Category: Retiring

DIY Decumulation: Expect Delays, Plan Accordingly

RobHLeave a comment

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.

  1. 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…. ↩︎
  2. Fast transfers seem to be part of the Wealthsimple ethos. ↩︎

Retirement Portfolio Annual Review

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:

PositionJanuary 2025December 2025Notes
AOA: USD 80/2052.2%51.3%Used for RRIF payments1
XGRO: CAD 80/2020.2%18.6%Used for RRIF payments
ICSH: USD short term bond0%4.4%Cash cushion, plus additional “cash” inside RRIF2
ZMMK: CAD short term bond0%0.6%Cash cushion CAD funds
SCHF: International Equity2.8%1.9%Used for monthly salary; held only in non-registered
XEQT: CAD 100% Equity0%6.5%Mostly in TFSA
HXT: CAD Equity7.4%6.3%Used for monthly salary; held only in non-registered
XIC: CAD Equity5.3%6.1%Did not add or subtract from this holding this year
DYN6005: USD HISA3.7%0%Replaced by ICSH
DYN6004: CAD HISA2.6%0%Replaced by ZMMK
HXS: USD Equity2%0%Sold off from non-registered accounts to fund monthly expenses
VCN: CAD Equity1.8%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.

  1. 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. ↩︎
  2. 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. ↩︎
  3. AOA and XGRO are both 20% bonds, not 15%, and so mathematically this has to be offset with 100% equity somewhere in the portfolio. ↩︎
  4. My providers will give me the real numbers sometime in the coming weeks. How much hassle this will be is TBD. ↩︎

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Dec 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:

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.

  1. Using =googlefinance(“USDCAD”) of course ↩︎
  2. 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. ↩︎

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Nov 2025)?

RobH2 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 me1, 3 for my spouse, 1 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 November 25th, this is what it looks like:

ETF Breakdown of retirement investments, November 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.

No notable changes this month; HXT is down slightly because that’s the fund I sold in my non-registered account this month to help pay the bills. I’ve sold quite a few shares of this fund this year and I’m seeing the capital gains mounting, but it’s around where I expected to be. I try to keep taxes owing reasonable; nonetheless I’m guessing I will certainly be moving to quarterly instalments in FY 2026; that’s the downside of having no withholding tax of any kind this year.

Plan for the next month

The asset-class split looks like this

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)

All looks to be in order from an asset allocation perspective, no need to do anything here. Cash is slightly elevated as a result of the pending closure of the three remaining QTrade accounts and will drift back to the normal 5% over the coming few weeks, I expect.

Overall

Net worth overall stopped its 6 month winning streak and I’m down slightly month over month. But I will reiterate: my net worth is still growing even though I’m taking a living wage every month. You might think that “decumulation” means “a steady reduction in net worth” but it needn’t be the case. And, in my particular case, my retirement income will include no pensions, so it’s probably a good thing that it keeps increasing overall.

My VPW-calculated salary continues to grow for the 7th straight month in spite of the step back this month in my net worth. That’s a feature of the “cash cushion” that is integral to the VPW withdrawal. It serves as a shock absorber to the monthly ups and downs of the stock market.

Next month will end my relationship with QTrade as I move the final 3 RRIF accounts to Questrade2.

  1. My QTrade one is no more, transferred to Wealthsimple to take advantage of their Summer promotion. ↩︎
  2. I had hoped to move these to Wealthsimple and generate more free money, but alas, they still don’t support self-directed spousal RRIFs, which is very odd indeed. ↩︎

On being retired: So what is it you do, now?

RobHLeave a comment

People still working are always fascinated with what a recent retiree gets up to. I guess the short answer is that I’m still busy, still procrastinating, still learning — but with far fewer constraints on how I spend my day.

This Blog

MoneyEngineer.ca was an idea that grew out of something I had been doing occasionally before I retired. I would discover something interesting in the world of being a DIY investor or in being a cheapskate and I would tell a bunch of friends and family about it, usually via email. But I figured that I could tell more people about what I’ve learned by starting a blog.

Knowing my procrastination habits, I took steps to make sure I would get that going on day 1. So in late December 2024 I prepurchased 2 years of WordPress and registered a domain. Investing a bit of cash in my proposed endeavor I knew would motivate me to actually DO it.

The time I spend on the blog now versus the early days has diminished quite a bit (partly because I’m now way more familiar with how WordPress works) but I enjoy the structure of heading down to the basement office and doing the work of researching and putting words on the page. And watching the website grow in popularity has also been gratifying. So thanks to all for reading and sharing!

Website views and unique visitors for MoneyEngineer.ca since launch

Managing Money

I do enjoy managing my own retirement income, and chasing whatever deal gets thrown my way. And I do try to simplify as much as I can. Being a cheapskate sometimes has the cost of adding complexity, it’s true. And outside the blog, I’m a frequent contributor to investing-related subreddits.

Volunteering

There are many organizations out there who are happy to put a recent retiree to work either on a recurring or on a one-off basis. Getting out of the house is a good thing, I figure. Here are a few of the places I’ve spent my time:

Fitness

I’ve always been a fan of outdoor exercise — gyms have zero appeal for me, and so even before I retired I made a habit of getting outside to ski, ride, run or walk thirty minutes four to five times a week. In retirement, I’ve become more interested in running and entered my first distance races this year; to avoid injury, I’ve added more miles and more structure2.

I have never liked strength training, but know that as I get older, that’s something I have to pay attention to. I recently discovered darebee.com and am following their strength training program; lots of variety and it’s mostly based on body weight exercises, so I can do them practically anywhere.

Piano

Both my kids took lessons and we own an upright as a result. The kids are both out of the house and instead of letting the instrument collect dust, I’ve started learning myself.

Once again, in order to prevent myself from avoiding doing the daily work, I invested in an annual subscription to pianote.com3. I suppose most accomplished musicians would frown upon anything other than in-person, tailored lessons, but the approach of pianote really appealed to me: playing songs but with enough technique to build skills.

On most days, I spend between 30 and 60 minutes at the piano. I’m currently working on the piano accompaniment to “Someone Like You“.

So there you have the view of what this retiree gets up to — what have you found that fills your days after work? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca. I’m always curious about new things to try!

  1. Not a princely sum by any means, and not very regular employment (about 4 hours so far this year), so I don’t think it counts as a side hustle. ↩︎
  2. Training plans provided by chatGPT in both cases. ↩︎
  3. And although their billing is all in USD, they are in fact a Canadian company. Go figure. ↩︎