Part 4 of a 7-part series on retirement income in Canada Part 2 of this series covered CPP and OAS, and Part 3 covered the RRSP and RRIF on their own. This post covers what happens when the three main accounts, the TFSA, the RRSP or RRIF, and your other investments, along with any workplace pension, have to work together to produce one steady income, which is the closest thing retirement offers to the paycheque it replaced. Why does the order matter? The order matters because

Part 3 of a 7-part series on retirement income in Canada The RRSP has one job for thirty years, and then the job changes. Part 2 of this series covered the guaranteed layer of retirement income, CPP and OAS. This post covers the account that does most of the heavy lifting for the people I work with: the RRSP, what happens when it becomes a RRIF, and the difference between following the government's withdrawal schedule and actually having a withdrawal plan. The questions below

I write this from my side of the desk. I entered financial planning as an accountant, saw the industry from the outside before I joined it, and built my practice around the way I believed advice should be offered. That path gave me a bias, which I will name plainly before the end. It also gave me years of watching people choose their advisors, and a close view of the incentives that shape the advice people receive. What follows is what I have learned along the way, laid out s

I noticed in my own relationship, the argument rarely announces itself as a major event. It usually begins with something small, such as a purchase one of us questions, or a budget review that shifts, almost without either of us noticing it happen, into a conversation about who contributes more and who should have more say. One person withdraws while the other becomes more insistent, and before long the spreadsheet on the table has stopped mattering, because the real conversa

Part 2 of a 7-part series on retirement income in Canada The Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security occupy a strange position in retirement planning. They are more substantial than most people realize, and yet for the people I work with they are one part of a much larger picture, and how large a part varies widely from one retirement to the next. What makes them important is not their size. It is that they are the only part of the picture that is guaranteed, indexed to infl

Part 1 of a 7-part series on retirement income in Canada For thirty or forty years the rules regarding money were simple: you earned your income, saved as much as you could, and each dollar went in one direction, into your accounts. Advancement meant seeing the balance rise, and each statement proved that you were doing things correctly. Then the cheque stops coming, and the plan asks you to reverse a habit built over an entire working life: to take money out, on purpose, mon

In most households, one person does the money. They pay the bills, file the taxes, move the savings where they need to go, and keep a running model of the family finances somewhere in their head. From the outside, this looks like a system that works. The bills get paid on time, the RRSP contributions happen, and nobody else has to think about any of it. The cost of the arrangement is that nobody else thinks about any of it, and that cost stays invisible for years, sometimes f

A teenage interest in money, an awkward conversation at Scotia Bank, a detour through political science and the military, and one accounting client who changed the direction of my career. This is the story of how I ended up in retirement planning, and why I still believe the most important question is not how much money you have, but what you want it to make possible.

After years of building a successful business, Heather and Steve had accumulated wealth, property and complexity. Their retirement plan brought the pieces together, uncovered major tax issues and showed them they had more freedom than they realized

A year from retirement, Kevin and Barb had properties, investments and plenty of questions about how to make it all work. Their plan helped them unwind the right assets, reduce lifetime tax and use more of what they had built for travel and time with their daughters.

Most households have a money person. They are the one who knows the passwords, meets with the advisor, decides when the mortgage gets renewed, and carries the retirement plan around in their head. Families even joke about it: one spouse is the CFO, and the other signs where they are told. The arrangement usually forms out of something that looks like consideration. One partner is better with numbers, or has more time, or cares more, and so they take the work off the other per

In all the years I have spent sitting with couples and their finances, nobody has ever told me about a hidden account. No secret credit card has ever come up in a meeting, no undisclosed loan, no cash set aside where a spouse would never look. For a long time I took this at face value. Then I ran into the research, which suggests that roughly a third of Canadians in relationships are carrying some kind of money secret, and I had to accept the more likely explanation. Either t