Category: RRIF

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. ↩︎

News: Wealthsimple now supports spousal RRIFs

RobH1 Comment

Well, that figures.

Right after the final, final deadline of Wealthsimple’s last free money offer, it appears that Wealthsimple is now offering spousal RRIFs as an account type for the DIY investor (they’ve had them for quite a while in their robo-advisor accounts).

This had always struck me as silly, especially since they have offered spousal RRSPs for a while now.

Full instructions on how to open one found here.

With this development, Wealthsimple is nearly a viable option to host all of my retirement funds1. My needs are pretty simple:

  • support for all the account types I need (RRIF/Spousal RRIF, TFSA, joint non-registered, individual non-registered)
  • zero cost ETF buy/sell
  • support for Norbert’s Gambit (which implies support for USD accounts, naturally)

Norbert’s Gambit is planned in early 2026 for Wealthsimple, per the very limited info found here.

So, if you’ve been on the fence about Wealthsimple, here’s one more reason to consider them. Once Questrade’s free money gravy train ends for me in March 2027, they become a personal serious contender, especially if they are willing to throw free money my way, which, historically, has certainly been a recurring theme. On that note, if any reader wants to give them a whirl, I have referral codes, just shoot me a note at comments@moneyengineer.ca; if you act quickly2, there might be some free Apple gear in it for you too.

  1. QTrade and Questrade both offer all three. There may be others. ↩︎
  2. Register by December 23, 2025 ↩︎

The Mechanics of Getting Paid in Retirement: 2026 Edition

RobH6 Comments

DIY investing also means DIY decumulation. In 2026, I’ll be paying myself from my various RRIFs as well as from non-registered funds. I’ll refer to the letters in the diagram below so you can follow along1:

A: Calculate Net Worth over all retirement accounts

“Retirement accounts” include 3 non registered accounts, 2 TFSAs and 5 RRIF accounts. All of these are at Questrade except for one RRIF account held at Wealthsimple. My net worth calculation ignores my day-to-day spending accounts, and any other assets (my house, for example). In 2026 I could look up this number using Passiv, but I’m not 100% clear on what the fate of my Passiv account will be once Questrade cuts ties with them (March 2026). I still have a spreadsheet with lots of details and pretty graphs based on my multi-asset tracker.

B: Use VPW Methodology to Calculate Monthly “Suggestion”

VPW stands for “Variable Percentage Withdrawal” and it’s the playbook I use to guide my monthly withdrawals from my retirement accounts. I talk a bit about it here. The suggestion is generated by a VPW spreadsheet, but the inputs are pretty simple:

  • current net worth
  • current age
  • current pension amounts2
  • future pension amounts, and age you’ll be when you take them3
  • asset allocation breakdown (%stocks versus %bonds)

This “suggestion” represents the maximum value of the assets I am advised to sell this month. You could take more or you could take less. It’s merely a suggestion. For me, I take the suggestion at face value and sell the assets needed to meet the value of the “suggestion”.

C: Calculate the Salary

The “Suggestion” in step B is NOT your salary. The VPW methodology enforces one more step to calculate that. The VPW methodology requires the use of a “cash cushion”, which has the effect of making sure you don’t need to make drastic month-to-month changes in your salary, either upward or downward. The cash cushion is roughly 5x the “suggestion”4 and your salary is 1/6th of “suggestion” plus “cash cushion”. The “salary” represents the amount that will eventually turn up in your chequing account.

To make things easier to track, my “cash cushion” is a totally separate non-registered joint account that holds one of four things: Canadian dollars, US dollars, ZMMK or ICSH. I keep a little cash floating around in this account to avoid having to do monthly trades. It just makes tax reporting and ACB tracking a bit simpler, at a small loss of interest income. Also, Questrade doesn’t support fractional shares of either ZMMK or ICSH, and since they routinely trade at roughly $50/share, mathematically, I’ll always have $25 CAD and $25 USD on average 🙂

D/D’: Compare the Suggestion to the Salary and act accordingly

Since the cash cushion is effectively a 5-month moving average Salary, the Suggestion could be more than or less than the Salary. If my net worth is down (or up) month over month, then it follows that the Suggestion will also be down (or up) month over month. My Salary may or may not be down (or up), depending on how long the downturn has lasted. Just to give you a sense of how the cash cushion smooths out the market gyrations, you can see the comparision of net worth versus salary below. (Taken from my most recent monthly “What’s in my Retirement Portfolio” update.) The net worth moves quite a bit month-to-month (generally upward, which is nice), but my salary is much smoother (but also generally upward).

Anyway, what all this means is that I’m either going to move some of the Suggestion money into the cash cushion (because my Salary is less than the Suggestion), or I’m going to pay myself from the cash cushion because my Salary is higher then the Suggestion5. It’s one or the other; as yet, I haven’t had the Salary be equal to the Suggestion, but it is mathematically possible, of course.

E/E’: Make sure the 4 Questrade RRIFs have cash to cover the monthly payment

At the end of 2025, I’m expecting some sort of communication6 from Questrade as to what my minimum monthly7 RRIF withdrawal needs to be for 2026 for each of the four RRIF accounts in my household8. This is a standard “feature” of anyone holding a RRIF — your provider makes a calculation based on the value of your RRIF on the last day of the year and your age (or your spouse’s age) at the end of the year. That’s RRIF minimum — the minimum amount you’re obligated to take. This coming year, I’ll stick with RRIF minimum again to avoid having to deal with spousal attribution rules.

So for 2026, I will know exactly how much cash I will need every month in every Questrade RRIF account. And since I’ve done such a good job in simplifying my RRIFs9 (pats back) I can also calculate exactly how many shares of XGRO need to be sold in each RRIF account every month, in real time10.

So generally, this step involves placing 4 sell orders to put cash in the account.

The E’ step — moving cash from the RRIF to the chequing account — I’m expecting to be automatic, but since I haven’t had to do this with Questrade before, I’m not certain.

F/F’: Generate cash equal to RRIF minimum in the Wealthsimple account and move it to the chequing account

Like with Questrade, I’m expecting Wealthsimple to communicate my RRIF minimum. From what I can see from their website, it appears that they actually make it really obvious.

The same good work I did with my Questrade accounts is even better in my Wealthsimple RRIF account since I hold no USD at Wealthsimple. So here, and thanks to fractional shares, 100% of my RRIF is invested in XGRO, with no additional cash.

Their help article makes it sound like both F and F’ are under my control, which is fine. I’ll just do this step at the same time I do the Questrade step. Maybe I only have to do F’ once and pay out in “Installments”? Not sure.

G/G’: Use the non-registered account(s) to generate cash equal to Suggestion minus all the monthly RRIF payments

I already know my five RRIF minimum payments will fall well short of the VPW “Suggestion”, so every month I have to sell assets from the non-registered accounts to make up the shortfall. This cash will either go 100% to my chequing account or some of it may be diverted to the cash cushion.

Normally this comes from my, not my spouse’s, non-registered account. Since my spouse is still working, I leave hers alone to avoid generating capital gains. Unfortunately, my non-registered accounts are a bit of a dog’s breakfast, and although I’ve made efforts to use spreadsheet formulas to make automated suggestions11, it’s proving a bit more difficult.

In the end, this is again a sale of one or more assets. For step G’, I can then immediately use Questrade’s “Withdraw Money” to move the cash into my chequing account, or “Move Money” to move cash into the Cash Cushion account.

Conclusion

And that, my friends, are the steps I take monthly in retirement. I try to perform these steps in the dying days of every month while allowing enough time for trades to settle to ensure cash is well and truly in hand before I move it to my chequing account.

In my household, a very large portion of this process gets spit out as a step-by-step “do this, do that” set of instructions I’ve built into a macro-enabled spreadsheet. The trades required for Step G are still decided on the fly, manually. Of couse, given that Questrade has APIs, I could conceivably make automatic trades based on the work I’ve done, but I’m not sure I want to take that step. Retirement project?

  1. I don’t really know if any of my readers find this particular articl useful, exasperating or confusing. But for me, it’s useful to write down how it works! ↩︎
  2. For me, zero. ↩︎
  3. For me, CPP, OAS and the OAS supplement. The current plan is to defer CPP/OAS until age 70 to maximize my inflation-indexed income. ↩︎
  4. which, in my case, since I withdraw monthly, is about 5x my salary ↩︎
  5. I’ve run this algorithm ten times so far this year: 3 times I had to pay myself out of the cash cushion and 7 times I added to the cash cushion. That’s the general upward trajectory of this year’s market in action ↩︎
  6. My last provider, I actually called them to check. I had of course calculated it myself (and they were very close) but my numbers don’t matter to the CRA. I’m hoping Questrade makes it a bit more obvious, but I’m pessimistic. ↩︎
  7. I had set it up as monthly. I could’ve chosen quarterly or annually. I like monthly. ↩︎
  8. Individual and spousal RRIFs for each of us. ↩︎
  9. My RRIF accounts hold one of five assets: Canadian and US dollars (because I can’t buy fractional shares), ICSH, AOA, or XGRO. ICSH is held in RRIFs to keep me at 5% cash in my retirement overall, and I routinely convert (quarterly) AOA into XGRO using Norbert’s Gambit. ↩︎
  10. And yes, I have a macro-based spreadsheet that tells you exactly how many shares to sell at that moment based on share price and current cash in the account. ↩︎
  11. The most appropriate thing to sell in any given month is an asset for which I’ve become overweight per my multi-asset tracker. But when you hold all-in-ones in the portfolio, it’s a bit trickier to work that out. I just need to set aside some time to come up with a spreadsheet-based solution. I would much prefer this decision to be made algorithmically. ↩︎