Tag: VFV

abundance of food on table

What’s in my retirement portfolio (October 2026)?

RobHLeave a comment

This is a monthly look at what’s in my retirement portfolio. The original post is here.

Portfolio Construction

The retirement portfolio is spread across a bunch of accounts:

  • 5 RRIF accounts
    • 3 for me (Questrade, Wealthsimple)
    • 2 for my spouse (Questrade)
  • 2 TFSA accounts (Questrade)
  • 4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint, all at Questrade)

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, and the charts that follow reflect the view post-payday, which happens around the end of the month. On October 29th after the markets closed, this is what it looked like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, aka the Magnificent Seven ETFs list.

This is pretty much the same chart as last month. I’m sort of expecting that to be the case month-to-month. Every month there are small reductions in my XGRO position1 since that’s what I sell to make my monthly RRIF payments. There are slightly larger reductions in the non-registered part of the portfolio to pay my salary, but their contribution to the overall picture is pretty negligible. HXT is the largest non-registered holding I have now, followed by ZMMK and XIC. Everything else you see on the chart above is either in my RRIF or my TFSA.

My asset allocation targets are unchanged, namely:

  • 5% cash/ultra short term bonds
  • 15% bonds
  • 23% Canadian Equity
  • 37% US Equity
  • 20% International Equity

The asset-class split looks like this; you can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.

This chart is an almost-perfect reflection of my asset targets, with all categories within 0.5% of the intended allocation.

Plan for the next month

Nothing looming; no planned changes. My spouse’s RRIF is 0.24% larger than mine, which is a tiny improvement over last month; ideally the values of our RRIFs would be equal so we withdraw the same amount and draw the same RRIF salary. Makes things a bit easier to plan.

I have been looking again at perhaps moving XGRO over to ZGRO.T to take advantage of ZGRO.T’s automated payouts, which would simplify my monthly RRIF routine considerably. Unless I can be reasonably sure ZGRO.T will generate enough income on a monthly basis to fully cover my foreseen monthly payouts, there’s really no compelling reason to do that.

Overall

Part of using VPW as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. My net worth took a small hit this month, but the trend remains positive overall:

My VPW-calculated salary has now increased for 10 straight months; it’s nice getting a monthly raise! I should start to see the salary flatline if the net worth remains flattish (as it has for the past 6 months now).

  1. And 4 times a year, that reduction is VERY small since XGRO pays quarterly dividends which are by default used to purchase more of the same. ↩︎
salesman discussing real estate to a senior couple

What’s it cost to manage your own retirement?

RobH2 Comments

One of the big reasons I became a DIY investor in the first place was to stop paying the typical 1% to 2% annual charges professional money managers charge.

Now before you start scoffing at “small” numbers like 1%, you have to consider a few things

  • 1% of one million dollars1 is $10,000. Retirement savings generally involve relatively large numbers, and small percentages translate into large real dollars. The lineups I see at the gas pumps to save a buck or two on a tank of gas tell me that real dollars are generally more meaningful to people than percentages.
  • Compound interest. Throwing away $10,000 on management fees every year means you’re $10,000 poorer every year. Fast forward ten years at an assumed 6% rate of return, and that $10,000 annual hole turns into (roughly2) ~$135,000 hole
  • …and the most annoying thing? A 100k portfolio is charged the same percentage as a $1M portfolio, meaning the $1M portfolio attracts 10x the fees of the 100k portfolio. Is the $1M portfolio ten times harder to manage? No!

But ok, even a DIYer doesn’t invest for free.

  • If you hold any kind of asset, there’s potentially3 commission fees every time you buy and sell
  • If you hold ETFs (as I do) then the FER4 will cost you, although not explicitly. FERs kick in before you see your own returns.
  • You might pay interest if you borrow money to trade (aka using margin)5
  • You may pay FX fees if you trade in currencies other than CAD6

So let’s look at what my retirement portfolio is actually costing me. For me, that’s now down to FER costs. Using my latest What’s in my retirement portfolio? article, it’s easy enough to calculate. I track in real time how much of each asset I hold, so by looking up the FER and multiplying by $1,000,000, you can get the annual cost :

It’s a bit higher than I expected, admittedly. $1902 is a far cry from the $10,000 I talked about earlier, but it’s not nothing.

I wonder what my rock bottom costs would be? If I were to eliminate all-in-ones (which are convenient, but costly) and just focused on 5 funds, one for cash, one for bonds, one for Canadian equity, one for US Equity and one for International equity, what would I end up with given my asset allocation targets? Here’s that table:

I chose ZAG over XCB because ZAG is a broader bond fund than XCB and diversification is good. I use XCB today because I get broad bond exposure via XGRO. I picked ZST over ZMMK for this exercise, but in reality I would probably still hold ZMMK and ZST in equal proportion. That would lower my overall costs ever so slightly.

I suppose this experiment shouldn’t surprise me: I covered the costs of all-in-ones in a previous post. But this shows that I could cut my annual costs in half should I choose to forgo the convenience of XGRO and XEQT. XGRO would be hard to give up because it makes managing my RRIF accounts (the only place I hold XGRO) much easier. I only sell XGRO to cover my RRIF minimums at the moment, no decisions necessary.

But XEQT I only hold in my long-duration7 TFSA account. There I could possibly make the switch with no real impact other than reducing my fees by about 0.01% or $100 on a million. Something to think about. What about you? Do you pay close attention to MERs/FERs of assets you own? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

colorful assortment of french macarons in box

What’s in my retirement portfolio (September 2026)?

RobH3 Comments

This is a monthly look at what’s in my retirement portfolio. The original post is here.

Portfolio Construction

The retirement portfolio is spread across a bunch of accounts:

  • 5 RRIF accounts
    • 3 for me (Questrade, Wealthsimple)
    • 2 for my spouse (Questrade)
  • 2 TFSA accounts (Questrade)
  • 4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint, all at Questrade)

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, and the charts that follow reflect the view post-payday, which happens around the end of the month. On September 30th before the markets opened, this is what it looked like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, aka the Magnificent Seven ETFs list.

As you can see, I’ve now successfully kicked USD out of my retirement portfolio; it’s completed faster than I originally planned thanks to Questrade’s offer of free Norbert’s Gambit to all Questrade users for a few months. The demise of USD-denominated assets does not mean a demise in the holding of US assets, in case you were wondering. The portfolio is still well exposed to the US equity market, since my asset allocation targets have remained unchanged:

  • 5% cash/ultra short term bonds
  • 15% bonds
  • 23% Canadian Equity
  • 37% US Equity
  • 20% International Equity

The asset-class split looks like this; you can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.

This chart is an almost-perfect reflection of my asset targets, with all categories within 0.5% of the intended allocation.

Plan for the next month

Nothing looming, which given the time I’ve had to spend moving USD out of the portfolio, is a welcome change.

The only thing I’m keeping an eye on is the relative size of my RRIF holdings compared to that of my spouse. From a planning and tax perspective, it’s much easier to manage if the size of our RRIF holdings is equal. At present, my spouse’s RRIF is 0.25% larger than mine, so probably that’s close enough. All I can really do to control this (since one cannot add to a RRIF) is to allocate more equity to one over the other, and cross fingers that the equity portion outperforms the bond/cash portion. Historically this has been the case, but one never knows when the timelines are measured in months!

Overall

Part of using VPW as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. My net worth stayed stagnant month over month but it’s still 20% above when I started on my retirement journey.

My VPW-calculated salary has now increased for 9 straight months; it’s nice getting a monthly raise!

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. ↩︎

a person is holding a package with their hands

What companies are in my retirement portfolio?

RobH1 Comment

I cover what I hold in my retirement portfolio every month (latest update is here), but as you can see, I only hold ETFs. What’s underneath the ETFs? Let’s take a look!

Calculating this is straightforward:

  1. Use the percentages I have of each ETF from the June update
  2. Look at the “Holdings” section of ETF or in the case of AOA/XGRO/XEQT, “Aggregate Underlying Holdings”1 and write down the percentages of each stock. I stopped when I accounted for 20% of each ETF.
  3. Multiply (1) by (2) and add them all up.

By doing this exercise, I can now account for the 20 companies that make up 20% of my retirement portfolio:

These 20 companies are really the tip of my personal investment iceberg — my aggregate retirement portfolio has at least 32,000 holdings, since that’s what’s actually inside AOA, the one ETF I own with the most holdings2. But the fate of these 20 companies will have an outsized influence on the overall performance of the portfolio. The only surprise for me is that there is only one company outside North America in the list. I would have expected one or two more.

It will be interesting to see what kind of differences I see once I complete kicking USD out of my retirement portfolio and go back to a list of only seven magnificent ETFs. I’m not sure there will be big changes, given that I’m keeping my asset allocations constant throughout, but I’m expecting some differences3. We’ll see come January 2027, I guess.

Just for fun, and given my recent article on the SpaceX IPO, I wanted to know how much I held of that particular company. AOA hasn’t included it yet4, but XGRO and XEQT have already. As of June 30, 0.02% of my portfolio is invested in SpaceX.

  1. In most cases, as of June 30. VFV only shows to May 30. ↩︎
  2. XGRO has 22000, for reference. I think the extras in AOA come mostly from fixed income (bond) products since they have broader geographic coverage. ↩︎
  3. The biggest changes won’t be visible since they occur in the bond side of my holdings. AOA and XGRO have very different approaches to this part of the market, but as it’s only 15% of my retirement holdings, they don’t show up as a “top” holding in my retirement portfolio . ↩︎
  4. And won’t until SpaceX is profitable. AOA includes IVV, which is an S&P 500 index fund, and the S&P 500 requires companies to be profitable before inclusion in that index. ↩︎