Tag: Optiml

close up shot of rusty gears

AI and Financial Planning

RobH1 Comment

Although a fair bit of my retirement portfolio is wrapped up in AI companies, that’s not what I’m talking about this time. I’ve been exploring the use of AI in helping make investment decisions. And it’s a rapidly evolving and fascinating place, and ultimately, I think it’s a huge win for the DIY investor. There are many ways for you to use AI in your financial decisions today — you can use free and generic AI, a commercial financial product that uses AI under the hood, or a DIY financial advisor built from scratch using Claude. The choice is yours!

Free AI

Here I’m talking about using free tiers of AI to ask basic questions. Excellent for the lazy investor. Yesterday, for example, I asked Gemini1 “What’s the best foreign ETF for Canadian Investors”?

Gemini’s response when asked, “What’s the best foreign ETF for Canadian Investors”?

I rate this response a solid nine out of ten:

  • XAW and VXC are what I was actually after; they are both ETFs that allow you to invest in the world ex-Canada with one ticker. Like all such funds, they tilt pretty heavily towards the US (about 63%) because that’s the biggest market by far.
  • VIU is also a valid response, but excludes the US market. My question wasn’t overly specific.
  • VFV is on less solid ground as a response since it’s an S&P 500 ETF, meaning it only has US exposure. I suppose it’s technically a “foreign ETF”.
  • The answer preventing the perfect score here is XEQT, which, although featuring in the Magnificent Seven ETFs, is a wrong answer IMHO because it holds Canadian Equity.

I like Gemini because it always provides links indicating sources, and checking the source is always a good practice. This is a big time saver. I tried the same query on ChatGPT and Claude. ChatGPT’s answer was very close, but Claude figured that by “foreign” I meant, “Everything outside North America”, not “Everything outside Canada”. An interesting assumption…

Anyway, my experience using free AI for financial advice like this is generally pretty positive, but I’m using it like an assistant, not an advisor. I even see moneyengineer.ca show up as a source now and then, so what’s not to like 😉

Products that use commercial AI under the hood

Here you have products like Gilded2 or Truthifi3. Truthifi reminds me a bit of Passiv, whereas Gilded looks a bit like Optiml, products I’ve talked about in these pages. I’d expect to see more and more of these kinds of companies try to make a revenue stream by wrapping up commercial AI packages in a way that makes it easy for the AI neophyte to benefit. I very quickly took a look at Gilded, but the free version does not do very much at all, and targets people who haven’t retired yet. Truthifi looked more promising to me but only gets useful if you directly connect it to your brokerage accounts, something I’m not willing to do until I read a bit more about it.

DIY Financial Advisor AI

While researching this article, I was surprised to find an open source project that allows DIY financial advice based on Claude AI. The Canadian Finance Planner Skill on GitHub looks to be a comprehensive piece of work that targets Canadians, but requires a Claude subscription including Cowork to be useful. And a little bit of tech-savviness to get it running, but I presume anyone already paying for Claude Cowork qualifies.

I may have to invest some time and money into this one, it looks absolutely intriguing, covering the entire gamut of financial concerns from budgeting, to estate planning, insurance, taxation… In their words “Think of it as having your own AI financial coach on call who happens to know every corner of Canadian finance”. It’s a promise that seems a bargain for the cost of Claude Cowork at $24 monthly.

What about you? Are you using AI in your own financial decisions? Tell me about it at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

  1. Gemini is Google’s own AI and, being lazy, the one I generally use because it doesn’t require anything other than typing the question directly into my browser bar. I don’t use ChatGPT or Claude as much for this reason. ↩︎
  2. I found out about Gilded from a recent Globe and Mail article by the perportedly retired Rob Carrick. ↩︎
  3. Discovered by Googling “personal finance canada AI” ↩︎

Top Five Money Engineer posts of 2025

RobHLeave a comment

The Money Engineer launched in January 2025 and according to the WordPress stats, I made 144 posts last year. What were the most viewed posts of 2025?

5th-ranked post of 2025: ZGRO versus ZGRO.T

ZGRO versus ZGRO.T: what’s the difference?

I got wind of ZGRO.T through Reddit, specifically r/CanadianInvestor. ZGRO and ZGRO.T are both all-in-one asset allocation ETFs from BMO, but with vastly different yield characteristics. I was confused, but in the end, decided that ZGRO.T was probably not a bad pick for use in a RRIF account as it might save you the hassle of selling shares. Their TOTAL returns (assuming all dividends are invested) are effectively identical.

4th-ranked post of 2025: Spousal RRIF Attribution Rules

Caution! Spousal RRSP/RRIF Attribution Rules

I think I was first warned about this nuance of spousal RRSPs/RRIFs by my DIY neighbour (thanks, Steve) and is the main reason I’m only drawing RRIF minimum for the next two years1. I think most of the visits to this article were search-driven. Either that, or people came to admire what might be my favourite article thumbnail2 I’ve posted thus far.

3rd-ranked post of 2025: Norbert’s Gambit with Questrade

Questrade Example: Exchanging USD/CAD with Norbert’s Gambit

As someone who holds more USD-denominated assets than might be wise, I do very much appreciate the existence of a cheapskate way of converting between USD and CAD assets. I think I first learned about this trick via The Loonie Doctor’s blog. The #3 blog entry explains how it works if Questrade is your broker. I would also recommend https://moneyengineer.ca/2025/08/21/tracking-norberts-gambit-costs-with-questrade/ for a very clear picture of what it actually costs (in time and fees) to execute the Gambit: in three of four instances, the time delay of executing the gambit has worked in my favor as the FX rate has drifted a bit to my advantage.

2nd-ranked post of 2025: TD versus iShares all-in-ones

TD versus iShares: XEQT/XGRO/XBAL versus TEQT/TGRO/TBAL

I’m a fan of all-in-ones (and am a little sad https://moneyengineer.ca/2025/01/21/why-you-can-fire-your-advisor-asset-allocation-etfs/ didn’t crack the top five last year). I am genuinely puzzled why people seem to get so wound up about which family of all-in-ones to choose3. I examined TD’s only because their cost to own is a bit cheaper than iShares (who I use primarily), and I’m a cheapskate. (I studied the cost of owning an all-in-one here.) Anyway, in the end, the biggest difference is visible in TGRO versus XGRO because TGRO, unlike any other GRO ETF, uses 10% bond allocation and not 20%. This gooses its return a bit, at the cost of additional volatility. Otherwise, it’s a case of tomato/tomahto. Pick one, or pick them all, it doesn’t matter much.

Top ranked post of 2025: Mini-Review of Optiml.ca

Mini-Review: Optiml.ca

This was, as the title implied, a quick review of a made-in-Canada tool to help craft a retirement plan. And again, my DIY neighbour gave me a heads-up about it4. It got a lot of interest, probably because the kind folks at Optiml linked to my review from their website ;-). I was impressed by the completeness of the tool during my test drive, and it seems like a good and fairly priced way for a DIYer to do some validation of their retirement plan. Having validation of my plan was one of the ways I knew I could retire.

Looking forward to seeing what the 2026 list might look like! Got a topic or question? Send it along to comments@moneyengineer.ca, or comment below!

  1. RRIF minimum withdrawals are never subject to spousal attribution ↩︎
  2. Courtesy Pexels free photos, built into WordPress’ editor. ↩︎
  3. iShares, TD, BMO, Vanguard, Global X…. ↩︎
  4. Thinking he should write his own blog, maybe. ↩︎

Mini-Review: Optiml.ca

RobH3 Comments

My fellow DIYing neighbour gave me a heads-up about this made-in-Canada retirement app and so I set up an account an gave it a whirl.

Optiml.ca helps you to “build and customize your financial strategy, stress-test different ‘What-if’ scenarios, or simply confirm you’re on the right track.”

Setting up an account was very easy since it supports integration with Google credentials. And they offer a fully-enabled trial for 14 days without requiring a credit card, which makes things even easier. I chose their most popular plan, the Pro Plan, which is $199 a year1.

The interface is clean and easy to navigate. I was able to get started right away without bothering with the offered tutorials.

I chose to set up the parameters of my current retirement savings manually, but it wasn’t difficult. You could instead choose to link with Wealthica and populate this sort of information automatically. I don’t use Wealthica myself, but perhaps I’ll give that a look in a future post.

Once your data is entered, you can run a “standard” scenario which is what a retirement planner would generate. This is table stakes for any tool, including some of the ones I mention in Tools I Use.

But it looks like Optiml goes much, much further in its analysis. You can ask it to auto-generate scenarios based on historical returns and different inflation rates to see how likely your plan would succeed, and you can choose other objectives, like maximizing spend or maximizing your estate value. You can also ask it to model the three phases of retirement where spending varies as you get older (aka go-go, slow-go, no-go23). You can ask it to play with CPP/OAS start dates, and so on. It seems quite comprehensive and well thought out. And what I really like about it is that it has pre-canned scenarios so you don’t have to think about (and overthink about) each and every input into the model.

And you can save your analysis on the tool itself, which is handy for comparing outcomes and trying different “what if” scenarios.

I encountered what I thought were some bugs in the system, but online support quickly set me straight with prompt, detailed, specific and accurate answers, which is highly unusual in the Canadian financial services space 😉

All this to say, I’m pretty impressed with what I see here. At this point in my retirement, I don’t see the need for it myself4, but for others who are still looking for a tool to help guide retirement spending, this looks like a winner.

  1. Given what this tool can do, this seems a more-than-fair price to me; the cost of a fee-based advisor (who is likely using a similar tool to generate the output) is a lot more than that. ↩︎
  2. This model, according to Google, is attributed to Michael Stein, author of “The Prosperous Retirement” ↩︎
  3. …and while intuitively this is something that makes a lot of sense, it’s the first time I’ve seen it called out so explicitly ↩︎
  4. In other words, I’ve passed the analysis phase and am just trying to enjoy retirement 🙂 ↩︎