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.
My QTrade one is no more, transferred to Wealthsimple to take advantage of their Summer promotion. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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:
Catalyste+: https://www.catalysteplus.org/volunteer-with-us/ links professionals with businesses who are looking for a bit of mentorship. I’m starting my first consulting gig with a business based in the Yukon.
parkrun: https://www.parkrun.ca/. I run or volunteer at my local parkrun most Saturdays, and am trying to launch one for my neighbourhood.
I served as a standardized patient for our local med school, but this was actually a paid gig1
I’ve done some work for the National Archives, digitizing old documents.
I am installing (this week, I think) a rain gauge to participate in the work of CoCoRAHS
And from time to time I do edits on Wikipedia or use my eyes to help projects hosted on Zooniverse
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!
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. ↩︎
Training plans provided by chatGPT in both cases. ↩︎
And although their billing is all in USD, they are in fact a Canadian company. Go figure. ↩︎
In a previous post, I took a look at the major fund companies’ all-in-one-funds with a focus on what passive indices each of them folllowed with regards to Canadian equity, US equity, International equity, and bonds. That assessment found that iShares and BMO were very similar, but TD and Vanguard looked very different.
But do different indices really make a difference in terms of what each of these companies hold when it comes to equities? That’s what we’re trying to find out. Let’s take a look at each of the categories in turn.
Canadian Equity
Let’s take a look at the top Canadian equity holdings of TEQT, XEQT, ZEQT and VEQT1:
Stock
TEQT %
XEQT %
ZEQT%
VEQT%
RBC
1.65
1.73
1.62
1.80
Shopify
1.55
1.69
1.62
1.49
TD
1.12
1.16
1.10
1.16
Enbridge
0.84
0.88
0.85
0.92
Brookfield
0.82
0.82
0.78
0.81
BMO
0.74
0.77
0.72
0.77
Agnico
0.66
0.69
0.68
0.63
Scotiabank
0.64
0.67
0.63
0.68
CIBC
0.60
0.63
0.60
0.63
CP KC
0.57
0.58
0.57
0.62
# held
292
215
215
156
Top 10 %
9.19
9.62
9.17
9.51
Top Canadian Equity Holdings for TEQT, XEQT, ZEQT, VEQT per ETF factsheets, October 2025
VEQT has fewer holdings than the others, and this indicates slightly more concentration/slightly less diversification than the other funds. TEQT is at the top of the heap when it comes to the number of companies held, with XEQT and ZEQT looking pretty similar. My take here is that the differences between TEQT/XEQT/ZEQT/VEQT are pretty slight when it comes to Canadian equity. The Canadian equity indices these funds track may be different, but the differences are pretty minor, and might simply be attributable to tracking errors; how often and when these funds rebalance their holdings may explain the differences shown here.
But just for fun, I looked at comparing VCN (which is underneath VEQT, and tracks the FTSE Canada all cap) to XIC (which is underneath XEQT, and tracks the S&P/TSX Capped Composite) and found this using https://www.dividendchannel.com/drip-returns-calculator/ (which is also listed in Tools I Use).
This indicates a tiny advantage to XIC aka the capped composite index, but there’s not a lot of daylight between these two returns!
On the Canadian Equity front, I declare the 4 funds EQUIVALENT!
US Equity
The US weighting is NOT the same for each of these funds, so making a one-to-one comparison is a bit tricky.
TEQT: 55% US
ZEQT: 50% US
XEQT, VEQT: 45% US
What I show in the table below is the percentage of the US portion held by the fund. So in other words if stock XYZ makes up 5% of the US holdings of TEQT and XEQT, it means that TEQT actually holds more of XYZ because 55 cents of every dollar of TEQT is invested in XYZ as compared to 45 cents for XEQT et al.
Stock
TEQT: TPU %
XEQT: XTOT %
ZEQT: ZSP/ZMID/ZSML%
VEQT: VUS%
NVIDIA
7.81
6.91
7.35
6.45
Microsoft
6.62
5.71
6.26
6.02
Apple
6.38
5.53
5.99
5.54
Amazon
3.73
3.24
3.45
3.49
Broadcom
2.75
2.38
2.51
2.23
Meta
2.74
2.33
2.51
2.56
Alphabet Cl A
2.43
2.07
2.26
1.97
Alphabet Cl C
2.13
1.67
1.82
1.59
Tesla
2.12
1.80
1.91
1.46
JP Morgan
1.46
1.24
1.36
1.29
Eli Lilly
1.25
1.00
1.09
1.00
Berkshire
1.15
1.33
1.47
1.43
# held
504
2494
1511
3524
Top 10 %
38.17
32.97
35.54
32.74
Top US Equity Holdings for TEQT, XEQT, ZEQT, VEQT per ETF factsheets, October 2025
What’s clear here is that TEQT is an outlier insofar as it only focuses on the largest US companies, with the other three funds including smaller companies. This also impacts how much money is found in the top 10 US holdings of TEQT, with 38% of holdings invested in names like NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple et al.
This has proven beneficial of late since smaller US companies have not kept pace with the larger ones. Per spglobal.com, the 10 year performance as of Oct 13, 2025 of the three US market segments has been:
S&P SmallCap 600 = 7.65%
S&P MidCap 400 = 8.49%
S&P 500 = 12.75%
Meaning that any fund that holds smallcap and midcap US stocks has had their returns dragged down in the past 10 years.
So my conclusion for US Equities is that TEQT is the performance champion, but this comes with a less diversification than the alternatives: not only does TEQT focus on the highest-performing portion of the US equity market, it also puts more money overall into the US equity market. This has worked well for the last ten years, but it’s anybody’s guess as to whether this is a good idea for the future.
International Equity
The International2 weighting is NOT the same for each of these funds, so making a one-to-one comparison is a bit tricky.
TEQT: 20% International
VEQT: 25% International
ZEQT: 25% International
XEQT: 30% International
BMO gets the “lack of transparency” award from me for their complex structure. ZEQT holds ZEA which holds European stocks as well as IEFA, which is their USD fund holding the same things. It also holds ZEM which holds emerging markets stocks as well as EEM, which holds similar things in USD. Nowhere can you find a BMO/ZEQT consolidated view like what I’m showing below.
Like in the previous examples, what I show in the table below is the percentage of the International portion held by the fund.
Stock
TEQT: TPE %
XEQT: XEF/XEC %
ZEQT: ZEA/IEFA/ZEM/EEM%
VEQT: VIU/VEE%
Taiwan Semi
0
1.73
5.88
4.19
ASML
1.98
1.43
2.11
1.59
SAP
1.43
1.03
1.37
1.14
Nestle
1.30
0.93
1.24
0.96
Roche
1.24
0.87
1.12
0.95
Novartis
1.24
0.90
1.17
0.98
AstraZeneca
1.24
0.93
1.26
0.94
HSBC
1.15
0.83
1.22
1.02
Shell
1.11
0.80
1.09
0.87
Toyota
1.06
0.70
0.97
0.85
Siemens
1.02
0.77
1.08
0.82
Tencent
0
0.80
2.75
2.10
Samsung
0
0.37
2.03
1.16
Alibaba
0
0.40
1.87
1.59
# held
893
5626
3864
3524
Top 10 %
12.77
10.25
20.89
15.68
Top International Equity Holdings for TEQT, XEQT, ZEQT3, VEQT per ETF factsheets, October 2025
Here you see some pretty significant differences. BMO and Vanguard (especially BMO’s ZEQT) have a much heavier emphasis on “emerging” markets than XEQT does; TD’s TEQT has NO exposure to emerging markets at all.
That’s an interesting strategic choice being made here. Let’s compare emerging market performance to mature international markets. We cand do that by looking at IEFA (mature markets) versus EEM (emerging markets)4:
Emerging markets have been a serious lag to global performance, so perhaps TD is on to something here. I played with this chart quite a bit and it’s only very lately (last 2 years or so) that emerging markets have outperformed the established ones. Long term trend? ZEQT certainly hopes so.
So on the international front, you have choices
TEQT only focuses on mature markets
XEQT allows some (not much) exposure to emerging markets
ZEQT and VEQT make much bigger bets on emerging markets
Which is the correct call? TEQT historically has made the right choice, but as the old adage goes “past performance does not guarantee future results” (or something like that).
I’m using the all-equity versions of these to make the comparison more apples-to-apples. VEQT has a larger Canadian percentage (30%) than the other 3 (25%), so I muliplied VEQT’s holdings by 25/30 to make the comparison meaningful. ↩︎
In this analysis, I’m not making a distinction between “mature” and “emerging” markets. Some of the funds do. In all cases, “International” means “no US, no Canada”. ↩︎
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 October 27th, this is what it looks like:
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 massive changes this month; the one you might notice is a slight shift from AOA to XGRO. I move some of my USD holdings into CAD every quarter, and last month was when I did it. The majority of my spending is in CAD, so I use Norbert’s Gambit to move funds around.
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 60)
36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500, with a small sprinkling of Russell 2000)
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.
Overall
The retirement savings had a great month, again — a 6-month growth streak at this point. Overall, I’m now 11.5% ahead of where I started even though I’ve been drawing a monthly salary since the beginning of the year. I don’t really expect the winning streak to continue, but VPW allows me to take some benefit from the frothy stock markets at moment.
Net Worth as a percentage of starting point
My VPW-calculated salary has hit a new high this year, 5.92% higher than my first draw in January. The monthly salary is also on a 6-month growth streak.
Monthly Salary as a Percentage of Jan 2025 salary
The months ahead will see the final “goodbye” to QTrade1 as the last of my RRIF investments will move to (mostly) Questrade2.
I didn’t have a great deal of issue with QTrade as a provider, but their support (lack thereof) was beginning to become irritating. ↩︎
My own QTrade RRIF will join the RRIF holdings I already have with Wealthsimple. They remain a potential backup provider of my retirement savings. I would have moved more to take advantage of their cashback promotion, but they still, inexplicably, do not support self-directed spousal RRIF accounts. ↩︎
Every month, I try to share with you what’s in my overall retirement portfolio (September 2025 post is here). That retirement portfolio is actually distributed over a bunch of accounts held by me and my spouse and includes RRIFs, TFSAs and non-registered accounts. This is what it looks like at the moment:
Retirement savings as of October 1, 2025 by account type
(My multi-asset tracker is a handy tool to help you quickly create charts that look like the above one).
My current strategy for these three account types looks like this:
RRIF: This is 100% invested in my ETF all-stars. I’m currently withdrawing RRIF minimum payments for two main reasons:
To avoid problems with attribution. I cover that topic over here.
To avoid withholding tax. RRIF minimum payments don’t attract withholding tax, but I am setting aside some of my payments to deal with the unavoidable tax bill come April 2026. I talked about that topic over here.
TFSA: This is mostly invested in the ETF all-stars, but there’s a few stragglers in here1 that I really ought to get rid of. Nothing wrong with the funds in there, but it’s a needless complexity. The TFSA continues to get new funds since it’s hard to beat tax-free growth, and I only buy all-stars with those funds. It will get drawn down last in my retirement planning.
Non-registered accounts: Here it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, with very little invested in the all-stars, mostly because most of the equity found here was bought long ago, and changing what I hold would attract capital gains that I would prefer to take on my own terms. It’s where the majority of my early-retirement decumulation takes place.
Here’s what that breakfast looks like:
What’s in my non-registered portfolio, October 2025
Here’s a look at each holding, from highest to lowest percentage.
HXT: This is a Canadian equity ETF that does not pay dividends, instead using some wizardry to bury it all in the per-unit price of the ETF. This simplifies taxes, and I have held this fund for a long time. Due to increasing costs of this ETF, it’s among the first to get liquidated as I need funds.
XIC: Canadian equity fund, very popular. I think I bought it to create a bit of dividend income. It will get liquidated after the Horizons funds go (HXS, HXT, HXDM).
SCHF: A very low-cost international equity2 fund in USD that I’ve held for a very long time. It’s funds like SCHF that attracted me to investing in USD, which, at present, adds a lot of complexity.
ICSH: This is one of the all-stars. It is what my VPW cash cushion is invested in3. I use ICSH more than ZMMK in the cash cushion because US interest rates are quite a bit higher than Canadian rates at the moment. I talked about that here.
HXS: Same idea as HXT, except it invests in the S&P 500. This one is held only by my spouse who is still working for a living, so this will just stick around a while, until she stops working and can take on the capital gains.
VSC: A bond fund held by my spouse. I may sell this to harvest some capital gains losses.
HXDM: Same idea as HXT, except international equity. It is on the list to liquidate.
ZMMK: An all-star, held in the same account as ICSH.
The rest (XEQT, TEQT, XGRO) are all new arrivals in the portfolio, purchased using dividends4 from the other funds as well as the bonus payments I keep collecting from Questrade for switching to them.
My non-registered accounts are only a small portion of my retirement holdings, but there’s a fair bit of complexity there. Over time, these accounts will go to zero other than the cash cushion portion (ZMMK, ICSH or whatever replacements I discover) which will remain as long as VPW is my decumulation strategy.
Mostly pure Canadian equity funds. This is to offset AOA that has next-to-no Canadian equity component. ↩︎
VPW = Variable Percentage Withdrawal, an absolutely brilliant strategy for making sure you don’t run out of money in retirement and don’t leave a lot on the table. Read all about it here. ↩︎
With all ETF trades being free, I hold very little actual cash in any of my accounts. ↩︎
The Money Engineer 