own login, since things like account statements and tax forms are only available from her login since she is ultimately the owner of those accounts, not me.

Managing My Parents’ Finances

As my parents aged, they passed on management of their retirement assets to me. I sat with them in a BMO branch as they filled in the paperwork4 to open their self-directed BMO Investorline accounts. This included filling in BMO Investorline’s paperwork designating me as the Trading Authority over their RRIFs, their TFSAs, and their joint non-registered account.

Having trading authorization on my parents’ accounts gave me my own login to the BMO Investorline platform, and from that screen I could see all the accounts and make trades. It also allowed me to call their support line myself and seek help doing things like in-kind RRIF payments to my folks’ non-registered account.

Limitations of Trading Authorization

Trading authorization isn’t an identity-based concept; rather, it’s an account-based concept. This means, for example, if you have trading authorization over three of your spouse’s accounts, and your spouse opens a fourth account, you do not automatically get trading authorization over the new account. The paperwork has to be filled in for the new account.

Trading authorization is only good for people who are alive. Trading authorization has no meaning if the account holder dies. Once that happens, you lose access to the account. Getting it back usually involves going through the probate process.

Different platforms treat accounts managed by trading authorization differently. In QTrade and BMO Investorline, there was no distinction at all between my and my spouse’s accounts. I had to give them nicknames to help me remember whose accounts were whose. In Questrade, I can only get a unified view of accounts from Questrade’s Edge platform, which although powerful, is a bit of an assault on the senses.

  1. all found by googling “trading authorization” <broker name> ↩︎
  2. A pretty interesting gap for a company that doesn’t have too many ↩︎
  3. Interestingly, Passiv doesn’t care who owns a linked account. If you have the login credentials of ANY user from a Passiv-supported broker, you can link them to your Passiv login. ↩︎
  4. One example of only a few where the relationship between BMO and BMO Investorline was useful. ↩︎

Cautionary Tale: changing brokers when you have a RRIF

RobH6 Comments

Summary: If you’re changing online providers with an active RRIF, the old provider is (apparently) obligated to pay out the ENTIRE RRIF amount for the current year before releasing your funds.

As you may have read previously, I’m (still) in the middle of changing online brokers from QTrade to Questrade1. Things are moving along…glacially2. I’m at step 6 of the guide.

Background

If you’re not that familiar with RRIFs, you may want to give Demystifying RRIFs a read.

At QTrade, I had 3 separate RRIF accounts:

  • One individual RRIF in CAD
  • One individual RRIF in USD
  • One spousal RRIF in CAD

QTrade makes you have different accounts for CAD and USD, whereas Questrade does not (hooray)3.

The individual and spousal RRIFs are set up to pay out RRIF minimum on a monthly basis, on the last day of the month. I expect this is a little unusual, since a lot of people seem to take their payments annually. In a weird QTrade wrinkle, one can only make payments from a CAD RRIF account, even though the USD RRIF account is used to calculate RRIF minimums4.

The RRIF transfer-out requests were initiated the instant the RRIF account was approved by Questrade, in the opening days of March (March 2 or March 3), a day or two after my February RRIF payment was processed by QTrade. Plenty of time, I figured.

Trouble Afoot?

About 2 weeks ago now, I got a cryptic email indicating that my RRIF transfer out request had been rejected by QTrade due to having “insufficient funds for RRIF payout”. Looking at my QTrade account, it looked to me like the US RRIF was moving (QTrade had already kindly charged me the $150 transfer-out fee), but the CAD RRIFs showed no signs of a transfer being initiated.

Thinking a little about it, I realized that perhaps QTrade wouldn’t release the RRIF assets to Questrade unless they could be sure Questrade could make the monthly RRIF minimum payment, which strikes me as silly, but I expect there’s some regulation that makes this mandatory. And so I immediately sold a few shares of XGRO in each of the RRIF accounts to ensure enough cash existed to cover the RRIF minimum payments and re-initiated the transfer out request.

But again, rejection. What?

But that, apparently, was not fully correct.

Current State of Play, and Some Advice

Today, I was informed by QTrade that no, they are obligated to pay out the ENTIRE RRIF payment for the year before they hand off the account to Questrade. Given the state of the market, I’m not exactly jumping up and down at the thought of having to sell 9 months worth of RRIF payments all at once. (This was, after all, EXACTLY why I set up the RRIFs to pay out monthly.)

So, I’ve decided to leave the QTrade RRIFs alone for the time being. This is far from ideal (multiple providers breaks all my rules about retirement investments being simple), but I take solace in the fact that

  • I will fix this at the end of the year, once most of my RRIF has been paid out
  • Maybe there will be another promotion before then 🙂

All this to say that make sure you have sufficient funds to cover any anticipated RRIF payouts BEFORE initiating a transfer-out request!

  1. And in what may be a minor miracle, I had BOTH providers call ME ON THE SAME DAY without prompting. ↩︎
  2. Most of the account transfer requests are 20+ days old at this point. I did struggle with completing the RESP transfer form correctly. The TFSAs moved quickly. The individual investment account moved quickly. The joint investment accounts are taking a lot longer. And the RRIFs longer still. The RESP, no idea. ↩︎
  3. Having filled out 14 different account transfer requests, ANYTHING that will reduce my account count is welcome. ↩︎
  4. This weird treatment was one of the reasons I started looking at other providers. QTrade claimed they could allow USD RRIF payments, but rejected my initial efforts to make that happen. The day before I started moving everything to Questrade, and two months after I complained about it, QTrade support contacted me to tell me that, oops, sorry, you can withdraw USD from your RRIF. Too late! ↩︎

Questrade Bonus Capability: Passiv

RobH5 Comments

**** Update: Per email communication on October 24 2025, as of January 31, 2026, Passiv will not be offered at all by Questrade, as they are planning to launch their own “integrated portfolio monitoring and rebalancing tools”.

**** Update: As of June 1, 2025, Passiv Elite is no longer offered for free for Questrade Clients. It’s now part of a subscription service called Questrade Plus***

As you may have heard, I’m in the middle of a transition between online brokers1. And so I’ve been spending some more time getting to know what Questrade offers to the DIY investor besides free buying and selling of stocks and ETFs.

One thing I looked into lately was Passiv, a service that is offered for free for all Questrade clients.

In brief, Passiv is a 3rd party web application2 that allows you to track your investments from a single screen, no matter if they are found in multiple investment vehicles (e.g. TFSA, RRSP, RRIF) or if they are found across multiple providers (full list of supported brokers is here)3.

What’s more, it also evaluates your portfolio against a model that you define. For example, if you (like me) have an investment portfolio with a target allocation of 5% cash, 15% bonds, 20% Canadian equity, 36% US equity, and 24% international equity, Passiv can assess your current holdings against these targets, and even do the trades to rebalance the portfolio!

Astute readers will note these are a lot of the same benefits I’m a fan of — and one of the big reasons most of my portfolio is invested in all-in-one asset allocation ETFs. (Are these ETFs unfamiliar? You can read about them here.)

I tried to use Passiv to model my own portfolio, but discovered that all-in-one asset allocation ETFs aren’t really supported by the tool4. Once I thought about it some more, it’s clear why — Passiv really markets itself as an ALTERNATIVE to using all-in-ones. Here’s a clear marketing pitch from Passiv that demonstrates its approach: https://passiv.com/feature-posts/model-portfolios-that-cost-less-than-all-in-one-funds-or-robo-advisors.

So to get the full benefit of Passiv, instead of holding XGRO, you would instead hold the constituent components of XGRO, a fund I’ve broken down previously. This would save you some management fees over time. Passiv helpfully does the math to calculate how much here5.

As a certified cheapskate, I’m always interested in saving a bit of money. But there are some downsides I could see in the Passiv approach:

  • You have to actually DO the rebalancing now and then. Not a big deal, but a fund like XGRO does this as part of their offer6.
  • You have to do the rebalancing no matter what. By this I mean that you have to buy when others are selling, and sell when others are buying. You can’t get overly attached to any one segment of your portfolio, because then you start making bad decisions based on “gut instinct”. Humans are notoriously bad at this7.

On the plus side, you will definitely save on management fees, and you could certainly tweak the contents to avoid products you wouldn’t normally buy (e.g. XGRO has some hedged funds, which I don’t like, typically).

An unknown for me is how foreign exchange is handled. That’s always something I consider since a lot of my retirement savings are in USD. Some experiments required 🙂

Anyway, it’s given me something to think about. I’ll have to see how easy it is to use in practice once all my accounts are back in place. Any Passiv users out there? I’m interested in your take — just drop a line to comments@moneyengineer.ca.

  1. And some (not all) of the funds are now showing up in Questrade, about 3 weeks after starting the process. Switching providers is not for the impatient. ↩︎
  2. WARNING: they don’t have an app. But someone named “Pasiv” does, and it looks very similar. ↩︎
  3. Other benefits include tracking of dividends, performance charts, etc. All stuff Questrade is apparently not very good at. ↩︎
  4. One asset class per stock symbol. My home-grown spreadsheet supports dividing symbols by asset class. ↩︎
  5. The calculation doesn’t include Passiv’s fees for the service, which are waived if you are Questrade client. ↩︎
  6. Per BlackRock “XGRO’s portfolio will be monitored relative to the asset class target weights and will be rebalanced back to asset class target weights from time to time at the discretion of BlackRock Canada and/or BTC. Generally, XGRO’s portfolio is not expected to deviate from the asset class target weights by more than one-tenth of the target weight for a given asset class.” [source] ↩︎
  7. If you’re interested in how behavior shapes investing, https://www.looniedoctor.ca/2024/12/13/etf-investor-behavior/ is a very good introduction to the topic. ↩︎