Category: RRIF

Chasing Free Money with Wealthsimple

RobH2 Comments

As I’ve been alluding, my relationship with QTrade is coming to an end. It would have ended back in March 2025 when I moved the majority of my holdings to Questrade, but having an active RRIF can make things a bit more complicated when it comes to changing your online broker.

Anyway, the plan all along was to move the last of my QTrade holdings — 4 RRIF accounts: 2 for me, 2 for my spouse — to Questrade around now, after most of the RRIF payments for 2025 have been taken care of1.

But then Wealthsimple came around and decided to throw free money on the table2. And they even helpfully extended the registration deadline — multiple times — to make it even easier. Now, I know I preach about simplifying your arrangements in retirement to make it easier on your heirs, but hear me out….

Because of a problem with my DPSP, (another cautionary tale for those who are considering retirement), I already had a RRIF with Wealthsimple (and a nice shiny MacBook Air) as a reward for my troubles. If I wanted to keep my MacBook, I had to keep my money with Wealthsimple3 until January 2026, so that RRIF wasn’t going anywhere…I reasoned I wasn’t really making things more complicated. I’m going from using three brokers to using two, so that’s clearly an improvement.

Moving accounts from another provider to Wealthsimple, like many things Wealthsimple does, is totally digital, and very, very easy to accomplish. All that was needed was the account number and a recent statement from my sending broker, and that was it. I think it took all of 10 minutes to get the ball rolling. No printers. No pictures. No pens. Just clicks and swipes.

And even better is Wealthsimple’s super-clear status indicator, visible in the app or when using the web:

How clear is that? Of course, one could complain about how it could possibly take a month for things to move along (I know I did), but it’s stuff like this that makes me realize how far ahead of the competition Wealthsimple is when it comes to serving their clients.

What’s more, the transfer finished *way* ahead of schedule, being fully complete on November 8th, around 2 weeks after initiating the request. And, to make things even more pleasant, Wealthsimple has already reimbursed me the $150 plus GST that QTrade charged me for moving the account — no need for me to provide “proof” — the industry standard is well known to all, including, lately, the federal government.

I’ll provide an update once the free money starts rolling in. I have to update my workflows on how I get paid, since it’ll be a new world starting in January!

  1. I take RRIF payments monthly to make it more like a salary. And to avoid large stock sales all at once, since getting paid means selling assets. ↩︎
  2. I wonder if the gravy train in this space will end — read more about my thoughts on that here ↩︎
  3. The catch with free money (or free gifts) from brokers always involves keeping your money intact with them for some non-trivial amount of time. 12 months and 24 months are both pretty common. No big deal to me, I intend to stay retired a lot longer than that. ↩︎

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Oct 2025)

RobH2 Comments

This is a monthly look at what’s in my retirement portfolio. The original post is here. Last month’s is here.

Portfolio Construction

The retirement portfolio is spread across a bunch of accounts:

  • 7 RRIF accounts (3 for me, 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 October 27th, 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.

No massive changes this month; the one you might notice is a slight shift from AOA to XGRO. I move some of my USD holdings into CAD every quarter, and last month was when I did it. The majority of my spending is in CAD, so I use Norbert’s Gambit to move funds around.

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 60)
  • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500, with a small sprinkling of Russell 2000)
  • 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.

Overall

The retirement savings had a great month, again — a 6-month growth streak at this point. Overall, I’m now 11.5% ahead of where I started even though I’ve been drawing a monthly salary since the beginning of the year. I don’t really expect the winning streak to continue, but VPW allows me to take some benefit from the frothy stock markets at moment.

Net Worth as a percentage of starting point

My VPW-calculated salary has hit a new high this year, 5.92% higher than my first draw in January. The monthly salary is also on a 6-month growth streak.

Monthly Salary as a Percentage of Jan 2025 salary

The months ahead will see the final “goodbye” to QTrade1 as the last of my RRIF investments will move to (mostly) Questrade2.

  1. I didn’t have a great deal of issue with QTrade as a provider, but their support (lack thereof) was beginning to become irritating. ↩︎
  2. My own QTrade RRIF will join the RRIF holdings I already have with Wealthsimple. They remain a potential backup provider of my retirement savings. I would have moved more to take advantage of their cashback promotion, but they still, inexplicably, do not support self-directed spousal RRIF accounts. ↩︎

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Sept 2025)

RobH3 Comments

This is a monthly look at what’s in my retirement portfolio. The original post is here. Last month’s is here.

Portfolio Construction

The retirement portfolio is spread across a bunch of accounts:

  • 7 RRIF accounts (3 for me, 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. At market close, September 25, this is what it looks like:

Retirement holdings by ETF, September 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 massive changes this month; the one you might notice is a reduction in HXS, which holds US stocks exclusively. I picked this one to sell out of my non-registered accounts as my US equity allocation was a bit high.

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 60)
  • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500, with a small sprinkling of Russell 2000)
  • 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

I don’t need to make serious changes at this juncture, but there will be some need to make some noticeable tweaks in the coming month:

  • Q3 dividends will flow in to the account which will make for some movement, especially in XGRO and AOA. (Payout date for XGRO is September 29th , AOA is estimated to be October 8th.
  • I will need to convert some of my US RRIF holdings into CAD. I do this quarterly. Why quarterly? It allows me to smooth out any big swings in the FX rate over the course of the year. This will show up as a reduction in AOA and an increase in XGRO next month.
  • And, at the very end of October, AOA will rebalance. This is not foreseen to be a big deal.
  • All these moves will be tracked through my multi-asset tracker; it may be I have to buy a bit more foreign equity as I see I’m a touch light in that category.

Overall

The retirement savings had a great month, again. Overall, I’m now 8% ahead of where I started even though I’ve been drawing a monthly salary since the beginning of the year. This is aligned with what my retirement planner told me to expect, but as you can see, the journey has had some interesting ups and downs already.

Monthly retirement savings, as percentage of Jan 2025 value

My VPW-calculated salary has hit a new high this year, 4.22% higher than my first draw in January1. This is also expected, since it tracks the value of the retirement portfolio, albeit in a much more controlled way. The VPW “cash cushion” smooths out the ups and downs of the monthly returns. I suppose I really should see an increase in my salary on par with inflation so that I maintain my spending power. I’ll have to think about how to track that2.

Monthly salary, as percentage of Jan 2025 salary

ZGRO versus ZGRO.T: what’s the difference?

RobHLeave a comment

ZGRO and ZGRO.T are both asset allocation funds (aka all-in-ones1) offered by BMO. They hold the same assets, and they both generate the same (dividends-reinvested) returns. But ZGRO.T says it has a yield of 5.65% whereas ZGRO has a yield of 1.73%2. How is this possible? Full disclosure: I don’t own either of these funds because I have historically invested in a very similar-to-ZGRO product, XGRO, instead3.

Let’s start with a really high level look at these funds4.

ZGRO vs ZGRO.T, Overview Tab (source bmogam.com)

The first thing I’ll point out is one of caution: ZGRO and ZGRO.T have very similar tickers and it’s all-too-easy to mix them up. The fund names are also very similar, although ZGRO.T adds the words “Fixed Percentage Distribution Units” to the mix. That’s a clue. The other things we can learn from this first glance is that ZGRO.T is pretty new (Inception Date), is about 1/20th the size of ZGRO in terms of investments (Net Assets), has an identical MER to ZGRO, but whoa, that distribution yield is off the charts. Put simply, if you had $1000 in ZGRO, and $1000 in ZGRO.T, and the last distribution paid was assumed to be constant5, you’d get $11.73 from ZGRO and $56.50 from ZGRO.T over the next twelve months. Huh?

This is even more puzzling if one takes a look at what each of the two ETFs hold: it’s identical:

ETF HeldZGRO %6ZGRO.T %
ZSP – S&P 50037.037.0
ZCN – TSX Capped20.420.4
ZAG – CAD Bond13.813.8
ZEA – MSCI EAFE13.413.4
ZEM – MSCI Emerg6.76.7
ZUAG – US Bond5.85.8
ZMID – US Mid Cap2.02.0
ZSML – US Small Cap1.01.0
Cash00

Comparing top holdings, ZGRO versus ZGRO.T. Can you see a difference? I can’t see a difference.

I spent quite a bit of time searching on the BMO website trying to get their take on the difference. In a lot of places, (e.g. the simplified prospectus7), the two funds are treated as the same. After nearly giving up, I did come across this document which has a teeny tiny footnote, which I reproduce here:

These units are Fixed Percentage Distribution Units that provide a fixed monthly distribution based on an annual distribution rate. Distributions may be comprised of net income, net realized capital gains and/or a return of capital. The monthly amount is determined by applying the annual distribution rate to the T Series Fund’s unit price at the end of the previous calendar year, arriving at an annual amount per unit for the coming year. This annual amount is then divided into 12 equal distributions, which are paid each month.

BMO Asset Allocation ETFs Whitepaper

So the big difference as I see is is that ZGRO.T attempts to give a stable yield in 12 month chunks. It does this by

  1. Giving you dividends from the underlying assets (so does ZGRO)
  2. Selling underlying assets (and generating a capital gain)
  3. Giving you back your own money (this is known as as return of capital)

Let’s take a look at the two from a tax perspective (note that this only matters if you were to hold these funds in a non-registered account):

ZGRO vs ZGRO.T 2024 Distribution Tax Tab (source bmogam.com)

And here the distinction between the two becomes clearer: ZGRO.T is making good use of Return of Capital (RoC) to distribute a dividend with limited near-term tax implications. But as always, there’s no free lunch — using RoC means that future capital gains will be higher since RoC reduces the ACB8 of the funds in question, and if your ACB drops to zero, you have to treat RoC as a capital gain.

So when might you consider using ZGRO.T instead of ZGRO?

ZGRO.T makes sense in a RRIF account. It’s essentially automating some of the steps I have to take every month to get paid (you can see the mechanism I use here). Every month, I have to sell some of my holdings in order to get the RRIF-minimum payment out.

In a non-registered account, ZGRO.T’s monthly distributions might be useful if you had the need for consistent monthly cash flow; in addition, if you expect to at some point be in a lower tax bracket, it might help you save future tax, since it’s deferring some gains by using Return of Capital. In my case, I don’t see a good reason to use it since I would have to sell existing assets in order to raise funds to buy it, which generates capital gains.

So, in summary, the two funds are the same from a total return perspective, with ZGRO.T more monthly cash and ZGRO providing more paper gains. In a RRIF account, ZGRO.T automates some of the manual selling needed to execute decumulation. In a non-registered account, the tax treatment of the two is different, and you’d have to work out the numbers to see if it’s a benefit or not.

  1. If you want to read about all-in-ones, https://moneyengineer.ca/2025/01/21/why-you-can-fire-your-advisor-asset-allocation-etfs/ is a good place to start. ↩︎
  2. This yield is calculated by dividing the most recent per share distribution by the share price and multiplying by 12. In essence, this number is the value of the most recent (monthly in the case of ZGRO.T, quarterly in the case of ZGRO) dividend payout extrapolated over the full year. It may or may not represent what kind of yield you get in the future. ↩︎
  3. Why? Inertia. There are minor differences in the makeup of XGRO versus ZGRO but either is a fine choice for the lazy investor. ↩︎
  4. All the tables here are right off BMO’s ETF selector, which is excellent, by the way. ↩︎
  5. ZGRO is currently paying 7.3 cents per share every quarter and this has been stable since 2020. ZGRO.T is currently paying 6 cents per unit held every month and this has been stable since March 2025. ↩︎
  6. As of September 18, 2025 ↩︎
  7. which weighs in at ~450 pages. I’d hate to see the non-simplified prospectus. ↩︎
  8. Adjusted Cost Base. The average per unit price you pay for a share, necessary to track in order to accurately calculate capital gains (or losses). I use adjustedcostbase.ca for this, found in Tools I Use ↩︎

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Aug 2025)

RobH1 Comment

This is a monthly look at what’s in my retirement portfolio. The original post is here. Last month’s is here.

Portfolio Construction

The retirement portfolio is spread across a bunch of accounts:

  • 7 RRIF accounts (3 for me, 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. At market close, August 22, this is what it looks like:

Retirement holdings by ETF, August 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.

The most noticeable change is a growth in the importance of ICSH to my portfolio at the expense of ZMMK. I did the math to justify performing a Norbert’s Gambit of the CAD generated by selling ZMMK and picking up ICSH. The amount of HXS remaining in the portfolio is dwindling, and may be gone altogether by next month. I choose which assets to sell out of my non-registered accounts by simply determining which asset category needs to be trimmed based on my multi-asset spreadsheet.

I also have a new way to track my AOA splits; since it rebalances itself twice annually, it seems to me wiser to fix its bond contribution at 20% in my multi-asset tracker. The equity splits between US, International, and Canadian are still dynamically calculated at least monthly using a properly weighted formula.

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 60)
  • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500, with a small sprinkling of Russell 2000)
  • 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

I don’t really see a need to make changes based on what I see here. Cash flowing in to the account (bonus payments, regular TFSA contributions) will be re-invested in one of XEQT or XGRO1, typically2.

Overall

The retirement savings had a great month. Overall, I’m ahead of where I started even though I’ve been drawing a monthly salary since the beginning of the year. This is aligned with what my retirement planner told me to expect, but as you can see, the journey has had some interesting ups and downs already.

Monthly retirement savings, as percentage of Jan 2025 value

My VPW-calculated salary has hit a new high this year, 2.41% higher than my first draw in January3. This is also expected, since it tracks the value of the retirement portfolio, albeit in a much more controlled way. The VPW “cash cushion” smooths out the ups and downs of the monthly returns. I suppose I really should see an increase in my salary on par with inflation so that I maintain my spending power. I’ll have to think about how to track that4.

Monthly salary, as percentage of Jan 2025 salary
  1. I have purchased some TEQT lately since it has a lower MER. I covered TD’s family of all-in-ones here. ↩︎
  2. Since my target is 15% bonds, and XGRO is 20% bonds, I have to offset some of the XGRO purchases with 100% equity purchases. ↩︎
  3. Not a bad raise. ↩︎
  4. Looks like https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/subjects-start/prices_and_price_indexes/consumer_price_indexes is a good place to start. ↩︎