Net Worth Update: 2025 Year-End Review
A little over six years ago I handed in my resignation at my public sector day job to focus full-time on advice-only financial planning, this blog, and some paid freelance writing work.
Suffice to say, that was one of the best decisions of my life. No more Monday morning budget meetings, performance reports, or KPIs. Now I could work on what I wanted, when I wanted, right from the comfort of my own home with my wife and business partner.
Forget the fact that we launched into this at the start of a global pandemic. That may have actually been a blessing, as the world grew more accustomed to working remotely over Zoom and other online tools.
Our business has exploded since then, exceeding our wildest expectations of what was possible. Along the way, I've been a guest on the Rational Reminder podcast, The Wealthy Barber podcast, the annual Canadian Financial Summit, and even wrote my first op-ed in The Globe & Mail this year.
We've also updated our website to reflect that we're now a financial planning firm with a blog on the side, not the other way around.
On the personal finance front, we've benefited from a growing income and a raging bull market (Covid crash and 2022 blip aside). My RRSP has grown by 101% in six years, despite not having made a single contribution in that time. Incredible!
We reached the million dollar mark in our net worth at the end of 2020. That felt like a monumental milestone. But just five years later and we've cracked $2M in net worth.
It was going to take an exceptional year in the market for us to reach that milestone, but that's exactly what happened. Our investments, mostly held in Vanguard's All Equity ETF (VEQT), were up 20.56% in 2025. That did most of the heavy lifting for us.
Additionally, we increased our salary & dividend combination (with designs on contributing to our RRSPs next year and into the future), which allowed us to contribute aggressively to our TFSAs.
We'll complete our TFSA snowball next year, plus start those RRSP contributions as mentioned. From there, we'll balance our RRSP and TFSA contributions with some extra mortgage payments, plus financial assistance for our kids through post-secondary and early adulthood.
All while continuing to travel and add to our accumulation of memories – those pay the best dividends over time.
Since I've already spoiled the outcome (that we hit the $2M mark), here's how our net worth looks at the end of 2025:
| 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assets | ||||
| Chequing account | $12,000 | $12,000 | $12,000 | 0.00% |
| Corporate cash balance | $60,000 | $55,000 | $75,000 | 9.09% |
| Corporate investment account | $562,848 | $444,117 | $305,617 | 26.73% |
| RRSP | $456,847 | $378,600 | $302,411 | 20.67% |
| LIRA | $303,019 | $251,172 | $204,231 | 20.64% |
| TFSA | $169,198 | $52,297 | $0 | 223.53% |
| RESP | $139,422 | $122,293 | $100,796 | 14.01% |
| Principal Residence | $976,000 | $976,000 | $976,000 | 0.00% |
| Total assets | $2,679,334 | $2,291,479 | $1,976,055 | 16.93% |
| — | ||||
| Debt | ||||
| Mortgage | $460,899 | $481,077 | $500,155 | -4.19% |
| Total debt | $460,899 | $481,077 | $500,155 | -4.19% |
| — | ||||
| Net Worth | $2,218,435 | $1,810,402 | $1,475,900 | 22.54% |
It's amazing how much investment returns drive our overall net worth growth now versus 5-10 years ago when savings contributions really moved the needle more. While we contributed significantly to our TFSAs, it was the 20%+ investment returns that did the heavy lifting this year.
Now let’s answer a few questions about the way I calculate our net worth:
Credit Cards, Banking, and Investments
Earlier this year I closed the TD account that I've had since I was eight years old and moved my everyday banking to Wealthsimple.
My wife and I follow a simple approach to our banking: One joint account where income flows in and joint expenses flow out, plus one no-fee personal account for agreed-upon guilt-free spending.
We have a joint credit card at Scotiabank (Passport Visa), but funnel most of our spending onto our Wealthsimple Visa Infinite cards (2% cash back on everything).
Once or twice a year we'll apply for a new rewards card to build up our points, focusing on American Express Membership Rewards, Aeroplan, and Mariott Bonvoy as our go-to travel programs.
All of our investment accounts (RRSPs, TFSAs, my LIRA, our kids' RESP, and our corporate investment account) are all now held at Wealthsimple's self-directed trading platform.
You know all of this from my post about how I invest my own money.
RRSP / LIRA / RESP
The right way to calculate net worth is to use the same formula consistently over time to help track and achieve your financial goals.
My preferred method is to list the current value of my RRSP, LIRA, and RESP plans rather than discounting their future value to account for taxes and distributions.
I consider a net worth statement to be a snapshot of your current financial picture, so when it comes time to draw from my RRSP/LIRA and distribute the RESP to my kids, my net worth will decrease accordingly.
Principal Residence
We bought our home in 2023 for $976,000, so that’s the price I’m using for our net worth calculation. I typically adjust the purchase price by inflation each year but I’ll likely keep listing it at the purchase price for a few years.
Astute readers will notice that the price of our previous home went from $459,000 to $555,000 from 2022 to 2023. That ended up being the sale price, so you can see that I was pretty conservative with the house value over the years.
Final Thoughts
Unlike the last major net worth milestone, there will be no big hairy audacious goal to reach $3M or $5M in a few years. While that's likely the trajectory we're on, it's starting to feel a bit tone deaf to post about our success when inequality has never been more prevalent in society.
Regular people are still struggling with affordability after the recent spike in inflation, and while wages (on average) have also risen, we're seeing more of a K-shaped recovery and a growing divide between the rich and poor.
I know many of you look forward to these updates, and I've always strived to be transparent with my readers. But this will be our final net worth update post.
Besides not wanting to sound out of touch, I also don't want the message to focus on continuously growing the pile.
I joke that half my job is spent trying to convince my retired clients to spend more money. I think that comes from an obsession with saving, investing, and wanting to move the needle forward. It's hard to turn off the savings taps and turn on the spending taps.
But, as Die With Zero author Bill Perkins says, our net worth should peak around age 55 (not at death) so we can maximize our life fulfillment and create more long-lasting memory dividends. Wait too long to spend your money, and you risk your health failing before you can enjoy the fruits of your labour.
We aim to do that with our travels and giving our kids amazing experiences and the opportunity to pursue their dreams. Heck, we still have our own dreams to pursue!
So that's going to be our focus from now on. Saving and investing for tomorrow, of course. But also living for today and not obsessing over a vanity metric like our net worth.
Happy New Year, thanks for reading, and we wish you all the best for 2026 and beyond!
Nice, I’m glad to see you having such success, well earned, I miss seeing your posts on Twitter, those were good times. I think you’re making the right decision about further net worth updates, no point in making yourself a target.
Hi Paul, thanks for your comment. Leaving Twitter was probably one of my highlights of 2025 🙂
All the best!
Wow! You got that TFSA back up so fast. Good on you!
Happy New Year. All the best in ’26!
That’s both of our TFSAs combined! Not quite there yet.
Happy New Year!
Nice work Robb. With your financial success and your acknowledgement of the rich/poor divide, perhaps you could do a piece on your charitable giving approach and how you chose where / when to give.
Thanks Neil! Great idea, as we do think it’s important to give back.
This year we chose to support three local organizations (Lethbridge Family Services and their Angel Tree campaign, Wood’s Homes emergency youth shelter, and YWCA’s Harbour House emergency shelter for women).
We also helped a family member with a down payment, support our friends who run a local women’s community group, and became more generous tippers with our local small business bakery and coffee shop (30-50% because, why not?!?).
I used to work in the fundraising space so I definitely have some thoughts to share and would love to put together a blog post on the subject.
Two things that don’t get enough attention are: supporting programs with matching funding (I’m all for getting the employer match with your savings contributions, find out about matching programs for your charitable giving), and donating appreciated shares of stocks, mutual funds, ETFs held in a taxable account for more tax efficient giving.
Die With Zero is excellent and a must read IMO.
Donating securities is one of the best strategies ever.
For anyone working for a fairly major corporation, I encourage you to check on charitable matching programs that may be offered by your employer. Most corporations have them. Some have two types of programs: one that matches an employee’s own charitable giving and another where the company makes donations to charities based on an employee’s volunteer time. It allows the company to make charitable donations that follow the interests of their employees and is a huge benefit to the recipient charities because they didn’t have to do any fundraising to get the money.
Robb … thx for the thoughtful reply. I think your last point about cost effective ways to give shares is worth a blog post almost on its own. Poorly understood and under utilized.
Happy 2026.
Congratulations Robb! What a journey even if the destination seems a little anti-climactic! It’ll be amazing watching and emulating the die with zero approach going forward.
Peak net worth at 55 sounds really intriguing and learning from how you handle things over the next decade now that the net worth chase is over is going to be an exciting chapter.
Have a non-hairy audacious 2026 all the same!
Thanks Ravi, I really appreciate your support! Happy New Year to you and your family!
Congratulations on an awesome year Robb.
My heartfelt thanks, in large part to you, for MY awesome year! Your professional advice and support is what keeps me on track. I may be a number one student with the “die with zero” recommendations but having fun with it! lol.
Happy New Year to you and your family. Looking forward to a great 2026!
Geri, that’s so great to hear – music to my ears!
Happy New Year, and all the best to you in 2026!
I’ve always really enjoyed the net worth updates but agree that after $1MM in liquid assets, sharing publicly is of limited benefit for all the reasons you mentioned. Here’s to a rich and fulfilling year ahead!
Thanks so much, Nhi – happy New Year!
Hi Robb
I am also interested in charitable donations information/post. It’s one of the things that is on my list to discuss with you in the future.
Kathy
Hi Kathy, thanks – I’m hearing a lot of encouragement for a post on charitable giving so I’d better get to work on that. Happy to discuss with you as well!
In BC we get annual property assessments in January that adjusts home values based on overall markets and area sales. It’s the value used to determine property taxes in July. I use that amount in my bookkeeping as it would be pretty unrealistic to keep using purchase price after 15 years. Does Alberta have a similar data point for property owners?
Totally fair, Frito, and we do get annual property assessments. The problem is our home is newly built in a brand new area, so the city assessment is pretty much useless for a market valuation until there are some comp sales in the area. Maybe this year will be better.
In any case, I won’t keep valuing it at the purchase price forever.
Ha! Property assessment just came in today at $1,015,000. So not too far off. I’ll use that going forward.
This might require its own post, but how, why, and when do you decide to leave RRSP contribution room on the table?
It comes out of necessity at some point for everyone, but there is certainly a mental hurdle to get over. We’re no longer maxing RRSPs and TFSAs, as there just isn’t enough new monies to go around.
But in your case wouldn’t it make more sense to pay yourself a higher salary from your corp and use that money to top up RRSPs?
Hi Mark, short(ish) answer:
Our RRSPs are completely maxed out. We haven’t contributed since 2020 because we paid ourselves dividends-only for the last five years so we did not generate any new RRSP room.
That changed in 2025 because our business revenue was going to exceed the SBD limit, so we switched to a salary / dividend combo to bring the business income down and accelerate our TFSA snowball catch-up.
Since the RRSP room won’t be created and available until 2026, that meant paying a bit more in personal tax in 2025.
We’ll contribute the maximum amount of created RRSP room in 2026 and continue down that path for the foreseeable future.
For the record, before income exceeded the SBD, I was okay with the dividends-only approach because we already had robust savings inside our RRSPs and my LIRA. But as income grew we needed to change our approach our face much higher taxes inside the corp.
Makes complete sense! Here’s to continued success in the new year!
Hi Rob,
Well done and I echo others that agree with you no longer posting NW.
I cannot recall seeing a post on the RRSP versus saving in a corporation analysis. My most recent discussion with a tax partner on this is that a lot of professionals save in the corp and nil in salary. The corp effectively becomes their RRSP. They seem to do this as they are then not paying the employer share of CPP and they have more flexibility on withdrawals versus in the RRSP/RRIF scenario.
Would be nice to hear your thought process as you are now well into that scenario but have still decided to take salary. The big negative is no CPP at the end of the day but you are earning far in excess on your investments than cpp will ever pay.
Keep up the good work.
Hi Dale, thanks for your comment. Regarding the RRSP versus corporate investing decision, there is already good compelling arguments published by CIBC’s Jamie Golombek (https://www.cibc.com/content/dam/personal_banking/advice_centre/tax-savings/rrsp-tfsa-business-en.pdf) and PWL Capital’s Ben Felix (https://pwlcapital.com/optimal-compensation-saving-and-consumption-for-owners-of-canadian-controlled-private-corporations/) supporting the case for business owners to pay salary and prioritize their RRSPs and TFSAs before adding to their corporate investments.
As I mentioned above in my reply to Mark H, we paid ourselves dividends-only for five years, but now that business revenue has exceeded the SBD limit we made the decision to switch to salary (which can be deducted from corporate income) to stay under the SBD limit.
We also want to avoid growing the corporate account too large and having passive income exceed the $50,000 threshold (granted that would take a portfolio in excess of $2.5M to achieve).
Keeping all of your savings inside the corp is potentially disastrous from a tax planning perspective. Note that the money needs to come out eventually to fund retirement consumption. Withdrawing significant dividends in retirement will certainly affect your OAS benefits (dividends are grossed-up). Not to mention the most recent attempt by the previous Liberal government to increase the capital gains inclusion rate, which would have negatively impacted business owners using that strategy.
In general, one should aim to max out their RRSP and TFSA room (and pay themselves enough salary or salary + dividends to continue doing so) before contributing to their corporate investments. That’s what we aim to do going forward, at least as long as we continue to work full-time.
Well, I am 55 and our net worth went up by -7 annual budgets in 25. A little wild but we’ll tale it.
We did increase our spending but whether our net worth has peaked or not depends on Mr Market. I am hoping the answer is “no”. Medical/care expensive can escalate dramatically later on, so spending most money while one is healthy seems counterintuitive.
Great update – it’s really good to hear about your success!
Great stuff…..knock of 200 k for the house right now though. The past two years has hit us all 🙂
Thanks for sharing Robb. I’m a recent follower of your site and enjoy the content.
Question: I’m currently working on our own net worth statement (my wife and I), and I was wondering how to account for our defined benefit pensions. When I log in to the pension website, it does not provide this information, just our annual amounts. Is there some formula perhaps I could use?
Thanks!
Hi Stephen, thanks!
You should receive an annual pension statement and on that statement it should say something like, “the commuted value of your pension if you left the plan today.” That would give you a rough idea.
Hey Stephen, I worked for a municipality for 10 years and was never able to get a commuted value estimate of my DB pension. It was never on my annual statement and when I called the pension provider they would not give me a value and said they were unable to provide that information. So I think it depends on the pension plan I used the combined contributions from myself and my employer to be conservative. In the end when I commuted the pension it was about the same value as the contributions with almost no growth (which was pretty lame). Interest rates make a difference. This was the end of 2024.
Thanks Joseph. I did call my pension provider who said the same thing, that they cannot provide that information (insert shoulder shrug emoji). They said you would need to consult an actuary to determine a net worth value of my DB pension.
Thanks for sharing. Recent follower that got recommended by my dad since moneysense isn’t good anymore but globe/mail’s still decent. I’m 34 and near your numbers. I respect your net worth decision. I only let people know my TFSA since showing proof goes a long way with younger audience. The one thing I tell people is I wouldn’t be where I am today without my investments. Looking forward to your articles and views on finance
Thanks for being so candid over the years with your numbers Robb. I really appreciate it when people are proud to share their successes; it helps to break the taboos around talking about money. I wish you continued successful market returns in the years to come!
At what age do you tell the kids about the large RESP that will be waiting for them?
Oh, they’re well aware and yet the oldest still insists on going to university in Scotland, where her share of the RESP might buy her 1.5 years of tuition and housing. Time to earn some scholarships, young lady!
Lol indeed! I guess it opens options for them! I have an 8 and 10 year old and am wondering the best age and way to tell them about it. (Future blog post idea)?
Robb, I appreciate posts like this!
The one item that cannot be put on a net worth statement is the freedom you feel from leaving your corporate job and starting your own venture.
Best wishes to you and yours in 2026 and beyond.