Tag: BMO investorline

Give more to charities, less to the CRA

RobHLeave a comment

It’s probably not news to most of you that charitable giving in Canada attracts tax breaks that reduce your tax owing to the CRA. It’s a nice deal — support the causes that are meaningful to you while saving a bit of tax owed.

But for those of you with non-registered accounts holding stocks and ETFs, did you know there’s even a better option that can save you even more tax? By donating shares in-kind to your chosen charity, you get the same donation credit AND you avoid paying capital gains tax on the shares donated!

The differences can be sizeable depending on the unrealized capital gains you have in your portfolio.

Here’s a quick example: let’s say I bought $10,000 of XGRO1 5 years ago in my non-registered account. Per this dividend calculator featured in “Tools I Use” I see that it’s currently2 worth $15,850.

Say I want to donate $1000 to a charity — selling $1000 of XGRO today would generate a capital gain of $369. That’s taxable at 22.48% marginal rate in Ontario in 20253, so I have to pay an additional $83 in taxes4.

If I instead donate the shares in kind to the charity, I pay nothing on the capital gain, and I keep $83 either for me, or for additional charitable works.

So how do you do this? Well, it will depend on the online broker you deal with, but generally the steps are something like:

  • Let the charity know you’re intending to do this. Larger charities will have a published process, for example the Ottawa Food Bank’s is here5. Smaller charities can still benefit if you use a service like CanadaHelps6.
  • Let your broker know your intent. Every broker will have a different process, usually including some kind of form. Here’s some examples I found:7

And that’s it. The receiving charity will issue a donation receipt reflecting the market value of the donated securities for your tax filing. The nullification of the capital gain is done using form T11708 when it comes time to file your taxes.

I plan to do this more systematically for the charities I support; it’s admittedly a bit more effort than automated contributions. Since Questrade (my current broker) charges me $25 every time I do this, I’ll have to be a bit more strategic about amounts and timing.

  1. XGRO is a significant part of my portfolio, and as such it is included in my ETF all-stars page. What is also true is that I don’t hold much of it in my non-registered portfolio, but that’s just a historical investing habits showing up. ↩︎
  2. 5 year return, WITHOUT dividends reinvested as of July 17, 2025. Not reinvesting the dividends means my cost base is clearly $10k, useful for the example that follows. ↩︎
  3. Per https://www.taxtips.ca/taxrates/on.htm for taxable income between $114k and $150k. Don’t forget that capital gains are only taxed at 50% of the value of the gain. ↩︎
  4. Ignoring the tax savings generated by the charitable donation in the first place since that’s the same in both scenarios. ↩︎
  5. Googling “donate securities” <charity name> is helpful ↩︎
  6. They do keep a portion of the donation to offset their expenses, so it may not be a good idea for small donations. ↩︎
  7. Sorry Scotia iTrade users, I did my best but could not find their form. Let me know if it’s available somewhere and I’ll update. I’ve successfully used the process with both BMO and QTrade. ↩︎
  8. i’m not an accountant. Consult a professional if you have concerns. ↩︎

QTrade versus Questrade unboxing

RobH3 Comments

I’m in the middle of my transition from QTrade to Questrade. With 11 different accounts to migrate, most of my time has been spent with their new account setup screens, but I have already taken note of a few differences that I’ve noticed between the two in my first week of using Questrade.

Trading fees on stocks and ETFs

Questrade recently announced that they were eliminating commissions on the buying and selling of all stocks and ETFs. QTrade has a decent list of free to trade ETFs, but obviously Questrade is the winner here.

Personally, I don’t think this will make a huge difference for me since my retirement portfolio is mostly based on QTrade’s “free” list (most notably XGRO and AOA), but it’s not fully in that camp. I’ll save a few bucks over the course of the year thanks to this.

Support

Those of you who read my mini-review of QTrade will know that I don’t consider their support a strong suit1.

I encountered quite a few snags2 along the way with Questrade’s account opening process, and as a result I have spent some time dealing with their support team.

One big difference you see right away is that they seem to rely exclusively on chat, with very clear (if sometimes disheartening3) queue position metrics. I myself am a fan of chat, especially one that makes it very clear where you are in the queue. Compared with QTrade, no contest — I’ll take keeping a window open on a computer I’m using over having to listen to highly compressed and repetitive hold music any day of the week!

A technical quibble I have with Questrade’s chat is that it is inconsistently persistent as you navigate the Questrade screens4. On more than one occasion I had my chat closed accidentally because I navigated to the “wrong” screen. Compared to other support chat platforms I’ve used (Rogers, for one), it’s decidedly feature-light.

The support I eventually got was uneven. I suppose last week may not have been the best week to attempt calling Questrade5, but all the same, sometimes the answers I got made no sense or were just flat out wrong.

US Dollar Account Support

Both companies are strong in this regard, allowing USD holdings in various accounts. Personally, I hold USD-denominated assets in my RRIF and my non-registered accounts. (I also used to hold USD assets in my TFSA, but because of the non-preferred tax treatment of dividends held in TFSAs, I got rid of those a few years ago).

The big difference that’s obvious immediately is while QTrade keeps the USD and CAD accounts separate — different account numbers, different screens to navigate — Questrade combines CAD and USD assets in one account. This has the pleasant side-effect of reducing the total number of accounts I have.

I haven’t investigated (yet) how values of accounts and portfolios are reported in Questrade6. I’m expecting that they will allow you to see your account and portfolio values in either USD or CAD7.

One of the irritants I had with QTrade is that they never, ever showed the USD/CAD exchange rate they were using to display the overall CAD value of the portfolio. It appeared they were using a rate that was consistently 1.5% below the spot rate.

And another irritant I had with QTrade is that I could not get RRIF payments natively in USD, something I was told was possible before I opened the RRIF in the first place8. Questrade claims they allow this on their public website, so I’m hopeful. More to come at the end of this month, hopefully.

HISA support

High Interest Savings accounts are an important part of my portfolio holdings since my decumulation strategy depends on them. QTrade has an extensive list of free to trade HISAs (I covered them here) but Questrade doesn’t provide access to this class of product. Instead I have to use ETFs. But since all ETFs are free to trade on Questrade, this shouldn’t really make a big deal of difference. In some ways, it’s better because QTrade restricted HISA purchases to a minimum of $1000, whereas most of the cash-oriented ETFs have an entry price of either $50 or $100 per unit.

I find it difficult to get answers to super-specific questions about various platforms, so if you have questions about any of the platforms I use/ have used (namely, BMO Investorline, Interactive Brokers, Wealthsimple, QTrade and Questrade), then feel free to ask away at comments@moneyengineer.ca.

  1. For an example of coherent and attentive customer support, you’d have to look at Wealthsimple ↩︎
  2. Their website appeared to be getting crushed at times…weird sporadic and non-repeatable error messages ↩︎
  3. Last week on one of my calls, I started at position 370 or so. That was a 90 minute wait. But at least I could write blogs while I waited, something that is really irritating to do when you have to listen to hold music. ↩︎
  4. Possibly browser-related, but c’mon, it’s 2025 and I was using OSX Safari! ↩︎
  5. RRSP season, and their generous promo ending… ↩︎
  6. I have accounts, but until the in-kind asset transfer completes, I have no assets. ↩︎
  7. Taking a peek at the mobile app while I write this, I see options for account balances to be reported as “Combined in CAD”, “Combined in USD”, “CAD” and “USD” so it appears my expectations will be met. ↩︎
  8. After two months (!) of back and forth with QTrade, I was told — last week — that this is possible using the exact same method I unsuccessfully attempted in January. ↩︎