Wealthsimple is once again looking for new clients, or new investments from existing clients. Register by June 16, 2025, transfer $25000 or more within 30 days of registering, and receive an AirPod reward. If you prefer cash, the promotion website spells out the value:
Move $25k to $50k: $150 reward
Move $50k to $100k: $200 reward
Move $100k to $200k: $450 reward
Move $200k+: $900 reward
So not exactly a king’s ransom being offered here, but free money is free money.
Happy May to all, here’s some news from the world of Canadian DIY investing.
HISA rates are stable
HISAs, for those in the know, are “High Interest Savings Accounts” and offer a nearly zero risk1 way to earn some interest on your cash holdings. Read all about them here. “Class F” funds are usually available via your online broker, often bought and sold in the same module as mutual funds, although they are NOT mutual funds.
The periodically updated HISA table I maintain has been updated for May. No changes seen from last month, which is unsurprising, given both Canada and the USA have held interest rates steady over the past month. Here it is:
As a newly-minted Questrade user (got my first bonus payment yesterday, yay!) I see this as a net negative. Let’s look at why.
Passiv Elite is no Longer Free
One nifty (and unexpected) bonus I discovered being a Questrade client was getting access to Passiv’s advanced features. Questrade Plus means that particular freebie is coming to an end. Passiv’s “community” (i.e. free) service is still somewhat useful, but if you want automated rebalancing, you’re going to have either pay Questrade (and subscribe to Questrade Plus) or Passiv (currently $99/year) for that privilege in the near future.
Unlimited Journaling of Limited Use
The unlimited journaling feature of Questrade Plus targets people like me who do Norbert’s Gambit to convert USD to CAD on the cheap, but since I don’t do this sort of thing super-frequently (maybe 5-6 times a year at most), I’d rather pay-as-I-go (currently priced at $9.95 per request).
Real Time Data Streaming of No Interest
The “real time data streaming” feature targets the day trader. Other providers include this sort of thing for free (QTrade, Interactive Brokers). That’s not my thing. It does make me wonder who Questrade sees as their ideal client. Are they trying to be Wealthsimple? Or are they trying to be Interactive Brokers?
Wealthsimple Self-Directed RESPs, coming soon
Wealthsimple continues to chip away at the gaps in their self-directed portfolio offerings. RESPs were one of those gaps, but now it’s been filled, and the main website has been updated to reflect this. I can confirm that I have been offered a spot on the beta launch, so its release to the general public is imminent. Wealthsimple has offered robo-advisor RESPs for a while, but the DIY investor has been forced — until now — to look elsewhere for this.
Unless banks fail. We are all in a lot more trouble if that happens. ↩︎
Because, we all know, you can never have enough subscriptions, right? ↩︎
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!
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Which I inadvertently did, paying myself from the wrong non-registered account. Sigh. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
For QTrade I had to use my bank account to get around this restriction. ↩︎
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:
You navigate to the Questrade account that is going to get the transfer (e.g. your TFSA)
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.
You are asked a series of questions online (sending broker, account numbers, kind of transfer)
A pdf is automatically created2 that you then have to print, sign, and then…
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.
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. ↩︎
Whether a pdf is created or not I think is partially dependent on who the sending institution is. Not sure about that. ↩︎
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… ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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:
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.
all found by googling “trading authorization” <broker name> ↩︎
A pretty interesting gap for a company that doesn’t have too many ↩︎
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. ↩︎
One example of only a few where the relationship between BMO and BMO Investorline was useful. ↩︎
The Money Engineer 