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I work with a lot of clients who have done everything right. They saved diligently throughout their careers, paid off their mortgage, maxed out their registered accounts, and arrived at retirement with more money than they ever expected to have. And yet they’re worried. Not about whether they can afford to retire – they clearly…

I read a Globe and Mail piece by RBC senior portfolio manager Nancy Woods this week, one of those “investing basics” explainers aimed at people just getting started. The hook was a herd-of-cows analogy: your money is the herd, dividends are the milk, price appreciation is the baby cows (the herd growing over time). The…

One of the top questions I hear from soon-to-be-retired clients is some version of: “What do I do about health coverage when I leave my employer plan?” The anxiety is real. For decades, benefits were just… there. Dental cleanings, prescriptions, massage, physio – it felt like free money. Now they’re staring down retirement wondering how…

If you contribute regularly to your TFSA you already know this, but it’s worth repeating. Your My CRA Account is not a live tracker of your TFSA contribution room. In fact, it can be frustratingly slow to update. The reason is straightforward. Financial institutions have until the end of February each year to report your…

Every time markets get shaky I get some version of the same message. “Hey, are we getting nervous about VEQT? Anything we should be doing differently, or just let it ride?” It’s a fair question. Market declines and a barrage of bad news can certainly make some investors uncomfortable. But it also reveals something important.…

One of the strangest things about retirement is that it’s often not about whether you’ll have enough money to last a lifetime, but whether you’ll feel comfortable spending it. Economists call this the retirement consumption puzzle. In theory, retirees should draw down their savings over time and enjoy the money they spent decades accumulating. In…

Beth came to me with questions about her mother Susan’s finances. Susan is 80 and widowed. She lives in a retirement home and spends about $60,000 per year after tax. Her health is declining and she’s not expected to live beyond age 85. After her husband passed away, she now has $1.2 million in a…

I had an unexpected opportunity this week. I wrote my first op-ed for The Globe and Mail, and the topic was something that has become a recurring feature of Canadian retirement debates: proposals to reduce or eliminate the minimum RRIF withdrawal percentages. The idea is often framed as a compassionate fix to protect seniors from…

One of the biggest shifts in retirement is learning how to spend your own money without second guessing every decision. After years of building your portfolio, it can feel strange to start drawing it down. That is usually when people start watching the markets too closely and stressing about every dip. The whole point of…

A reader wrote this week asking a timely question: many of us are in that stage of our financial lives where sequence-of-returns risk looms large, and it feels like our portfolios are increasingly at the mercy of a handful of tech giants. The question was whether it’s possible to reduce or eliminate exposure to the…