Questrade’s offer of free money (to a maximum of $20k) applies to both new and existing clients. (Regrettably, I think that since I started my — still uncompleted — transfer last year, I won’t be eligible myself. Now isn’t that a kick in the head? Of course, I’m still collecting from the transfer I did in early 2025.)
Base reward: 1% cash back for registered1 accounts, 2% cash back for non-registered accounts
Move 3 or more kinds of accounts (one of which has to be non-registered) and double your base reward to 2% for registered accounts, 4% for non-registered accounts
Maximum cashback for registered accounts: $10k
Maximum cashback for non-registered accounts: $10k
Must start the transfer before Feb 2, 2026, and it has to complete by May 29, 2026
So one way to qualify for the maximum reward would be:
Move a TFSA worth $250k to get $2500 base
Move an RRSP worth $250k to get $2500 base
Move a non-registered account worth $250k to get $5000 base
This is 3 accounts so this triggers the multiplier that doubles the reward:
$5000 for the TFSA, $5000 for the RRSP, total $10k
$10k for the non-registered account
So by moving $750k, one could take advantage of a $20k reward. Which, admittedly, is a pretty high bar, but $20k is not nothin’ either3.
To me, if you’ve grown tired of not getting free money this seems like a pretty good deal, but only if you’re able to qualify for the bonus by moving 3 kinds of accounts. Otherwise, the reward is just 1% and brokers have been more generous than that of late (e.g. QTrade).
So act quickly and decisively, this one will be over before you know it. If you want to show some love, you can even use my Questrade referral code4 🙂
For example: TFSA, RRSP, RRIF, RESP. LIRAs are not listed in the Ts and Cs, though. ↩︎
You’re allowed to withdraw 5% with no penalty. If you exceed that, then you don’t get any more bonus payments. Exception: RRIF minimum payments :-). ↩︎
Something I never paid much attention to when I was building my retirement savings were the delays built into the system when it comes to moving money around. The Mechanics of Getting Paid in Retirement: 2026 Edition shows the steps I use to get a monthly paycheque, but it doesn’t show the delays. When I was working, I could predictably expect a paycheque twice a month. No guesswork. Now that I rely on these money movements to do things like pay bills, I’ve become a lot more attentive to where things slow down. Stressing about them isn’t helpful, but knowing about them in advance means you can build them into your plan so you don’t get caught in a cash flow crunch.
I should preface this by saying that I use Questrade and Wealthsimple for my providers, and how your provider handles things can be quite different, so take these as examples, not as absolutes. So where have I seen things slow down?
Time between selling an asset and having useable cash
Here I’m talking about cash as cash, not cash to immediately do another trade, i.e. sell ETF “a” and then use the proceeds to buy ETF “b”. For that example, I think most brokers allow you to sell to buy immediately after the trade executes, at least in my experience.
Here I’m talking about selling ETF “a” so you have the cash to pay your credit card balance. This is usually a multi-step process. The first step is having access to the cash you gain from the proceeds of a sale. This is generally speaking a business day after the trade executes. So if you sell on Monday, the cash appears in your account on Tuesday. If you have a margin account (which I do for my non-registered holdings), then it has the nice side benefit of providing access to the cash immediately after the trade executes.
So now that the cash is there in your trading account, you then have to get it to a place where you can spend it. And here there will be a lot of variability depending on who your broker is, who you bank with, and how you actually move the money (EFT, wire transfer, physical cheque).
For me, I use EFT withdrawals to my CIBC chequing account. And this has delays too.
As an example, I executed a trade in my Questrade non-registered account to help fund my December paycheque.
December 23rd: sold some HXT in the morning, immediately requested a withdrawal to my CIBC account using an EFT. The money was available instantly because I have margin in that account.1
December 29th: deposit received to my chequing account
# of business days: Dec 23rd (0.5) Dec 24th(1), December 29th (2)= 2.5 days to get my $$$
I also sold some funds in my Wealthsimple account on December 23rd. I wasn’t able to withdraw anything until the following day since this account isn’t a margin account. But on the 24th, when I made the request via EFT, the money appeared in my chequing account in minutes. This was 1.1 days2 to get my $$$$.
I do recall when I managed my parent’s BMOI account cash in a non-registered account could immediately be used for bill pay, cheque writing, eTransfers or ATM withdrawals, thanks to their “AccountLInk” service.
Delays in moving money between accounts at the same brokerage
In my VPW-driven decumulation methodology, I have a non-registered Questrade account that is exclusively used as the “cash cushion” — about 5 months of rolling average salary, invested in ZMMK and ICSH, two funds that are on my ETF All-Stars page. Every month, I either get paid from this account or I move money into it from my non-registered account. Getting paid undergoes the same delays as I mentioned above: about 2.5 days, but moving money into this account from another account (one would think) is instantaneous, no? No, not with Questrade.
Typically, it takes a day before the money becomes useable in the destination account. Not so with Wealthsimple, where transfers are instantaneous.
Delays in getting dividend payments
All ETFs publish their dividend schedule. For example, here’s what ICSH’S looks like:
“Ex-Date”, at least for my provider (Questrade) is the date used to indicate a “dividend event” notification. But “ex-date” isn’t when you should look for your dividend payment; you have to own the ETF in question by ex-date to take part in the next dividend payment. And so “Payable Date” is the one of interest, and the lag between the ex-date and the payable date is highly dependent on the ETF in question. Since most of my ETFs pay out either quarterly or monthly, often declaring ex-dividend on the last business day of the month, the first week of January will be active with new dividend funds rolling into my various accounts.
Delays: Just Roll with it
While I do find it irritating that my own money gets tied up for days at a time for no discernible reason, I’ve adapted my expectations accordingly and don’t worry about it. In the early days of retirement, be aware that things may not happen as quickly as you expect, so it’s probably a good idea to have a bit of cash flow leeway in the first month or two as you work out the kinks in your own decumulation system.
And no, I don’t get charged interest when I do this. I’m not sure why, but if I did, I would simply wait a day. I just like being able to make the move in the moment — still logged in, the amounts are fresh in my mind…. ↩︎
Fast transfers seem to be part of the Wealthsimple ethos. ↩︎
Right after the final, final deadline of Wealthsimple’s last free money offer, it appears that Wealthsimple is now offering spousal RRIFs as an account type for the DIY investor (they’ve had them for quite a while in their robo-advisor accounts).
This had always struck me as silly, especially since they have offered spousal RRSPs for a while now.
With this development, Wealthsimple is nearly a viable option to host all of my retirement funds1. My needs are pretty simple:
support for all the account types I need (RRIF/Spousal RRIF, TFSA, joint non-registered, individual non-registered)
zero cost ETF buy/sell
support for Norbert’s Gambit (which implies support for USD accounts, naturally)
Norbert’s Gambit is planned in early 2026 for Wealthsimple, per the very limited info found here.
So, if you’ve been on the fence about Wealthsimple, here’s one more reason to consider them. Once Questrade’s free money gravy train ends for me in March 2027, they become a personal serious contender, especially if they are willing to throw free money my way, which, historically, has certainly been a recurring theme. On that note, if any reader wants to give them a whirl, I have referral codes, just shoot me a note at comments@moneyengineer.ca; if you act quickly2, there might be some free Apple gear in it for you too.
QTrade and Questrade both offer all three. There may be others. ↩︎
DIY investing also means DIY decumulation. In 2026, I’ll be paying myself from my various RRIFs as well as from non-registered funds. I’ll refer to the letters in the diagram below so you can follow along1:
A: Calculate Net Worth over all retirement accounts
“Retirement accounts” include 3 non registered accounts, 2 TFSAs and 5 RRIF accounts. All of these are at Questrade except for one RRIF account held at Wealthsimple. My net worth calculation ignores my day-to-day spending accounts, and any other assets (my house, for example). In 2026 I could look up this number using Passiv, but I’m not 100% clear on what the fate of my Passiv account will be once Questrade cuts ties with them (March 2026). I still have a spreadsheet with lots of details and pretty graphs based on my multi-asset tracker.
B: Use VPW Methodology to Calculate Monthly “Suggestion”
VPW stands for “Variable Percentage Withdrawal” and it’s the playbook I use to guide my monthly withdrawals from my retirement accounts. I talk a bit about it here. The suggestion is generated by a VPW spreadsheet, but the inputs are pretty simple:
future pension amounts, and age you’ll be when you take them3
asset allocation breakdown (%stocks versus %bonds)
This “suggestion” represents the maximum value of the assets I am advised to sell this month. You could take more or you could take less. It’s merely a suggestion. For me, I take the suggestion at face value and sell the assets needed to meet the value of the “suggestion”.
C: Calculate the Salary
The “Suggestion” in step B is NOT your salary. The VPW methodology enforces one more step to calculate that. The VPW methodology requires the use of a “cash cushion”, which has the effect of making sure you don’t need to make drastic month-to-month changes in your salary, either upward or downward. The cash cushion is roughly 5x the “suggestion”4 and your salary is 1/6th of “suggestion” plus “cash cushion”. The “salary” represents the amount that will eventually turn up in your chequing account.
To make things easier to track, my “cash cushion” is a totally separate non-registered joint account that holds one of four things: Canadian dollars, US dollars, ZMMK or ICSH. I keep a little cash floating around in this account to avoid having to do monthly trades. It just makes tax reporting and ACB tracking a bit simpler, at a small loss of interest income. Also, Questrade doesn’t support fractional shares of either ZMMK or ICSH, and since they routinely trade at roughly $50/share, mathematically, I’ll always have $25 CAD and $25 USD on average 🙂
D/D’: Compare the Suggestion to the Salary and act accordingly
Since the cash cushion is effectively a 5-month moving average Salary, the Suggestion could be more than or less than the Salary. If my net worth is down (or up) month over month, then it follows that the Suggestion will also be down (or up) month over month. My Salary may or may not be down (or up), depending on how long the downturn has lasted. Just to give you a sense of how the cash cushion smooths out the market gyrations, you can see the comparision of net worth versus salary below. (Taken from my most recent monthly “What’s in my Retirement Portfolio” update.) The net worth moves quite a bit month-to-month (generally upward, which is nice), but my salary is much smoother (but also generally upward).
Anyway, what all this means is that I’m either going to move some of the Suggestion money into the cash cushion (because my Salary is less than the Suggestion), or I’m going to pay myself from the cash cushion because my Salary is higher then the Suggestion5. It’s one or the other; as yet, I haven’t had the Salary be equal to the Suggestion, but it is mathematically possible, of course.
E/E’: Make sure the 4 Questrade RRIFs have cash to cover the monthly payment
At the end of 2025, I’m expecting some sort of communication6 from Questrade as to what my minimum monthly7 RRIF withdrawal needs to be for 2026 for each of the four RRIF accounts in my household8. This is a standard “feature” of anyone holding a RRIF — your provider makes a calculation based on the value of your RRIF on the last day of the year and your age (or your spouse’s age) at the end of the year. That’s RRIF minimum — the minimum amount you’re obligated to take. This coming year, I’ll stick with RRIF minimum again to avoid having to deal with spousal attribution rules.
So for 2026, I will know exactly how much cash I will need every month in every Questrade RRIF account. And since I’ve done such a good job in simplifying my RRIFs9 (pats back) I can also calculate exactly how many shares of XGRO need to be sold in each RRIF account every month, in real time10.
So generally, this step involves placing 4 sell orders to put cash in the account.
The E’ step — moving cash from the RRIF to the chequing account — I’m expecting to be automatic, but since I haven’t had to do this with Questrade before, I’m not certain.
F/F’: Generate cash equal to RRIF minimum in the Wealthsimple account and move it to the chequing account
Like with Questrade, I’m expecting Wealthsimple to communicate my RRIF minimum. From what I can see from their website, it appears that they actually make it really obvious.
The same good work I did with my Questrade accounts is even better in my Wealthsimple RRIF account since I hold no USD at Wealthsimple. So here, and thanks to fractional shares, 100% of my RRIF is invested in XGRO, with no additional cash.
Their help article makes it sound like both F and F’ are under my control, which is fine. I’ll just do this step at the same time I do the Questrade step. Maybe I only have to do F’ once and pay out in “Installments”? Not sure.
G/G’: Use the non-registered account(s) to generate cash equal to Suggestion minus all the monthly RRIF payments
I already know my five RRIF minimum payments will fall well short of the VPW “Suggestion”, so every month I have to sell assets from the non-registered accounts to make up the shortfall. This cash will either go 100% to my chequing account or some of it may be diverted to the cash cushion.
Normally this comes from my, not my spouse’s, non-registered account. Since my spouse is still working, I leave hers alone to avoid generating capital gains. Unfortunately, my non-registered accounts are a bit of a dog’s breakfast, and although I’ve made efforts to use spreadsheet formulas to make automated suggestions11, it’s proving a bit more difficult.
In the end, this is again a sale of one or more assets. For step G’, I can then immediately use Questrade’s “Withdraw Money” to move the cash into my chequing account, or “Move Money” to move cash into the Cash Cushion account.
Conclusion
And that, my friends, are the steps I take monthly in retirement. I try to perform these steps in the dying days of every month while allowing enough time for trades to settle to ensure cash is well and truly in hand before I move it to my chequing account.
In my household, a very large portion of this process gets spit out as a step-by-step “do this, do that” set of instructions I’ve built into a macro-enabled spreadsheet. The trades required for Step G are still decided on the fly, manually. Of couse, given that Questrade has APIs, I could conceivably make automatic trades based on the work I’ve done, but I’m not sure I want to take that step. Retirement project?
I don’t really know if any of my readers find this particular articl useful, exasperating or confusing. But for me, it’s useful to write down how it works! ↩︎
For me, CPP, OAS and the OAS supplement. The current plan is to defer CPP/OAS until age 70 to maximize my inflation-indexed income. ↩︎
which, in my case, since I withdraw monthly, is about 5x my salary ↩︎
I’ve run this algorithm ten times so far this year: 3 times I had to pay myself out of the cash cushion and 7 times I added to the cash cushion. That’s the general upward trajectory of this year’s market in action ↩︎
My last provider, I actually called them to check. I had of course calculated it myself (and they were very close) but my numbers don’t matter to the CRA. I’m hoping Questrade makes it a bit more obvious, but I’m pessimistic. ↩︎
I had set it up as monthly. I could’ve chosen quarterly or annually. I like monthly. ↩︎
My RRIF accounts hold one of five assets: Canadian and US dollars (because I can’t buy fractional shares), ICSH, AOA, or XGRO. ICSH is held in RRIFs to keep me at 5% cash in my retirement overall, and I routinely convert (quarterly) AOA into XGRO using Norbert’s Gambit. ↩︎
And yes, I have a macro-based spreadsheet that tells you exactly how many shares to sell at that moment based on share price and current cash in the account. ↩︎
The most appropriate thing to sell in any given month is an asset for which I’ve become overweight per my multi-asset tracker. But when you hold all-in-ones in the portfolio, it’s a bit trickier to work that out. I just need to set aside some time to come up with a spreadsheet-based solution. I would much prefer this decision to be made algorithmically. ↩︎
Yup, it’s another promotion. Keep that gravy train going! This time, it’s a contest, so no guarantees, but the rewards are pretty nice if you happen to be so lucky.
In each case, all you need to do is to open and fund a new TFSA/RESP/FHSA account ($250), or contribute more than $250 to an existing account, or send a postcard with an essay (yes, really) before the end of the year. One entry per client, per investment vehicle. But you can only win ONE of the three prizes (shucks).
I wonder which contest will actually have the best odds? I contribute to my TFSA every month, so I guess I have a shot, too…
The Money Engineer 