Tag: questrade

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News: Questrade changes how RRIF payments work

RobHLeave a comment

Questrade is my main provider of online brokerage services. They recently (this month) made a change to how periodic RRIF payments work. They unfortunately made no formal announcement about this, and the only reason I know it to be true is thanks to a helpful answer to my Reddit question from (presumably) an employee.

Questrade allows you to set up automatic withdrawals from your RRIF with (sigh) a form that provides options to withdraw monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually. As I’ve mentioned previously, I choose to use monthly withdrawals1 since that more closely approximates how I got paid when I was working.

Anyway, every month, Questrade sends you an email reminding you to make sure you have enough cash in your RRIF to make the payment. (Of course, they don’t actually tell you what that amount may be; they assume you know, probably after calling support early in the year.)

Prior to this month, they advised that cash needed to be in the account three working days before the withdrawal date (a date they never mentioned; I guess you’re supposed to know that too). Why three working days were required I have no idea2. Perhaps there’s an abacus powered RRIF processing centre in some corner of Questrade HQ?

All this to say if you didn’t happen to have enough cash in your account on the appointed RRIF withdrawal day Questrade used to:

  • Take the amount you were supposed to withdraw, let’s call it X
  • Divide X over the number of periods remaining in the year (e.g. you missed your February monthly payment: there’s 10 months left in the calendar year, so X/10, let’s call that Y).
  • Add Y to your old monthly payment amount going forward. Y is the new monthly amount.

Which, although a bit unexpected, has some logic to it.

Last week, I got another one of these reminder mails from Questrade, except the wording had totally changed. Now the notion of missing a payment was addressed directly:

If cash is unavailable:
We may still process your required payment on the scheduled date. If your cash balance is insufficient, your account will go into a debit cash balance. If you don’t take action to satisfy the debit balance, we may close positions in your account. If we need to close positions for you, we will charge a $45 fee for each trade we make.

— Questrade email from October 2026.

This is, I would venture, a rather significant change, yes? And the weaselly wording “may close positions….if we need” gives me zero information as to what rules are being applied here and when or if they would ever apply to me. The response to my Reddit post “the payment goes to our risk team for approval” means nothing to me. Will I get paid or won’t I? Will I get charged for my misstep or won’t I?

Anyway, I consider this another black mark for Questrade in the ever-evolving RRIF Support Showdown universe. It’s not the policy itself which annoys me; it seems fair enough, assuming “may” means “we will”. It’s the means in which it was communicated (or more accurately, not communicated) that leaves me cold.

With so many brokers throwing money at you to move funds, it’s hard to justify loyalty to ANY online broker, especially one whose loyalty bonus is coming to an end!

  1. I like monthly withdrawals; it allows me to keep a pretty manual process top of mind since I’m doing it every 30-odd days or so. The other benefit of going monthly is there’s not a huge number of shares being liquidated, so if the market is the midst of some temporary meltdown, I’m not risking a large amount of my net worth at any one time. . ↩︎
  2. When you’re comparing a hipster online broker’s SLA to be less attractive than that of one of Canada’s big banks, you know your bar is awfully low. ↩︎
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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 ↩︎

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Questrade: Custom Indexing extends to CAD stocks, more AI platform support

RobHLeave a comment

Questrade has been beavering away on a raft of new features, some of which were promoted with great fanfare in an online event last month. I covered that in some detail in a previous post. There are already some significant developments to these features so I thought I’d mention them here so you have the latest view.

Custom Indexing now includes Canadian Equities

Custom Indexing, in Questrade’s estimation, allows you to

“Combine the control of picking stocks with the ease of owning ETFs to put your own spin on the market. Then, keep the whole thing in sync with one click.”

Questrade website: Custom Indexing

Custom Indexing wasn’t actually part of last month’s event, but was quietly released earlier in the year. I covered its first release in this post. In essence, it gives you the ability to create your own all-in-one fund. In its first release, I thought it showed promise but as it only permitted the inclusion of US Equities, the feature was of limited use to most people. (Including me, since I’m nearing the end of my multi-month initiative to kick USD out of my retirement portfolio.)

Now that Custom Indexing supports Canadian equities, you can build your own all-in-one fund, and save on the additional management fees these funds typically attract (I broke down how much a fund like XEQT costs in a previous post). It’s quite easy to set up, I built an equivalent to XEQT in about 5 minutes using its underlying funds (XTOT, XIC, and XEF). And with one click you can reset the desired percent allocations of each fund)1.

I could see using this in my TFSA accounts as a result; I’d really like to use this in my RRIF accounts, but you can’t have a RRIF that uses custom indexing, inexplicably.

Questrade’s MCP expands

If you missed it, the MCP is what allows your Questrade accounts to be connected to an AI platform. I’ve been experimenting with Anthropic’s Claude. I talked about my experiences using it previously. But already it’s expanded in scope.

  • The MCP now supports ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex and VS Code
  • The MCP now supports trading — all trades have to be approved via push notification

I continue to tinker with this feature. There’s a lot of promise here to get rid of some of the manual tasks I have to execute on a monthly basis. Using free versions of these AI platforms is in itself a bit limiting2, but since I’m still learning, I don’t mind.

  1. For longtime Questrade customers, this will seem eerily familiar; “one click rebalancing” is one of the features of Passiv Elite, a service that used to be offered gratis to Questrade users. ↩︎
  2. For example, I can’t connect both my wife’s Questrade accounts and my Questrade accounts to the same instance of Claude without paying for a Claude subscription. But I can use multiple AI programs, no big deal. ↩︎

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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. ↩︎