Tag: investing

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Dec 2025)?

RobHLeave a comment

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: HISA Table updated, TD adds free-to-trade ETFs

RobHLeave a comment

High Interest Savings Page Updated

As reported last week, the USA cut their prime rates while Canada did not. The latest rates are now reflected in the HISA and short-term bond table (Canada & US). No changes for at least 6 weeks at this rate. Most cash I hold in my retirement savings is invested in an ultra-short-term bond fund, namely ICSH (one of my ETF all-stars) so I can squeeze out a few more basis points on my cash holdings.

TD Cuts Trading fees on 100 ETFs

TD seems to be upping its game. Not only are they throwing free money around, but an observant reader (thanks, big brother 🙂 ) alerted me to a recent change. You can read all about it here, but the skinny is that they cut trading fees on a list of 100 ETFs. Paying trading fees of any kind seems to be a dying business model, so it’s nice to see TDDI join the free club, at least a little bit. Some of these ETFs are even worth holding; I’ll save you the trouble and show you which ones:

NameSymbolWhat it holds
Vanguard S&P 500 IndexVFVLargest US Companies
SPDR S&P 500SPYLargest US Companies in USD
Vanguard 500 IndexVOOSame as SPY
iShares Russell 2000IWMSmall cap US Equity in USD
TD all-in-onesTEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON100% Equity, 90% Equity, 60% Equity, 30% Equity. Read more here and here.
TD Aggregate Bond IndexTDBCanadian gov’t and corp bonds.1
TD International EquityTPEDeveloped international market equity.2
TD US EquityTPU/TPU.USimilar to VFV/SPY3
TD Canadian EquityTTP300 Canadian stocks (aka “the Canadian market”)4
TD Cash Management TCSH/TUSD.UUltra short term debt in CAD/USD5
Vanguard all-in-onesVEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS100% Equity, 80% Equity, 60% Equity, 40% Equity
Vanguard Canadian Agg BondVABCanadian gov’t and corp bonds6
Vanguard FTSE GlobalVXCAll equity ex-Canada (65% US Equity)
Vanguard FTSE DevelopedVIUAll developed equity ex-North America7
Vanguard US Total MarketVUN/VTI~3500 US Stocks in CAD/USD (aka “The US Market”)8
Vanguard FTSE Canada VCNTop 200 Canadian Stocks, so similar to TTP9
Newly free-to-trade ETFs at TDDI that are moneyengineer.ca approved

All the above funds would be worthy of consideration since they adhere to my rules about being passively managed, low cost, and aligned with my asset-allocation strategy. The simplest purchases here would be one of the TD or Vanguard all-in-ones (new to all-in-ones? read about them here) best aligned with your risk profile. There’s a bunch of other ones that aren’t of interest to me — bitcoin, leveraged, actively managed, segment-based…nah, I’m good.

  1. Used in TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  2. No “emerging” market exposure. Used in TEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  3. TPU is used in TEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  4. Used in TEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  5. Similar to my use of ZMMK/ICSH ↩︎
  6. Used in VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎
  7. Used in VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎
  8. Used in VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎
  9. Used in VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎

Mini-Review: ValueInvesting.io Backtesting

RobHLeave a comment

“Backtesting” is a commonly-used tactic to see how well the portfolio you have (or are considering) would have performed historically. While “past performance does not guarantee future results” it’s better than not knowing.

I stumbled upon valuetesting.io when I was trying to backtest…something, I don’t really remember what I was up to. Anyway, my random internet walk found valueinvesting.io, which seems to be chock full of all kinds of tools that I haven’t looked at, so I’m just going to focus on the backtesting tools, which I did spend a few hours playing around with. You have to navigate to https://valueinvesting.io/backtest-portfolio to access this portion, and if you want to save portfolios, you have to create an account.

So what, in a nutshell, does this tool do? In their words:

Our portfolio backtesting tool allows you to evaluate the historical performance of up to 3 portfolios. We support 2 portfolio types: asset classes and tickers (stock, ETF, mutual funds). Multiple backtesting scenarios are supported such as periodic capital inflows or outflows, allocation rebalancing frequency and leverage type. Our tool provides historical returns, risk metrics, drawdowns and rolling returns information about your selected portfolios.

https://valueinvesting.io/backtest-portfolio

Let’s take a look at the two kinds of portfolio types they support: asset classes and tickers.

Backtesting using asset classes

The downside of this tool as a Canadian investor is pretty obvious when you try to build a portfolio using asset classes. (Asset classes are integral to the way I think about my retirement portfolio — you can read more about my approach here.) There’s no “Canadian Equity” category to choose (boo!).

The class that would hold the most Canadian equity would be “Intl Developed ex-US Market”1, so let’s compare that to say the “US Large Cap” (which I take to be a good proxy for the S&P 500).

The good old S&P has left the rest of the developed world in the dust, it seems…Well, except for THIS year:

Anyway, the asset classes are good fun and all, but without a Canadian index to track, it’s not too useful to me. (And, inexplicably, nowhere could I find a definition of any of these in the tool, and an email to the support address remained unanswered at the time of publication). So let’s move on to something more interesting, namely the ticker backtesting!

Ticker Backtesting

As the name implies, this portion allows you to enter tickers, and there’s full and complete support for Canadian ETFs that I tried.

So of course I immediately tried to build my idealized portfolio, which is what my “What’s in my Retirement Portfolio” would look like without the non-registered assets2.

The problem? XEQT and XGRO (two of my ETF all-stars) haven’t been around all that long, and so I can’t backtest very far. No matter, by looking at the composition of XEQT and XGRO and doing some clever math, I can create the equivalent decomposed portfolio:

And I can prove that I got it right by backtesting the two against each other. Pretty good, eh?

So with my decomposed portfolio at the ready, I can compare its performance long-term against (for example) just buying the S&P 500 index (VOO) or the International Developed ex-US index (VEA).

As expected, my portfolio has quite a bit poorer performance than the S&P, but better than the International ex-US. The bond/cash component smooths out the standard deviations (that’s “volatility”) so my worst years (although still a bit scary) are still a bit less than experience of owning 100% equity.

One more thing to look at — this backtesting assumes we don’t rebalance anything. That’s not correct, since that’s one of the benefits of holding ETFs like AOA, XGRO and XEQT — they automatically rebalance periodically. valueinvesting.io lets you choose monthly, quarterly, semiannually and annually. I know for a fact that AOA rebalances twice a year, so we will assume XGRO/XEQT do the same. This is what the result looks like:

This reduces the volatility and the return a bit, which if you stop and think about it, makes sense: equities consistently outperform bonds and cash over time so the rebalancing exercise makes sure the equities remain at an 80% contribution to the portfolio.

Conclusion

The backtesting portion of valueinvesting.io is a good tool to test various combinations of ETFs / stocks you may be interested in. There’s not very much documentation on the site, but it’s easy enough to use. The free account (which requires registration) is enough to get you that far.

  1. Did a bunch of tests and determined that VEA was the ETF that matched the performance of this index most closely. This ETF is about 11% Canadian Equity. ↩︎
  2. The non-registered assets are being sold off, little by little, to fund my retirement. This year, they have provided about 2/3 of my “salary” (RRIF minimum payments gave me the other 1/3), so I am –slowly– drifting toward the ideal portfolio. The AOA percentage in the ideal portfolio will get smaller over time as I transmogrify it as needed to XGRO using Norbert’s Gambit. ↩︎

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Nov 2025)?

RobH2 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 me1, 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 November 25th, this is what it looks like:

ETF Breakdown of retirement investments, November 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 notable changes this month; HXT is down slightly because that’s the fund I sold in my non-registered account this month to help pay the bills. I’ve sold quite a few shares of this fund this year and I’m seeing the capital gains mounting, but it’s around where I expected to be. I try to keep taxes owing reasonable; nonetheless I’m guessing I will certainly be moving to quarterly instalments in FY 2026; that’s the downside of having no withholding tax of any kind this year.

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)
  • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500)
  • 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. Cash is slightly elevated as a result of the pending closure of the three remaining QTrade accounts and will drift back to the normal 5% over the coming few weeks, I expect.

Overall

Net worth overall stopped its 6 month winning streak and I’m down slightly month over month. But I will reiterate: my net worth is still growing even though I’m taking a living wage every month. You might think that “decumulation” means “a steady reduction in net worth” but it needn’t be the case. And, in my particular case, my retirement income will include no pensions, so it’s probably a good thing that it keeps increasing overall.

My VPW-calculated salary continues to grow for the 7th straight month in spite of the step back this month in my net worth. That’s a feature of the “cash cushion” that is integral to the VPW withdrawal. It serves as a shock absorber to the monthly ups and downs of the stock market.

Next month will end my relationship with QTrade as I move the final 3 RRIF accounts to Questrade2.

  1. My QTrade one is no more, transferred to Wealthsimple to take advantage of their Summer promotion. ↩︎
  2. I had hoped to move these to Wealthsimple and generate more free money, but alas, they still don’t support self-directed spousal RRIFs, which is very odd indeed. ↩︎

On being retired: So what is it you do, now?

RobHLeave a comment

People still working are always fascinated with what a recent retiree gets up to. I guess the short answer is that I’m still busy, still procrastinating, still learning — but with far fewer constraints on how I spend my day.

This Blog

MoneyEngineer.ca was an idea that grew out of something I had been doing occasionally before I retired. I would discover something interesting in the world of being a DIY investor or in being a cheapskate and I would tell a bunch of friends and family about it, usually via email. But I figured that I could tell more people about what I’ve learned by starting a blog.

Knowing my procrastination habits, I took steps to make sure I would get that going on day 1. So in late December 2024 I prepurchased 2 years of WordPress and registered a domain. Investing a bit of cash in my proposed endeavor I knew would motivate me to actually DO it.

The time I spend on the blog now versus the early days has diminished quite a bit (partly because I’m now way more familiar with how WordPress works) but I enjoy the structure of heading down to the basement office and doing the work of researching and putting words on the page. And watching the website grow in popularity has also been gratifying. So thanks to all for reading and sharing!

Website views and unique visitors for MoneyEngineer.ca since launch

Managing Money

I do enjoy managing my own retirement income, and chasing whatever deal gets thrown my way. And I do try to simplify as much as I can. Being a cheapskate sometimes has the cost of adding complexity, it’s true. And outside the blog, I’m a frequent contributor to investing-related subreddits.

Volunteering

There are many organizations out there who are happy to put a recent retiree to work either on a recurring or on a one-off basis. Getting out of the house is a good thing, I figure. Here are a few of the places I’ve spent my time:

Fitness

I’ve always been a fan of outdoor exercise — gyms have zero appeal for me, and so even before I retired I made a habit of getting outside to ski, ride, run or walk thirty minutes four to five times a week. In retirement, I’ve become more interested in running and entered my first distance races this year; to avoid injury, I’ve added more miles and more structure2.

I have never liked strength training, but know that as I get older, that’s something I have to pay attention to. I recently discovered darebee.com and am following their strength training program; lots of variety and it’s mostly based on body weight exercises, so I can do them practically anywhere.

Piano

Both my kids took lessons and we own an upright as a result. The kids are both out of the house and instead of letting the instrument collect dust, I’ve started learning myself.

Once again, in order to prevent myself from avoiding doing the daily work, I invested in an annual subscription to pianote.com3. I suppose most accomplished musicians would frown upon anything other than in-person, tailored lessons, but the approach of pianote really appealed to me: playing songs but with enough technique to build skills.

On most days, I spend between 30 and 60 minutes at the piano. I’m currently working on the piano accompaniment to “Someone Like You“.

So there you have the view of what this retiree gets up to — what have you found that fills your days after work? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca. I’m always curious about new things to try!

  1. Not a princely sum by any means, and not very regular employment (about 4 hours so far this year), so I don’t think it counts as a side hustle. ↩︎
  2. Training plans provided by chatGPT in both cases. ↩︎
  3. And although their billing is all in USD, they are in fact a Canadian company. Go figure. ↩︎