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:
5 RRIF accounts
3 for me (Questrade, Wealthsimple)
2 for my spouse (Questrade)
2 TFSA accounts (Questrade)
4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint, all at Questrade)
The view post-payday
I pay myself monthly in retirement, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On May 29 before the markets opened, this is what it looked like:
The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, (and if not an all-star, they are probably on the Magnificent Seven ETFs list). The charts look almost identical to the previous month; AOA is up a bit mostly because the USD has been on a bit of run this month, increasing almost 1% month over month :
Plan for the next month
The asset-class split looks like this; you can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.
15% bonds/income (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, rest are in XCB)
23% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX — HXT and XIC); this is up from the old 20% target
37% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500); this is up 1% from the old target
20% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets); this is down 4% from the old target
At the same time, I’m looking to get rid of my USD allocations since they are adding needless complexity and I no longer have a way to easily spend USD anyway. This is going to be a multi-month process1, but I want to be USD free by the end of the year.
So, next month, I will begin. I’ll first tackle ICSH in my non-registered account, which I’ll do once it pays out its monthly dividend in the first week of June. And I’ll begin replacing AOA with XGRO2.
Overall
Part of using VPW3 as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. And once again, a new all-time high:
My VPW-calculated salary continues to increase, albeit at a more modest rate, as expected.
Multi-month because I want to make sure I don’t get burned by a sudden change in USD/CAD FX rates. By converting some every month, I can smooth out any weird spikes. ↩︎
The biggest difference between AOA and XGRO (besides the native currency) is the amount of Canadian Equity content. AOA has a very small amount (about 3%) whereas XGRO has 20% ↩︎
Variable Percentage Withdrawal, my chosen decumulation strategy. ↩︎
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:
5 RRIF accounts
3 for me (Questrade, Wealthsimple)
2 for my spouse (Questrade)
2 TFSA accounts (Questrade)
4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint, all at Questrade)
The view post-payday
I pay myself monthly in retirement1, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On April 24 at mid-day, this is what it looked like:
The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, (and if not an all-star, they are probably on the Magnificent Seven ETFs list). The charts look almost identical to the previous month, in spite of some conversion of AOA to XGRO. (I use Norbert’s Gambit to move USD denominated funds into CAD on a quarterly basis since my spending is all in CAD).
Plan for the next month
The asset-class split looks like this; you can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.
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/income (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, rest are in XCB)
20% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX — HXT and XIC)
36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500)
24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)
The alignment with target is what drives my investment decisions; and here I see that the international equity portion of my portfolio has drifted 1% below target, which is usually the threshold whereby I start to pay attention. Do I need to take action to increase my International Equity portion, or is my target something to reconsider? I have some thinking to do.
Overall
Part of using VPW2 as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. Last month’s meltdown is yet another speed bump that we’ve managed to survive, and April 2026 brings me to another all time high of my retirement net worth, as compared to January 20253.
My VPW-calculated salary continues to increase, albeit at a more modest rate, as expected.
Questrade, although my RRIF settings are for the last day of the month, seems to need a lot of time to process the payment; I’ve learned that unless I have cash in the account at least 3 business days prior to the last business day, the automatic payment won’t happen. ↩︎
Variable Percentage Withdrawal, my chosen decumulation strategy. ↩︎
In constant dollars. I should really adjust my net worth to show inflationary impacts but it’s more calculating than I feel like doing at the moment. ↩︎
Every quarter, I convert some of my USD to CAD using Norbert’s Gambit. A good chunk of my retirement holdings are in USD, but since I spend in CAD, I need a cheap way to convert. I’ve been tracking my actual costs using Questrade’s platform for the past year. You can read about that over here.
Anyway, over the past year, the conversion has been effective. I have never paid the usual FX rates charged by Questrade (1.5% over the spot rate). My most recent conversion was the most expensive one to date, and that was a rate 0.7% over the going rate on the day I started the process. On three other occasions, I actually made out better than the spot rate, but that was because the foreign exchange rate moved in my favour in between the purchase and the sale.
My need for US cash has evaporated now that I have a no-FX fee credit card. (You can read about what cards I’m using over here.) So this makes me wonder if it’s time to get rid of the majority of my US holdings. Note this doesn’t mean that I will stop investing in US equities — that would be unwise — it just means I will stop holding assets denominated in US dollars.
The are downsides to holding USD-denominated assets, of course:
It adds complexity to the portfolio. AOA is the US equivalent of XGRO; both are 80/20 asset allocation ETFs. But because AOA is a US ETF, it holds a paltry amount of Canadian Equity, and I have to make up that difference elsewhere by holding pure Canadian Equity ETFs like HXT or XIC.
If you hold too much USD (or any foreign property) in non-registered accounts, you’ll be obliged to file a T1135 with CRA1.
It may limit the universe of online brokers you can deal with. Wealthsimple, for example, does not currently support USD RRIF accounts.
Foreign exchange can work for or against you. It’s another variable that can impact your returns. I’m not convinced this is a downside, but it does make tracking things like ACB in a non-registered account a little more tedious.
One big hesitation I have about converting all my USD holdings would be the time I’d have to be out of the market while the Gambit runs its course. As you can see in from my tracking, each conversion means I’m not invested in AOA for 3-4 trading days. I just hate that idea. I also hate the idea of converting at a time when the CAD<->USD exchange rate is perhaps not optimal. (A low Canadian dollar would be a good thing for me in this case.)
One place I sort of like having the USD assets is in my cash cushion, especially since US interest rates are quite a bit higher than Canadian rates. (I track current rates over at HISA and short-term bond table (Canada & US)).
So perhaps I just need to craft a plan where I make more aggressive conversions over a fixed time frame. x% every month, with a deadline. This helps mitigate the “time out of market” and “exchange rate” issues. Crafting the plan with fixed milestones also takes emotion out of the equation; if I set a series of future transactions, then all I have to do is press the button mechanically.
ACB stands for “Adjusted Cost Base”, and is something you need to care about if you have non-registered stocks/ETFs that you buy and sell. If you don’t track your ACB, you can’t calculate the capital gains and losses for a given asset sale.
“But that’s what the T5008 is for, isn’t it?”
Theoretically, yes, but online brokers are notoriously sloppy with tracking ACB and hence your T5008 may not track capital gains properly. Some common reasons why this is are:
You hold the same asset at multiple brokers (or even within multiple accounts at the same broker). The CRA doesn’t care where you own the asset, they only care that you own the asset. No matter how many ways and in how many accounts the asset is sliced, CRA considers there to be only one ACB for all of them.
You move the asset from one broker to another and the ACB gets set incorrectly by the receiving broker
Your asset is priced in USD and your broker is using a different FX rate from you1
Your asset delivers a return of captial (RoC for short) which lowers your ACB (and increases future capital gains); your broker may or may not track this on your behalf
Your asset reinvests dividends into the fund (this sounds the same as a DRIP, but it isn’t — it’s commonly known as a “phantom distribution”). This increases your ACB.
Your asset undergoes a share split or share merge.
For these reasons, I don’t trust T5008s, and I track my own ACB. In Tools I Use I mention the ACB tool I use; it’s the one I have been using for many years now, namely Adjusted Cost Base. (Before that I think I used an Excel template…which I converted to ClarisWorks format, but I digress…)
I use the free version of Adjusted Cost Base because it suits my needs, and I wasn’t aware of a reasonable alternative, and I’m a cheapskate. But it seems there is one now — MyACB. I gave MyACB a quick spin this week, here’s how it compares to Adjusted Cost Base, both in “Free” mode:
Adjusted Cost Base won’t win any graphic design awards3. The design is functional but not at all modern looking. MyACB looks like a modern website. Dark mode? Check. Logical layout? Check. And at present, MyACB is ad-free4.
One big thing MyACB does better than Adjusted Cost Base is its support for editing portfolios, specifically related to deleting symbols. It’s far too easy to accidently trash an in-use symbol in Adjusted Cost Base. MyACB makes it very clear how destructive your desired action will be and asks for a specific and impossible-to-click-too-fast confirmation!
Portfolios
Tracking ACB for me means tracking it in my account, my spouse’s account, and our joint account. So that’s three portfolios. And I try to hold different assets in different portfolios to avoid raising the CRA’s ire.
Anyway, my three portfolios exceed the “free” capacity of both products; I get around the restriction by having my spouse have her own Adjusted Cost Base account to track her portfolio. Not a big deal, just a minor inconvenience. With MyACB it would be a bit trickier.
Once nice thing that MyACB does here is support for a “Group” of portfolios. This allows for a user to have multiple portfolios at multiple brokers to keep an eye on superficial losses. I wasn’t able to test this function, since MyACB is limited to one portfolio in the free version. But I can see it as being useful. (In my case, as an Adjusted Cost Base user, I just merge all my transactions across multiple accounts into one portfolio and achieve the same result. The MyACB model is cleaner and more useful).
Automated FX
Since I trade in both USD and CAD, I need to know what the CAD<->USD exchange rate is on day of settlement5. If you only hold CAD-denominated assets, then this won’t matter to you.
Here the free version of MyACB wins hands down. MyACB will do FX calculations for you by looking up the FX rate on the day of settlement. This is a something Adjusted Cost Base makes you enter manually.
Automated RoC and phantom distributions
ETFs have a habit of using these means of distributing money to their unit holders. I’m no tax accountant, but you can read all about these weird distributions over on both of the websites
Both tools offer support for these, no issue there. I’ve been tracking these distributions in Adjusted Cost Base for years.
MyACB adds a small teaser in the free version that allows you to automatically add these transactions for any ONE asset in your portfolio6. So if your non-registered account has one asset, this might be construed as useful. For me, and my 10 different non-registered assets, it’s merely an effort to entice me to pony up and pay for the family version of MyACB. Anyway, I tried it out and it performs as advertised, and is an exceedingly useful feature, but in the free version, it’s really just a way to kick the tires for most of us.
But compared to the free version of Adjusted Cost Base, one thing missing is support for multiple portfolios. Adjusted Cost Base’s free version supports two portfolios. I actually need three portfolios: one for my account, one for my spouse’s account, and one for our joint account. To get around that restriction, my spouse tracks her portfolio in her own Adjusted Cost Base account.
.
Import from other sources
Adjusted cost base doesn’t offer this in their free version, but it’s in the subscription version.
MyACB allows this in the free version, not too surprising, since it’s the new kid in town. The feature seems well thought out, and includes contributions from others (“schemas”) to save you time in figuring out how to map fields to MyACB.
I did try to do an export from Adjusted Cost Base to MyACB and ran into a few problems:
The way splits are modelled in the two platforms is different. MyACB puts the split ratio in a dedicated field, whereas Adjusted Cost Base puts in two places — once in the Transaction field and once in the Shares field. A bit of Google Sheets post-processing can fix this, but this may be a problem for a user less familiar with string manipulations.
In MyACB, the ticker symbol is mandatory, whereas in Adjusted Cost Base it isn’t.
Adjusted Cost Base doesn’t call out the currency used, just the exchange rate, and a “yes/no” if it’s a foreign currency transaction. MyACB stores the currency “kind” (e.g. USD, EUR etc). Again, a minor difference, but one that requires some thought as to how to covert one to the other.
Am I switching?
For the moment, no. Adjusted Cost Base meets my needs, and it would require some work for me to move to MyACB. To get the most out of the switch, I would have to pony up for a family plan given the portfolio limitations in MyACB’s free version. If you’re just starting out in getting help with your ACB tracking, either tool will meet your needs. MyACB has some nice features in the free version (automatic FX lookups, transaction importing) that warrant giving it a close look.
There’s more than one acceptable way to do this. What I do is find the Bank of Canada rate on the settlement date and use that. ↩︎
“Tax pros” is an assumption on my part. I don’t see how even the most dedicated DIYer has a need for 100 portfolios… ↩︎
I see that the top hat guy for Adjusted Cost Base’s logo has had a makeover; he looks a little less scary and seems to have given up cigars. ↩︎
I do respect the need for content creators and developers to be compensated somehow for the work they do. The ads on Adjusted Cost Base are quite prominent and can be quite distracting. ↩︎
You track your ACB in Canadian dollars, always. And you convert each transaction — buy or sell — to CAD. ↩︎
The UI to do this is a bit (uncharacteristically) clunky, in my view — you can only import one year of transactions at a time, which gets tedious pretty quickly. ↩︎
The best credit cards for me are not necessarily the best cards for you. I don’t find I’ve changed my spending habits much in retirement, but being retired has meant I can spend a bit more time trying to optimize my credit card holdings to maximize benefits to me. One thing that I value above all else is cold, hard, cash. I don’t like “points” cards because understanding what kind of ROI I’m getting is nearly impossible, and always subject to the whims of a points to dollar conversion rate that can be changed at any time. I’m now holding three different credit cards, all of whom pay cash back, and all of them have their place in my spending universe.
Primary Card: Rogers Red World Elite Mastercard
Read about it here. As a Rogers customer1, this card is really the best possible card for my needs:
No fees
2% cash back on everything, paid as a reward credit that you then immediately apply to subsequent card purchases; this reward credit is multiplied by 1.5 if you apply it to a subsequent card purchase for a Rogers service.
3% cash back on USD purchases, which erases the 1.5% FX fee charged, and then some
Travel insurance, purchase insurance, etc etc
Free supplementary cards
The problem with this card is that its credit limit is a bit low; I even asked for an increase and was denied2.
The other problem with this card is that it’s not tied to my normal banking, so I have to pay it manually3. And it only offers a login for the primary card holder, which isn’t ideal.
Secondary Card: CIBC Costco Mastercard
Read about that one here. This one is actually a conversion from another CIBC card I had. Converting a card from one kind to another means you don’t lose your credit limit, which was the main appeal here. I am a Costco member, so this is a good second choice for my needs:
no fees
1% cash back on everything except 2% back on gas and Costco.ca, and 3% back on Costco gas4 and restaurants5
Cashback paid annually in the form of a Costco gift certificate
Travel insurance, purchase insurance etc etc
Free supplementary cards
The travel card: Wealthsimple Visa
I’ve been on the waitlist (like many people) for quite a few months for this card now. I finally got my card when I called their support line to query about why a transaction on their prepaid Mastercard6 failed to complete. (Turns out there’s a daily limit on that card that can’t be modified). Anyway, the helpful agent offered to put in a good word for me and a few days later, I was able to successfully apply for the card and immediately download it to my phone7.
The Wealthsimple Visa’s features are a lot like the others:
no fee (if you have enough assets with Wealthsimple)
2% cash back on everything, paid into your account every month
travel insurance, purchase insurance, etc etc
and…most importantly for me, NO foreign exchange fees for any currency
With no foreign exchange fees, Wealthsimple’s Visa becomes the go-to card anytime I’m travelling to a non-US destination. It also becomes my primary card in the event that I cut ties with Rogers, since the only thing the Rogers card does better than the Wealthsimple card is paying for Rogers services.
The Wealthsimple card had a better credit limit than the Rogers card right out of the gate (I guess it helps that I had hard assets with them) but inexplicably does not have the concept of a secondary card, so my spouse is currently locked out of that benefit.
The card that got cut: the CIBC Aventura USD Gold Visa
This was a card I had for a few years when US travel was a more frequent (desirable?) option. It’s not a bad card, especially if you frequently transact in USD, but with two other cards that offered “good enough” coverage on USD purchases, I felt it was no longer needed. And (I forgot this) when I canceled my almost-never-used CIBC USD checking8 account, I lost the “no-fee” aspect of this card. At a cost of zero I might have been convinced to hang on to it “just in case”, but with a $35 annual fee (USD) it was no longer required. An hour long wait on hold with CIBC telephone banking was all it took9.
What card is used when?
For foreign currency transactions, Wealthsimple Visa card is best. Rogers card also a good option if USD.
For Costco gas and restaurants, Costco card is best.
Anything else, Rogers
Internet, television, home phone, if you’re curious. 2 year contract which I’ll probably break at the earliest opportunity 😉 ↩︎
I could set up a PAD, but I trust Rogers about as much as they trust me, it seems. ↩︎
There’s no advantage to actually shopping at a Costco store with this card, which seems weird. My weekly Costco grocery run is paid for with my Rogers Mastercard, since I get 2x the cash back <shrug>. What’s more, the Costco I usually frequent doesn’t have a gas station, and I’m not really willing to make a special trip to go get it — my CAA/Shell combination is about as good. ↩︎
These 2% and 3% rewards have annual caps, but I got bored trying to memorize them ↩︎
Part of Wealthsimple’s chequing account, a good product, in my view ↩︎
Great timing too, since I was in a foreign country at the time. ↩︎
I use American spelling here because (a) that’s how CIBC spells it and (b) it really is a US-domiciled account ↩︎
Writing that sentence has confirmed for me how low my standards for customer service have become. ↩︎
