Tag: TFSA

black and white wrenches on asphalt surface

Recent DIY Investing tools I’ve heard about

RobHLeave a comment

Lately, I’ve been exposed to a flood of new1 tools that target the DIY investor. Some I read about in the media (the Globe and Mail’s On Money newsletter is a good read), and some I get wind of through mails I get to comments@moneyengineer.ca (I do read all my mail).

I figured I’d summarize what I’ve seen; appearance here means I know they exist; I don’t use any of them at the moment.

I have taken (relatively) recent closer looks at tools like MyACB/AdjustedCostBase, Portfolio Pilot, Snowball Analytics and Portfolio Tracker should you be looking for a more in-depth review. I may at some point spend more time with some of tools below — let me know if you’ve got a favourite you’ve got in mind at comments@moneyengineer.ca, or tell me about your own experience with any of them!

ActiveACB: An ACB Tracker

Their website: www.activeacb.ca

Their pitch: Canada’s most complete ACB calculator for every investor. ActiveACB reads the trade history your broker already exports, rebuilds the ACB of every security you have held across all of your accounts, and turns the result into the proceeds, adjusted cost base, outlays, and gain or loss that Schedule 3 asks for on each disposition.

My quick take: Everyone who owns assets in a non-registered account should be tracking their ACB themselves, as brokers are notoriously bad at it2. ActiveACB has explicit support for options trading, and for assets held across multiple non-registered accounts, which might be of interest if that reflects your own situation. I can say from firsthand experience that the development team is VERY responsive to feedback.

Gilded: A financial planner/advisor

Their website: https://www.gildedfinancial.com

Their pitch: “Gilded is a future-focused financial planning app for a new generation of wealth builders. Through accurate projections, easy data tracking, and seamless simulations, we empower you to take control of your money and be your own best advisor. You don’t have to guess your financial future. You can know.”

My quick take: Canadian fintech. Projections, what-if scenarios. Includes retirement planning, too. I paid for a personal financial plan when I was getting ready for retirement to give me a sense of ease that I actually had enough to retire. I recommend some sort of oversight for everyone. Gilded isn’t just for retirement, it looks like it can also help people saving for that future, too.

Greenline: A portfolio tracker

Their website: https://usegreenline.com/en-ca

Their pitch: “See everything you own. In one place. You’re probably checking a few different apps just to see what you own. Greenline brings every account into one view.”

My quick take: Currently (October 2026) in free public beta. “Canadian focused, and Canadian built”. Lots of nice looking charts to take a closer look at what’s inside your portfolio. If you want a dashboard view of your overall portfolio across multiple accounts and providers and don’t like using spreadsheets, this is worth a look. I track my portfolio performance using my Google Sheets template. I’m ok with that.

Looniee: A portfolio tracker

Their website: https://looniee.ca

Their pitch: “Track your net worth and your TFSA/RESP/RRSP/FHSA room. If you invest in Canada, your money probably sits in more than one place: a TFSA at one app, an RRSP at the bank, maybe a pension and a home. Each one shows you a piece. None of them show you the whole thing. Looniee puts it on one screen, in Canadian dollars, with the room you have left in each account.”

My quick take: Looniee has some unique features that would be of interest to those who are still in the accumulation phase of their financial journey. For instance, tracking remaining contribution limits for Canada’s various savings vehicles can be challenging, at least based on my reading of the community of savers out there. Unlike some other tools, they work off of your statements, so there’s no need to trust Looniee with brokerage login information. I’ll probably take a closer look at this one.

Manticore: A portfolio tracker

Their website: https://manticorefinance.com

Their pitch: “Your entire financial life, in one place. A premium desktop app that tracks stocks, ETFs and crypto with auto-updating prices, plus your bonds, your net worth, budgets and a full suite of institutional-grade analytics: private by design, encrypted at rest.”

My quick take: It’s Windows software and I have nothing to run it on. It doesn’t support Canadian taxes, but may someday. And, like I said earlier, I’ve already got a portfolio tracker that suits my needs. If you’re Windows user and you want to do deep analysis on your portfolio, then this might be for you.

TextPhi: A finance companion

Their website: https://www.textphi.com

Their pitch: “The future of investing is in your contacts. Research. Watch. Test. In your texts. Whatever you want to understand, track, or test, just text Phi. Research that runs 24/7. Filings, earnings, markets, news, social, and more. Phi keeps digging even when you’re not. Phi remembers everything that matters. Over time, Phi builds a model of you as an investor, not just a record of your portfolio.”

My quick take: Built by UW students3, this product is still in invitation-only beta. Its innovation is relying on text messages to inform you about things you might want to know about your portfolio. You can ask it questions and get answers, all from the comfort of your phone. If you like to buy individual stocks, this might be for you. Given that I’m a boring asset-allocation passive index investor, I don’t trade on news, quarterly earnings or the latest social media post. I just stick to my asset allocation targets.

ValuEdge: an investor terminal

Their website: https://valuedge.app

Their pitch: For long term investors who want clarity, not noise. Know what you own, what it’s worth, & what changed. ValuEdge brings your brokers, valuations, watchlists, dividends, and alerts into one investor terminal — so you can track business value instead of just price.

My quick take: Although ETF tracking is supported, the focus of the tool and the included analytics would be more useful to the stock picker. I don’t buy individual stocks, preferring to buy the market through the use of all-in-one ETFs, primarily.

  1. Well, new to me ↩︎
  2. I use adjustedcostbase.ca myself. ↩︎
  3. Gotta support the alma mater ↩︎
people exchanging money in cantor

Retirement Portfolio is now USD-free

RobHLeave a comment

On September 4th, I sold my last units of DLR1 within my RRIF account and completed my multi-month activity of kicking USD out of retirement portfolio. I ended up doing this about 3 months faster than I anticipated, but that’s because Questrade offered a free two-month trial for Questrade Plus, which included as many free journaling activities2 as you wished during the trial. And since I’m a cheapskate, I figured saving the journaling fees was worth me upping the pace of my USD to CAD conversions.

I asked Claude to take a look at the various gambits I undertook3 and evaluate them. Claude was quite upbeat:

  • Claude calculated an effective blended rate of 1.39946.
  • Claude said I beat the spot rate by roughly +0.15% overall
  • And, as expected, Claude assessed that every single gambit landed within a few basis points of the spot market, much better than what Questrade would have charged me (1.5% or so).

So now, here’s what my various account types look like, in terms of assets. There’s no USD listed ETFs anymore. Here’s what the three kinds of accounts look like.

Let’s recap the major changes, per account type.

Non-Registered accounts

I’m always a bit reluctant to mess around with non-registered accounts since making trades here inevitably lead to capital gains. But the impact in the end was pretty minor.

There’s actually three separate accounts being considered here. Two are legacy investment accounts that have long-term holdings. The other is my so-called “cash cushion” account that is an integral part of my decumulation strategy, called “VPW”. You can read about the mechanics of it here.

So for the cash cushion, I had to get rid of ICSH in favour of ZMMK. I’m giving up roughly 1.2% in annual return by doing this, but I figure at some point the Bank of Canada and the US Federal Reserve will get closer in terms of their interest rates. This had a minor capital gain impact, which was as expected. Both ICSH and ZMMK keep a pretty stable price point (around $50/unit) and pay out monthly.

The bigger issue was getting rid of SCHF from my non-registered holdings, which I had held for a very long time. Selling that was going to trigger a large capital gain that I hadn’t accounted for in my tax calculations. The solution I came up with was pretty nifty, if I do say so myself. SCHF in my model is largely “International Equity” so clearly I was going to have to replace that international equity contribution somewhere. I ended up replacing SCHF with VCN (a Canadian equity holding) and replacing XIC (a slightly different Canadian equity holding than VCN) with VFV in the TFSA account. In essence, I moved my international equity stake out of my non-registered accounts and put it in the TFSA instead.

By buying VCN (a new fund for me) in my non-registered account, I reset the ACB of that fund so selling units a few months from now shouldn’t really attract too much in the way of capital gains. In fact, the first month4 I sold VCN to pay my monthly salary, I took a small loss. So my tax planning should also stay intact.

TFSA accounts

There were no USD assets in my TFSA to begin with, so no changes were needed on that account. I had to do some asset class shifting here while maintaining 100% equity allocation in the TFSA. As mentioned above, XIC (Canadian Equity) was dismissed from the TFSA, and replaced with VIU (which is international equity).

I do have a small desire to convert the TFSA into a custom index (a Questrade feature) to save a bit on the MER imposed by XEQT here. I may yet do this. It will expand the number of ETFs in these accounts since I’ll need to decompose XEQT into its constituent components. This is again a case of me adding complexity in order to save a few bucks…But don’t I owe it to my readership to give it a try?

RRIF accounts

Mainly, the RRIF accounts replaced AOA with XGRO and ICSH with ZST. But since XGRO holds a lot less US Equity than AOA did, the AOA to XGRO conversion wasn’t exact. I had to replace some of the AOA with a US Equity holding (VFV). I chose to use ZST instead of ZMMK in the RRIF for two reasons:

  • I wanted a different ETF in my RRIF as compared to my non-registered. This helps me avoid CRA superficial loss rules.
  • ZST is ever so slightly riskier than ZMMK, which is fine, since the cash position in the RRIF is much more static than the cash position in my non-registered account.

The way ahead

Getting rid of USD assets has simplified my portfolio and my workflow thinking. I no longer have to worry about USD/CAD exchange rates, and my need to use Norbert’s Gambit should be over. It also opens up my universe to other DIY brokers. I’ve been a fan of Wealthsimple, but couldn’t use them for my RRIF accounts since they contained USD assets. Now I can consider Wealthsimple for all my investing needs5.

Working through the mechanics of slowly moving my assets to an all CAD lineup has caused me to probably spend way more time than is healthy looking at my portfolio and making trades. This should come to an end — with DRIP set up across all registered accounts6, the holdings should be more or less on autopilot with only monthly checkins to make sure my asset allocations haven’t drifted too far from my targets.

I’ve updated my posts that talk about ETF all stars and the “Magnificent Seven” ETFs as well, for reference.

  1. Selling DLR is the last step of a Norbert’s Gambit when you’re converting USD to CAD. You can read about the gambit on Questrade here. ↩︎
  2. “Journaling” is the step that turns units of DLR.u (which are priced in USD) into units of DLR (which are priced in CAD). If you’re not a Questrade Plus subscriber, journaling costs $9.95 plus HST every time you do it on Questrade. ↩︎
  3. Ok, not all of them — Claude only connects to the accounts I own, and not those of my spouse. And the last trades haven’t settled yet, so the one I did on September 4th wasn’t showing up in my transaction history. I don’t expect the story is too different if I include the gambits I ran in my spouse’s RRIF account. ↩︎
  4. After making sure 30 days had passed in order to avoid a “superficial loss” in CRA’s parlance. ↩︎
  5. And if they offer a promotional offer that throws free money my way, I’d seriously consider switching brokers again. ↩︎
  6. I don’t use DRIP in non-registered accounts because non-registered transactions need to be logged for adjusted cost base adjustments; I’d prefer to keep these fully under my control to minimize the number of transactions. I don’t mind carrying a bit of cash in non-registered accounts in order to avoid excess trades. ↩︎

What’s included in your “retirement bucket”?

RobHLeave a comment

My monthly retirement salary is calculated using a methodology called Variable Percentage Withdrawal, or VPW for short. You can read about the methodology over here, and you can follow an excellent real-time illustration of how it works over at https://tinyurl.com/vpwForwardTestFiniki.

Part of the “how it works” is calculating your total retirement savings on a monthly basis. For me that includes the real-time value of:

  • 5 different RRIF accounts (3 for me, 2 for my spouse)
  • 2 TFSAs (1 for each of us)
  • 3 non-registered accounts (one for me, one for my spouse, one that serves as VPW’s cash cushion)

But what’s not in it?

  • My day to day chequing accounts
  • A rainy-day savings account
  • A tax savings account
  • A short term investment account

Since I’m continually talking about what’s in my retirement portfolio (most recently here), I figured a few words of other assets I have might be helpful.

My day to day joint chequing account

This is the account my spouse and I use for day to day banking. It’s an account we’ve held at CIBC for decades. It’s the kind of account that charges no fees as long as a minimum balance is maintained. It doesn’t pay any interest on balances. I could still conceivably use it to write physical cheques, but I can’t remember the last time I used it for that. Like most day to day banking, it has inputs and outputs:

  • Inputs: RRIF payments, payments from my non-registered retirement accounts, my spouse’s salary, eTransfers
  • Outputs: Most bill payments (subscriptions, utilities, insurance, credit cards, taxes, charitable donations), eTransfers, transfers to other accounts

As I build my relationship with Wealthsimple, some of the day-to-day duties are being shared — depending on cash flow I will sometimes pay bills from Wealthsimple, and if my CIBC balance gets too high (not often, but it does happen sometimes) I will move money from CIBC to Wealthsimple since Wealthsimple pays interest and CIBC does not. And if I’m traveling in a foreign country, the Wealthsimple credit card comes into play1, and balances for this card need to be paid from a Wealthsimple account.

My rainy day savings account

Every month, without fail, I redirect some funds to my rainy day savings account2. This is a separate account that pays interest. The rainy day fund pays for unexpected (but never ending) expenses. These could be car related (major repairs), house related (renovations, repairs), or sometimes a large splurge (vacation related). There isn’t a hard and fast rule as to when to apply rainy day savings, but a good starting point is when the cash flow of the joint chequing account looks like it’s heading to dip below the threshold where bank fees start getting paid for day to day banking. I hate all banking fees. Discretionary3 spending from the rainy day account is a joint decision.

My tax savings account

Every month, without fail, I direct some funds from my chequing account to the tax savings account. As a retiree, my only income comes from

  • Monthly RRIF minimum payments, which get no special tax treatment4. It’s like income. The big difference between a RRIF paycheque and a salary paycheque is that a typical salary paycheque has tax withheld at the source, CPP payments, EI payments… A RRIF paycheque has none of that.5
  • Payouts from my non-registered accounts, which also don’t come with any withholding tax. Every payout typically6 generates a capital gain and even with a 50% tax break on capital gains, it adds up!

So yeah, there’s a good chunk of income coming in (all flowing in to my day to day chequing account) but no taxes. So to cushion the blow in April, I’ve set aside funds to pay the looming tax bill. And for simplicity, I keep this separate from other accounts so there’s no temptation to “borrow” from it or to “forget” to make a payment. Payments are automated, direct from the chequing account every month. Wealthsimple makes this sort of thing quite painless to set up. And it’s a straight savings account, paying a small amount of interest, about 50 basis points below Bank of Canada overnight rate.

Short term investment account

This is something I’ve set up after getting a small inheritance. I haven’t decided what to do with this money, but while I think about it, I have it invested in an account with a reasonable return without taking on too much risk. It’s like the rainy-day fund, but with a likely longer time horizon.

The firewall between retirement savings and everything else remains in place. But everything else is a bit more complex than you might expect at first glance!

  1. No FX fees when I use this card. One of three I carry, which I talked about lately. ↩︎
  2. There’s actually a few of these held at different providers (Wealthsimple, Simplii) at the moment; this needs to be consolidated. ↩︎
  3. Renovations that aren’t urgent, for example. ↩︎
  4. I’m ignoring the fact that if you’re over 65 (I’m not) then you can split RRIF income with your spouse however you like. Because I planned ahead, my spouse and I are both the same age, and have very nearly the same RRIF value saved up, so even once I turn 65, the splitting may not be needed. ↩︎
  5. To clarify, if you take RRIF minimum payments (as I do) then there is no withholding tax. If you take more than RRIF minimum, then there is, and the amount withheld will depend on how much above the minimum you go. Full and complete rules outlined by the CRA (prepare coffee before reading). ↩︎
  6. A lot of the things I hold in my non-registered account I have held for a long time. And since it’s mostly boring index funds (I covered what’s inside a while back), they tend to increase in value over time. ↩︎

Portfolio Optimization In Practice

RobH2 Comments

My retirement portfolio is spread across multiple brokers and multiple accounts. And although I treat the portfolio as a unified entity when it comes to asset allocation (the concept is discussed here), different accounts have different allocations. The reasons are varied, but I would rank inertia as one of the big contributors — sticking with what’s there seems like a lot less effort than the other options.

What I think in important to point out is that the portfolio is still dealing with inflows and outflows every single month:

  • I pay myself RRIF minimum from my RRIF accounts, and this usually means selling some shares of XGRO
  • If RRIF minimum isn’t sufficient for my expenses (and it hasn’t been), then I have to liquidate shares from my non-registered account.
  • I contribute to our TFSAs every month
  • Questrade gives me free money every month as a reward for shifting assets their way (see how I did it here). This money shows up in my non-registered accounts1.
  • Dividends show up every month2; every quarter there is an even bigger distribution
  • And quarterly I convert some of my AOA holdings to XGRO within my RRIF using Norbert’s Gambit3. When I do this, it reduces my US and international equity holdings and replaces it with Canadian equity4.

So given all these ins and outs, there are always opportunities to tweak the asset allocations so that they remain close to my targets.

The targets, as always, are unchanged:

  • 5% Cash (mostly ultra short-term bonds)
  • 15% bonds
  • 20% Canadian Equity
  • 36% US Equity
  • 24% International Equity

Last week, a reader’s question (please send questions or comments to comments@moneyengineer.ca) led me to take a different look at what was in each of my retirement accounts (RRIFs, TFSAs, non-registered), and this week I acted on correcting a flaw in the way the accounts were structured.

The reader was actually asking about foreign withholding tax implications since the rules are different depending on whether the asset is held in non-registered, TFSA or RRIF but after spending a lot of time looking at it, I decided that, from a tax perspective, the portfolio was actually in reasonable shape. (If you want to dive into this yourself5, you can read https://www.finiki.org/wiki/Foreign_withholding_taxes and https://pwlcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2017-12_Ben-Felix_WP_Asset-Location-Uncertainty.pdf).

But this study did make me realize that the small allocation I had of bonds in my TFSA was wrong-headed. Since in my planning the TFSA is the LAST place I’ll head to fund my retirement, it follows that it should have the longest-timeline investments. So, for me, that means 100% equity is the correct allocation for the TFSA accounts. So what did I do?

  • I sold the bonds in my TFSA (XSH was the ETF), and put them in my RRIF (choosing instead to use XCB, a longer-duration corporate bond fund)
  • Of course, since you can’t add money to a RRIF, something had to be sold there. XGRO was plentiful, so that’s how I funded the bond purchase. From an asset allocation perspective, selling XGRO meant that I reduced my Canadian, International and US Equity exposure at the same time.
  • To compensate, the cash I generated in my TFSA by selling XSH was used to buy a combination of XIC (Canadian Equity) and XAW (US and International equity combined). XIC was already in the TFSA6. XAW is new but gives back the US Equity and International Equity I lost by selling XGRO7.

This is how the two accounts break down now, both from an ETF and an asset-allocation perspective. (In the asset allocation charts “Income” is the nomenclature I use for “bonds” and “Cash” means actual money as well as ultra-short-term bond funds like ICSH and ZMMK).

The result is my TFSA is now 100% equity, and the lower-growth cash-generating bonds are now all in my RRIF accounts. More efficient all around!

  1. Leaving the free money as part of the retirement portfolio was a conscious decision. I could have just as easily decided to withdraw the money every month. ↩︎
  2. Both ZMMK and ICSH pay monthly. They are both featured in my ETF all-stars. ↩︎
  3. You can read about it here. ↩︎
  4. AOA is 50% US equity, 28% International equity. XGRO is 36% US Equity, 24% International Equity. ↩︎
  5. It’s not a straightforward topic. In the end, the foreign withholding tax isn’t huge but as a cheapskate, it’s noticeable and can be higher than MERs of the ETFs you hold. ↩︎
  6. XIC helps tilt the overall Canadian equity allocations in the right direction. AOA tilts it in the wrong direction. ↩︎
  7. The current numbers don’t allow me to use an XEQT/XIC combination. Over time, this will change. ↩︎

RRIF, TFSA, non-Registered…what do you do with each?

RobH1 Comment

My retirement fund is divided amongst a bunch of different accounts: RRIFs, TFSAs, non-registered. And although I present them as a monolith in my monthly updates (latest one here), I don’t treat them the same way and they have rather different things inside them.

I don’t claim to have a fully optimized portfolio; a thoughtful reader was asking me questions about tax implications of my current holdings, and I admittedly haven’t given a ton of thought to that. But I will in a future post 🙂 .

So, in other words, you’re getting my current thinking for what I hold where. It may not be ideal. But at least you see why things are the way they are.

Below you can see how my retirement funds are divided amongst my various investment vehicles. This one is accurate as of January 8, 2026, and is greatly facilitated by tracking my stuff in Google Sheets. There’s a basic template of what I use over here1.

Retirement portfolio, divided by account type, January 2026

So that’s where it’s at. How do I treat the three main segments of the pie?

RRIF

So the RRIF is clearly the largest piece of the retirement pie and will be around for some time, possibly for the rest of my life. At this point in time, I’m only taking RRIF minimum payments which are recalculated every year and are based on my age and the value of my RRIF on December 31 of the previous year.

I am taking RRIF minimum primarily because I want to avoid the hassle of spousal RRSP/RRIF attribution that I talk about here. RRIF minimum is quite a bit less than the expected return of this account given the holdings therein, mostly AOA and XGRO:

I periodically (once a quarter) shift funds from AOA to XGRO using Norbert’s Gambit2. How much? Well, at the beginning of the year, I see how much of my RRIF is in USD. I then multiply that by my RRIF age factor3, divide by four, and presto, I have a quarterly amount I should move.

All of my many RRIF accounts4 have XGRO, and on the day I make my payday calculations, I have a spreadsheet that calculates how many shares of XGRO I need to sell in each account given the current price of XGRO and the amount of CAD happens to be kicking around in a given account. In very rare circumstances, I might (as well/instead) sell AOA if I had a need for US cash5.

The small contribution of ICSH here is because I have a 5% “cash” asset allocation in my portfolio, and I needed someplace to keep this monthly income. RRIF seems as good a place as any, especially since all those monthly dividends are completely tax-free as a result.

In the coming years, the RRIF will take on more and more of my monthly spending needs. Once the attribution time period has lapsed, I’ll probably take more than RRIF minimum from here in an effort to reduce taxes for older me — once I start collecting CPP/OAS as well as RRIF payments, I could find myself in a taxation world of hurt. Making my RRIF smaller will help, but there is no free lunch. You either pay taxes while you’re alive, or your estate will pay them when you’re not.

Non-Registered Accounts

I really have two kinds of non-registered accounts in my retirement calculations, and they have very distinct usages. Let’s see the difference:

The “legacy” non-registered accounts are long-standing accounts that have grown over the years of accumulation. They are held in my name and my spouse’s name and taxed accordingly. These accounts, specifically the one in my name, account for probably 2/3 of my current income. Every time I withdraw from these accounts, I have to account for capital gains, which is fine, since the taxation treatment of capital gains is generous. You’ll also notice that this account is 100% equity. And as previously noted, the dividends thrown off these investments is not particularly noteworthy (not zero, but nothing a dividend-focused investor would get excited about). That’s why you see funds like HXDM and HXS here, to explicitly avoid dividends. This portion of my non-registered funds is targeted to eventually go to zero in the next few years, probably before I start collecting CPP. That’s a tax avoidance strategy, no idea if it will work out in my favour.

The “cash cushion” non-registered holdings are 100% in ultra-short term bond funds, which to my way of thinking, is equivalent to cash. This account exists because I use VPW as a decumulation strategy, and the cash cushion helps smooth out my monthly salary. Sometimes I add to the cash cushion (directly from my other non-registered account) and sometimes I pay myself from the cash cushion. You can read all about how it works at The Mechanics of Getting Paid in Retirement. Here I keep a bit of uninvested cash floating around in an effort to reduce the number of buys/sells I have to do here. The capital gains are quite minimal in these funds since both ICSH and ZMMK stay close to $50/share6 but it’s possible to make minor gains/losses7 depending on the exchange rate and day of month I make the purchase/sale.

TFSA

The TFSA, per the plan prepared for me by my fee-based advisor, (part of the steps I took to figure out that I had enough to retire) is the last account to decumulate. I continue to contribute to my TFSA monthly, like I have ever since TFSAs were a thing. That would be an “expense” I could cut if needed, I suppose. It tilts heavily towards equities8:

Besides XEQT, you currently see XSH, a bond fund9. This exists in order to keep my target asset allocations in line, and because I don’t really want the monthly distributions landing in a taxable account. Perhaps that holding would be better in my RRIF? There’s also XIC here, which is a Canadian equity fund, necessary to offset the heavy US equity contribution made by AOA.

  1. Over the holidays I’ve started on a new template that makes heavy use of pivot tables, which I do like quite a bit. ↩︎
  2. You can track my progress over at Tracking Norbert’s Gambit Costs with Questrade ↩︎
  3. Per https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/businesses/topics/completing-slips-summaries/t4rsp-t4rif-information-returns/payments/chart-prescribed-factors.html, it’s “1 divided by (90 minus my age)” until I turn 70. ↩︎
  4. Hopefully in a week or two it will be down to five. ↩︎
  5. I do have a USD bank account (via CIBC) and a US credit card (ditto) to avoid FX charges, but my shiny new Rogers Red card also provides sufficient cashback on USD transactions to wipe out the extortionate FX rates charged by credit card companies. ↩︎
  6. Reverts to around $50 on its ex-dividend date, late in the calendar month. Except January, where ICSH doesn’t distribute at all, instead distributing twice in December. ↩︎
  7. Losses are unlikely because I trade frequently enough to fall under superficial loss rules. Best explanation of how this works at https://www.adjustedcostbase.ca/blog/what-is-the-superficial-loss-rule/ ↩︎
  8. Longer timeframe = higher risk acceptable = more equities ↩︎
  9. Here is a bit of problem. XSH is a short term bond fund; by rights, this should be a long term bond fund since the timeline of the investment is longer. Sigh. I picked this one because (a) it had corporate bonds and (b) it had a very low MER. ↩︎