The retirement financial planning tricks of the trade is not a long list. There are a few things you can do to greatly boost your retirement income, while you manage risk. The RRSP / RRIF meltdown might be the most useful retirement ‘hack’. The strategy entails spending down your RRSP funds at an aggressive rate, […]
Checking in on Joan’s Canadian blue chip portfolio. Plus, the Sunday Reads.
In my wife’s personal RRSP account she held the Vanguard VDY-T ETF. It had outperformed the TSX Composite by about 1% annual. We can thank the financials overweight for that. The Canadian financials XFN-T and the Canadian banks ZEB-T have a long history of outperformance. In June of 2023 we moved to a Canadian blue […]
Retirement tip: use the spousal RRSP account on the Sunday Reads.
Income splitting is one of the most useful strategies in retirement. And here’s a retirement tip that is often missed – taking full advantage of the spousal RRSP account. The spousal RRSP account allows a higher income spouse to transfer funds into the hands of a lower income spouse. Those funds will grow tax free; […]
You can count on your CPP payments to be there, on the Sunday Reads.
There are three major pillars for your retirement income in Canada. There’s Government Benefits, Personal Savings and the Employer Pension. The Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Old Age Security create the Government Benefits. We might consider that part of our pensionable earnings as the amounts are ‘guaranteed’ and indexed to inflation. At times we can […]
The abnormal returns for the Canadian asset allocation ETFs.
I have just updated the returns for the Canadian asset allocation ETFs. The returns over the last year and three years can be described as abnormal returns. So much so that I had to double check the performance for the equity markets that fuelled this incredible run. How did they do it? Over the last […]
Creating monthly income in retirement on the Sunday Reads.
One of the best things you can do in the accumulation stage is ‘set it and forget it’. That is, put your investments on auto pilot as much as you can. Set up direct transfers from your chequing account to your RRSP, Group RRSP, and TFSA (and perhaps taxable) and then if possible automate the […]





