Tag: BMO

a man with bruised knuckles having a headache

The ongoing struggle to simplify getting paid in retirement

RobHLeave a comment

Last week, I sat with my spouse and let her take the wheel in performing the steps to getting paid in retirement1. And although I’ve built an impressive2 set of tools and spreadsheets in an effort to make the steps easy to follow, it’s clear the process involves too many logins, too many screens, and too many manual steps to make this a true DIY project for my spouse. I’ll list a few of the issues I’m facing here.

RRIF withdrawals are automatic. Cash availability is not.

Problem: Both Questrade and Wealthsimple allow the recurring withdrawal of RRIF payments on a monthly basis. Both assume that I have taken steps to ensure that cash is available to enable that withdrawal.

I initially thought that Questrade’s Flow feature was going to solve this problem for me. And, in theory, it could. There are practical limitations with Flow right now that prevent me from using this in its current state, but at least the product team is listening to feedback.

One other possibility came to the forefront of my crowded mind courtesy of a recent post by one of my favourite bloggers, The Loonie Doctor. BMO’s Target Cash Flow ETFs were discussed last year in ZGRO versus ZGRO.T, and I did mention that ZGRO.t would actually be a pretty good idea in a RRIF. ZGRO.t provides monthly payouts (currently targeting a 6% yield) and it pays them out on the 2nd working day of every month:

From https://bmogam.com/ca-en/products/exchange-traded-fund/bmo-growth-etf-target-cash-flow-units-zgro-t

In order to take advantage of this, I’d have to

  • confirm that the monthly payout from ZGRO.t would cover my RRIF minimum payments in each RRIF account
  • convert my XGRO into ZGRO
  • turn off DRIP for ZGRO in my RRIF account
  • monitor cash in RRIF accounts to deal with excess cash

I did a quick check; unfortunately this wouldn’t work in all my RRIF accounts. The current payout of $0.058/unit wouldn’t be enough to cover RRIF minimums in every RRIF account I have. So unfortunately, this isn’t an option either.

Anthropic’s Claude is another possible pathway but it’s limited to Questrade. Most of my monthly payments use Questrade, but there is that one Wealthsimple RRIF account I still have. I could bring that account to Questrade, but I like keeping an eye on a few brokers to make sure I’m getting a good user experience.

But a bigger problem is the non-registered account portion of my monthly salary

My RRIF is only paying about 35% of my monthly salary. The rest comes from two non-registered accounts held by me and my spouse. These accounts will hang around for at least a few more years; the current decumulation is shown in the chart below:

It’s clear my non-registered accounts will be hanging around for a while yet.

What I choose to sell every month in my non-registered accounts depends on:

  • How far my asset allocations have drifted from their targets: most of my holdings in the non-registered account are a single asset class (Canadian equity, US Equity, International equity) so if any of those asset classes get too large, that’s a factor to consider
  • What my forecast is for my net income versus that of my spouse: this is the more important consideration since it impacts my tax bill. The idea is to keep our net incomes as close as possible. Capital gains are realized every time a sale in made in the non-registered account, but if I’m careful, I can split those capital gains such that our net income becomes pretty close by the end of the year3. Right now, I’m playing catchup — my spouse’s net income is currently forecast to be below mine, so I need to generate capital gains from her investments for the remainder of the year.

And then, there’s the broker UIs

Questrade is terrible when it comes to trying to use one login to do trades. Accounts for which you have trading authority are only visible for trading if you use the Questrade Edge interface, which is a lot less welcoming than the default web interface.

And then there are the infuriating limitations placed on trading authority. This is only a problem when we have to use my spouse’s non-registered accounts to pay our monthly salary.

  • You can’t move money between accounts unless you are the primary owner. For joint accounts on Questrade, that effectively means one spouse (the secondary owner) can’t get money out of a jointly held account. And since my monthly routine generally makes changes to our jointly held cash-cushion, I have to be the one to make those changes, or I have to do weird things like moving money out of Questrade to a bank account, and then moving money back in. It’s so silly.
  • Trading authority does not extend to withdrawing money. So if we need to sell my spouse’s non-registered investments, I can. make the sale, but then my spouse has to login with her own credentials to actually withdraw the money.

Wealthsimple has recently added trading authority support, but I haven’t tested what can and can’t be done from this feature.

I don’t have answers to my issues at this moment in time. I will have to continue experimenting; I will spend some time revisiting passiv.com to see if that makes things better.

  1. The monthly steps are described in detail over at The Mechanics of Getting Paid in Retirement: 2026 Edition ↩︎
  2. To me, at least ↩︎
  3. I use https://moneyengineer.ca/tools-i-use/#:~:text=Canadian%20Tax%20Calculators to help me figure this out ↩︎

hands grasping dollar bill in competitive struggle

News: Passiv adds support for more brokerages

RobHLeave a comment

I was introduced to Passiv as a result of joining the Questrade family back in 2025; Questrade subsequently broke off ties with Passiv earlier this year and have been working on improving their own platform to do a lot of what Passiv did. (Like recently introducing custom indexing1).

Anyway, I still use Passiv since it makes it easy to see my entire retirement portfolio (including accounts owned by my spouse) all in one screen. Even its free version is useful in that regard2.

Anyway, Passiv up until this week only natively supported Questrade and Wealthsimple in the Canadian market. But I see that they now also support DIYers using BMO Investorline and CIBC Investor’s Edge. So if you’re a user of these brokerages, you can enjoy the benefits of one screen for all your accounts.

  1. A decent looking concept, but of no interest to me personally unless they add support for RRIF accounts. I’m not holding my breath. ↩︎
  2. The paid version allows you to execute rebalancing trades, among other things. Passiv’s main competition is all-in-one ETFs. ↩︎
a person is holding a package with their hands

What companies are in my retirement portfolio?

RobH1 Comment

I cover what I hold in my retirement portfolio every month (latest update is here), but as you can see, I only hold ETFs. What’s underneath the ETFs? Let’s take a look!

Calculating this is straightforward:

  1. Use the percentages I have of each ETF from the June update
  2. Look at the “Holdings” section of ETF or in the case of AOA/XGRO/XEQT, “Aggregate Underlying Holdings”1 and write down the percentages of each stock. I stopped when I accounted for 20% of each ETF.
  3. Multiply (1) by (2) and add them all up.

By doing this exercise, I can now account for the 20 companies that make up 20% of my retirement portfolio:

These 20 companies are really the tip of my personal investment iceberg — my aggregate retirement portfolio has at least 32,000 holdings, since that’s what’s actually inside AOA, the one ETF I own with the most holdings2. But the fate of these 20 companies will have an outsized influence on the overall performance of the portfolio. The only surprise for me is that there is only one company outside North America in the list. I would have expected one or two more.

It will be interesting to see what kind of differences I see once I complete kicking USD out of my retirement portfolio and go back to a list of only seven magnificent ETFs. I’m not sure there will be big changes, given that I’m keeping my asset allocations constant throughout, but I’m expecting some differences3. We’ll see come January 2027, I guess.

Just for fun, and given my recent article on the SpaceX IPO, I wanted to know how much I held of that particular company. AOA hasn’t included it yet4, but XGRO and XEQT have already. As of June 30, 0.02% of my portfolio is invested in SpaceX.

  1. In most cases, as of June 30. VFV only shows to May 30. ↩︎
  2. XGRO has 22000, for reference. I think the extras in AOA come mostly from fixed income (bond) products since they have broader geographic coverage. ↩︎
  3. The biggest changes won’t be visible since they occur in the bond side of my holdings. AOA and XGRO have very different approaches to this part of the market, but as it’s only 15% of my retirement holdings, they don’t show up as a “top” holding in my retirement portfolio . ↩︎
  4. And won’t until SpaceX is profitable. AOA includes IVV, which is an S&P 500 index fund, and the S&P 500 requires companies to be profitable before inclusion in that index. ↩︎

construction worker putting earplugs on her ears

Advice: Stop listening to the noise

RobHLeave a comment

As a self-directed investor, it can be challenging to avoid the constant noise of the latest and greatest moves in the industry. A sample of the kinds of things that have landed in my inbox lately will hopefully illustrate this point:

  • “Single stock SpaceX ETFs are coming”
  • “This 11% dividend is a screaming deal”
  • “This divvie is the ultimate ‘pick and shovel’ play on Elon, Inc”
  • “Should we have sold in May and walked away?”

The noise is nearly impossible to avoid; there always seems to be one company, one trend, one segment, one market, one product that’s just booming while your portfolio languishes.

What’s the reason this is so? Beyond the need for news sources to produce content, I mean? A peek at Blackrock’s “periodic table“1 of market performance gave me an answer, maybe.

This table illustrates the performance of thirteen segments of the market on an annual basis. What is evident is that the “hot” segment keeps changing. What was hot last year rarely repeats this year. Take for example this year’s darling, Commodities. This index can be found over at https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/crb.asp and tracks (among other things) the price of oil, gold, copper, wheat…and I’m sure you’ve noticed the recent uptick in ETFs covering this space (or a subspace):

  • GlobalX has three new silver-focused ETFs (SLVX, SVCC, and SVCL) and three commodity producers ETFs (COMX, CMCC and CMCL)
  • BMO launched a covered call gold bullion ETF (ZWGD.T) and a hedged broad commodity ETF (ZCOM.F) this year
  • TD launched TCOM which looks like it’s achieving exposure to broad commodities markets through swaps and derivatives2

My sense is that all of these ETFs were launched in an effort to attract FOMO investors who are trying to ride the commodities wave this year. Commodities as a category aren’t a terrible thing to invest in, as the Annualized column shows — they have actually performed pretty decently over the past decade — but still behind US Equity, Emerging Market Equity, Japan Equity and European Equity indices.

There’s always going to be some segment that’s on fire in a given year. Predicting which segment that might be isn’t consistently possible, so my advice is to ignore the noise and don’t chase the latest shiny object. Over long periods of time, it’s hard to beat investing in boring index equity funds.

  1. There’s a few of these kinds of tables floating about; a more Canadian-centric one can be found at https://www.stingyinvestor.com/SC/PeriodicTableofAnnualReturns.pl ↩︎
  2. The “Investment Approach” linked here makes my head hurt ↩︎