Category Retirement Strategies

Saving & investing for retirement. Learning how to spend!

Benchmark Your DIY Portfolio

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 1 Comment
Measuring Portfolio Performance

How does your portfolio stack up against a simple, globally diversified, broad market index portfolio? Does it matter? It might. Most of us, short of placing some lucky bets, are unlikely to beat the markets over the course of our decades-long investing lifetime. But that doesn’t stop us trying. And that can get messy. Do you know what’s in your basket? And how well it’s working? If you find yourself wondering about this every now & then, it might be worth checking. How do we do that?

Plug your portfolio details into one of the online tools that provide portfolio comparison features. I like the Backtest Portfolio feature in Portfolio Visualizer for this. Once your portfolio is loaded, compare its total return performance to one of the all-equity ETFs like ZEQT, VEQT, or XEQT. If the equity side of your portfolio is crushing the returns of these all-equity funds, well done. Do you know why? Is it luck or skill? Can it continue? If you think it can, keep doing what you’re doing & get ready to enjoy your retirement!

If things are not going that well, it might be worth exploring why not. Of course, some investors may deliberately choose a portfolio mix that lags index funds. Not that the goal is to lag, but other attributes (low volatility, increased cash flow, whatever) may be favoured over maximising total return. It also doesn’t matter if you have a growth, dividend, or income investing approach, benchmarking total return performance can still be enlightening. And useful. Sticking with any strategy, even one that lags, is a decision best made when we know the cost.

I’ve left out a bond or cash component. However, that’s easily added. Make sure it’s in the same ratio as in your own portfolio, for an apples-to-apples comparison. Or use one of the asset allocation ETFs, like XGRO, VBAL, ZCON, etc. as your benchmark. These are the all-equity ETFs with bond funds built in. Select one with a built-in bond percentage that matches your own portfolio. I prefer not to use an S&P 500 Index® fund as the benchmark, because it’s less geographically diversified than I prefer for my portfolio. For for those who invest only in the US market, it’s a valid choice.

Most of the comparison & performance tools will require a subscription if you want to take advantage of the full capabilities. But, despite the limits, the free access can still be very useful. For example, Portfolio Visualizer allows 15 holdings & 10 years of back testing under the free tier. While stock pickers will almost certainly be challenged here, most ETF investors are likely to have fewer holdings. But if you’ve got more, choose all the bigger ones & hopefully the top 15 holdings will make up the bulk of your portfolio value.

Another challenge with making comparisons is that the first of the all-equity ETFs only launched in 2019. That limits how far back we can look for direct comparison. But there are some tricks that we can employ. Like breaking down a fund into older constituent (or similar) ETFs. For example, we can use an all-equity ETF proxy made up of VUN (USA 45%), XIC (Canada 25%), XEF (International Developed 25%), & XEC (Emerging 5%). This gets us a comparison all the way back to September 2013. On the flip side, if your portfolio has a bunch of new funds, there won’t be much history to look at. And, in general, the shorter the timeline, the lower the value of the comparison.

This next proxy drifts further away from using a single all-equity ETF. A comparison portfolio of SPY (USA 45%), XIU (Canada 25%), & EFA (International 30%) is a rough approximation that allows benchmarking all the way back to September 2001. It would have been interesting to see the impact of the dot-com implosion in 2000, but EFA wasn’t old enough to catch that event. I guess we could use a 50:50 portfolio of SPY & XIU to get back to 2000. The problem with both these “created” benchmarks is that the funds are in different currencies. This further muddies the waters. Pretty significantly. That said, for rough comparisons, they look back about 25 years. But why are we bothering with all this history stuff anyway?

We all know that past performance does not predict what the future holds. But benchmarking against one of these all-equity ETFs, or against a proxy for longer timeline comparisons, can throw up some interesting insights. It’s good to know how an asset mix survives things like the dot-com meltdown & the great financial crisis. There is tremendous value in seeing how things worked while accumulating. And then how things can change, sometimes seriously, while decumulating in retirement. I know some people are shocked by the outcomes from these comparisons. If that’s you, I hope you are positively shocked. Because of how well your portfolio has performed. And if so, congratulations!

If you are negatively shocked, you might want to reconsider what you are invested in & why. If the equity portion of your portfolio is way behind the returns of the globally diversified fund, is that acceptable to you? Is your original investing hypothesis intact? Ah look, I’m trying to tiptoe around asking you if you know what you’re at here! And if you don’t, consider this …

Should an investor seriously trailing an ETF filled with globally diversified, total market index funds think about the potential for buying that ETF instead? Or maybe this investor should consider talking to an advisor. I know that is a heretical thing to say out loud amongst DIY investors. But if the results are likely to be better, after paying an advisor 1% to just buy the all-equity ETF for you, why would you not think about this? And if this advisor throws in some fancy financial planning, that’s an added bonus. Look, DIY investing is not a religion. And we didn’t take a vow. We don’t have to remain committed to underperformance. Particularly if we can’t figure out how to fix it on our own. Of course, it can be as challenging to choose a good advisor, as it is to build a good portfolio! Seems like there is no escaping the need to invest in learning when it comes to making enlightened decisions about our money.

I guess this is all a bit simplistic, eh? But if you’ve been doing your own thing for a bit, it can be insightful to benchmark your performance against a simple off-the-shelf portfolio, like the all-equity ETF we used for benchmarking. And it’s an EFT that some academics & professionals argue might be the best long term investment choice for many DIY investors anyway. Only you can decide what to do once you see the results of a benchmarking exercise. Just don’t jump from the frying pan into the fire!

There are other considerations, of course. Some favour lower volatility portfolios. Others treat & handle risk differently. Retirement cashflow or income can be a big influence on portfolio choices for those nearing retirement. Worries about sequence risk in early retirement can factor into portfolio selection. And on & on it goes. But, regardless of these many influences, measuring & comparing performance can provide insight. And the insight may help guide us towards better solutions going forward. And if you do decide to have a discovery chat with an advisor, why not benchmark the advisor’s proposed portfolio against one of the all-equity ETFs as part of that process. After going through all this, I’m now questioning my own portfolio. Think I’ll head off & do a little benchmarking of my own. Catch up with you later! 😜

If you want to learn more about saving & investing, please check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.

US or Canadian – VOO or VFV?

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
The Currency Balance

Which currency should we invest in, Canadian or US dollars?

In this example, we’ll compare Vanguard’s US listed & US dollar denominated ETF (VOO), against the Canadian listed & Canadian dollar denominated equivalent (VFV) from Vanguard Canada. Imagine investing $10k back in 2012 in each of these ETFs. Conveniently, the Loonie & the greenback were approximately equal back then. One Canadian dollar was worth one US dollar. That means the $10k investment was of equal value, regardless of the currency.

With all dividends reinvested, here’s what the performance has looked like since then …

VOO vs VFV 2012 to 2025

By March 2025, VOO grew from $10k to $52k, in American dollars. While VFV soared to about $73k, in Canadian dollars. VFV looks like the big winner. But it’s not.
Back then the currencies were at par. By the end of this chart, it costs $1.44 Canadian to buy one US dollar. If we sold off VFV at the end & converted the proceeds to US dollars, we’d have a bit less than $51k American. pretty close to the US dollar value of VOO. Similarly, if we sold all our VOO holdings & converted those US dollars to loonies, we’d have almost $75k Canadian. Bottom line is that they’re about the same. We’re only looking at about a fifteen hundred dollar (Canadian) difference in total return, with the American listed VOO coming out slightly ahead.

VOO should come out slightly ahead. There a few reasons for that, including the following …

1. It has the lower fund fee of 0.03%, compared to the 0.09% fee of VFV in Canada.
2. While it all happens inside the ETF, VFV loses a little of the dividend payout due to the 15% dividend withholding tax that the IRS (the US equivalent to the CRA) collects. This happens regardless of the account the Canadian listed ETF is held inside.
3. Though ETFs can do currency exchange at better rates than the typical DIY investor, there might be some additional currency exchange drag on VFV too.

If the fund fees were the same, if currency exchange didn’t have any fees, & if there were no dividend withholding taxes, the performance of the two ETFs would be practically identical. The apparent outperformance of VFV in the chart above is mainly due to the declining value of the Canadian dollar against the US dollar over that 12 year period. Both funds grew similarly in real value (as they should, since they both hold the same stocks). But VFV grew “extra” Canadian dollars over that time, in line with the increasing real value of the stocks inside the EFT. This compensated for the Canadian dollar falling in value against the US dollar. If the reverse had happened, & the Canadian dollar had gained strength against the US dollar over this time, VFV’s numbers would have lagged VOO on the chart. It would have “looked” worse. But, once you convert the currency in either direction, both would have looked pretty much the same again.
That said, there are some pros & cons with either choice.

If you have a bunch of US dollars already & you want to invest these greenbacks inside an RRSP account, VOO would be the better choice. It may not always be this way going forward but, under the current agreement between Canada & the US (& as it was over this timeline), the RRSP account shelters the investor from the dividend withholding tax that would otherwise apply to US based ETFs. On the flip side, if you don’t already have US dollars, you’ll have to pay currency conversion fees. Or learn the Norbert’s Gambit technique to minimise the currency conversion costs. If you want to avoid that currency conversion work, the outcome resulting from sticking with VFV is still pretty good. Particularly when investing outside a registered retirement account, where neither fund can avoid the withholding tax. That would bring the results a little closer together. It is worth noting that the bigger the investment, & the longer the time invested, the greater the potential impact. The $1,500 difference on this $10k investment example, would have been $15,000 on a 100k investment. You can do the math for a million dollar investment as your portfolio grows! And, for a more precise comparison, you’ll need to figure out the impact of currency exchange costs, back & forth, on the end result too.

I’ve ignored some other critically important tax wrinkles (there are some potentially significant exposures here) that come with foreign investing during the course of this comparison, so be sure to consult a tax specialist if you want to invest on exchanges outside of Canada. There are tax reporting requirements with the CRA above a certain value of foreign owned investments, for example. There are also potential IRS tax reporting requirements. And perhaps even US tax liabilities along the way. There’s a lot to learn. And if you don’t know, you’d be well advised to check with a professional advisor to help you figure out your US & foreign investing strategy. In addition, the outcomes may require the inclusion of more than just stocks, bonds, & ETFs. Any additional foreign property, like a holiday home outside Canada, for example, will impact your tax situation. Talk to an expert!

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with investing in Canadian listed ETFs while you learn more about investing on foreign exchanges & in other currencies. It is a little less work to stick with the loonie. And the end result here was not too far behind the American equivalent. Many investors stick with Canadian listed ETFs, while still getting the necessary foreign exposure. There are also currency hedged ETFs that can help offset those currency fluctuations. But that’s a conversation for a another day.

Just remember that things would begin to reverse in the above chart, if the loonie were to gain in value against the US dollar going forward. In other words, VOO would then start looking better when charted against VFV. In the first 6 months of 2025, for example, VOO is up about 5%. While VFV is essentially flat. The real value of both is still close to the same. But the numbers are different due to a weakening US dollar this year, making VOO look better over this different timeline. This is more about how the numbers look, it’s not that the value is substantially different. Looks can be deceiving, eh!

If you want to learn more about saving & investing from the ground up, I’d like to suggest that you check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.

Safe Withdrawal Rate in Retirement

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 2 Comments
Take Care of those Pennies!

After a lifetime of saving for retirement, spending what we’ve saved can get pretty messy. Even a flock of pros would all come up with a different, at least slightly, spending plan for each of us. We don’t want to go broke too early. But we don’t want to make our retirement miserable by not spending enough either!

While it’s not actually a rule, the so-called “4% Rule” is often used as a guideline for determining a safe withdrawal rate over a 30 year retirement timeline. The rule suggests we can take out 4% the first year of retirement & take out inflation adjusted amounts (i.e. 4% + inflation adjustment) every year thereafter. And we can do that for 30 years, with a high degree of probability that the portfolio will make it all the way to the end. Bill Bengen originally used a portfolio of US stocks & bonds to develop this strategy. In recent years, he created a more diversified portfolio that he calculates allows a higher withdrawal rate of around 5%. Other experts point to the greater capability of an all-equity portfolio to deliver improved lifelong results. And still other experts in the space present models that suggested we might have to drop down closer to a 3% withdrawal rate to ensure portfolio survival. What gives?

There are a few things to consider here. The markets, particularly the US market, have produced great returns over the past decade & a half. An investor, convinced of the strength of the US market, who retired in 2010, might be looking like an investing genius today! Since 2010, a million dollar portfolio, all invested in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), being drawn down at an inflation-adjusted rate of 4%, would have a portfolio value of over $5m today. Not a typo. Using the 4% withdrawal methodology for more than 15 years, the portfolio would still have grown to a value of over five million dollars today. This retiree could have withdrawn a whopping 12% for year one. And, even after increasing that far bigger income by inflation every year, the portfolio would still be worth almost a million bucks today. That is an amazing outcome, eh?

Yeah, it is. But we can’t always take big withdrawal rates to the bank!

Let’s jump back another 10 years & look at a retiree who quit working in 2000. Exactly the same scenario as above. This retiree also has a million dollar portfolio & starts out with a $40k withdrawal the first year, or 4%. By today, the portfolio is only worth just under $340k. Even less in inflation adjusted value. What happened to the five million bucks from the previous scenario? The lost decade, including the dot-com crash & the great financial crisis, is what happened! Early poor returns damaged the future value of the portfolio.

If this “Year 2000 retiree” had used the 12% withdrawal rate from the other example, the Year 2000 portfolio would have gone to zero by 2006. Yes … zero. Nothing left after only 6 years. This is not a good outcome. In fact, just blindly following the 4% guideline in this example would have been a cause for worry by today. And withdrawing much more than an inflation-indexed 4% would almost certainly have resulted in a portfolio that died before the investor did!

Those examples are from the past. But the big lesson is that there is no guarantee that the future will be all rainbows & sunshine. We need a plan that handles grey skies & storms too. As we progress through retirement, financial plans must be reviewed & revised on a regular basis. To account for changes in the markets & in our lives. There may be the potential to increase our income for greater enjoyment during some years. Or there may be a requirement to reduce spending, to ensure we have income to the end of our days. Flexibility may be required en route.

And that’s what makes retirement planning so challenging. Financial planning is not a set it & forget it deal. As we saw above, we can’t depend on a financial plan that was created in 2000 or 2010 delivering the same results all the way to today. Modifications along the way are warranted. Similarly, if we were to start retirement this year, it is very unlikely that a financial plan created in 2025 will see us, cleanly & smoothly, all the way to the end. Will our asset allocation selections & portfolio choices allow us to spend way more than 4% every year? Or will we get trapped in a scenario where even 4% might be too aggressive? If we don’t use the 4% Rule, how do we handle the added burden of inflation through the years? There are a few challenges there, eh!

Some investors put their trust in dividend growth portfolios to sustain a growing income stream for a lifetime. And a plethora of new high income funds are proving very popular with investors who see early retirement calling via funds with huge distributions. Can these alternatives work? Some of these new funds offer distributions of 10 or 15%, some even more than that. Imagine you need a million dollar portfolio to produce 4%, or $40k, of annual income to retire on. If you’ve only got $400k saved, how about building an ETF portfolio yielding 10% & calling it quits? This might work. Or it might not. We’ll have to look at how we might compare, & perhaps even combine, these different strategies. However, that’s a whole other bunch of numbers & I’m getting grumpy now, so we’ll leave those questions for another day.

Meantime, take care out there & make sure you have an up-to-date financial plan.

If you want to learn more about saving & investing from the ground up, I’d like to suggest that you check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.

No Tipping Down Under!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Today’s tip … head down under for a holiday!

This is a departure from my usual subject matter, but I’m just back from a fantastic holiday in Brisbane, Australia. It was great because of the people I got to share the adventure with. And because Brisbane is such an amazing place. This city delivered lots of surprises. One such surprise was the most amazing transit system. Those Brisbane City Cats & Kitty Cats that zip up & down the meandering Brisbane River are an unbelievable treat. And you can go anywhere in southeast Queensland for 50 cents! Hey, I’m frugal, what can I say! That 50c fare had me smiling every time I tapped onto a bus, train, or river boat! And, for a change, I was not the designated holiday driver. I got to be a real tourist this trip! LOL

There was one other enjoyable thing that I didn’t even realise had any significance ’til I got back home. This was something simple. A thing that added a little extra joy to every dining experience down under. There is no tipping there!

I grew up in a country that only hinted at the occasional requirement for a small, token tip. And even that would require some very exceptional service. And maybe slight inebriation on the part of the tipper! For me, tipping was not the norm way back then. It was a bit of a culture shock when I first came to Canada. But after decades of living here, I am totally conditioned to providing the obligatory tip. Even when the food or service is pretty awful. In Australia, tipping is not the norm. And I think the Aussies might have it right!

For starters, the minimum wage in Oz is over $24 an hour. Servers get paid a reasonable wage, without having to generate some high-energy Hollywood charm to “earn” a decent tip. The Aussie system might be especially appreciated by servers who provide great service on days when the chef is having an off-day. Their paycheque is not negatively impacted by someone else screwing things up! Whilst there, I spoke with some people who have had experience in the service industry in both Canada & down under. While it’s too small a sample group to be of any value to make generalisations, they were unanimous in their preference for the Australian way of doing things. Especially the higher basic wage.

As a consumer, I learned something new about all this too. I had no idea there was so much subliminal stress involved in eating out in North America! I’m calling it subliminal because, day to day, I didn’t even notice it. Until I was subjected to the tip-free process down under. When it comes to paying the bill, you don’t even need to do any math in Oz. There are no tip calculations to consider!
My first meal out in Australia was a bit of a disaster. Not because of the quality of the meal, that was great. But because I was trying to tip a confused server. The machine didn’t prompt me for a tip & I had no idea how to handle that! 😜
I finally managed to get the tip into the machine, but I never mention tipping again for the rest of my stay.

Not having to tip means no there is no weighing up whether service was good or bad. If it was terrible, sure, you might complain. If it was amazing, you might flag the server’s efforts to the manager. But if it falls into that very broad band of acceptability, you just enjoy the parting exchange with another human being. The slightly horrible process of one human being sitting in judgement of another, while the amount of the tip is considered, is eliminated. And how about those times when the service is good, but the food is terrible? Should we reduce the tip? That’s punishing the server for the quality of the food & that wasn’t their responsibility. No fair, eh? In Australia, all that goes away.

The machines don’t arrive with the suggestion that tipping starts at 15% either! Wasn’t 10% a good tip way back when I first came to Canada? In Oz, they just show the final amount that you see on your bill. And this is for a dining in experience. Not having a tip suggested at a take-away (take-out!) counter was even better! And I never found myself having to supress a surge of anger towards any machine having the audacity to suggest that 20% was just a mediocre starting tip! All in all, finishing up the dining experience & paying for a meal is just a slightly nicer & better experience in Australia, compared to here.

While the consumer (me!) certainly benefits from the Aussie system, it feels like the bigger advantage of their non-tipping culture might be for the service staff. For starters, they are paid a decent wage. Canadian minimum wage levels are lower than the Australian rates. Canada doesn’t have any of the super-low hourly rates that apply to servers in some US states, but wages are still lower here than in Australia. Potentially, at the end of every meal, there are some slightly judgemental things that surround the whole tipping culture in North America. It may be subtle & almost insignificant, but they are there nonetheless. With worse potential for abuse are things like the tip-out practice. This requires servers to share their tips with other members of staff. So the chef that did a lousy job preparing the food still gets a cut of the tip from the server who provided great service. Even when the poor quality of the chef’s work triggered a tip reduction. In some places, I’m told the tip-out is calculated on the amount of the table bill. Even when the server gets no tip! So a server who provides great service, but delivers poorly prepared food might get no tip. And they have to pay a tip-out fee to the chef or other staff members who may have done the lousy job that encouraged the customer not to tip. Is this for real? The server could actually be financially penalised for the poor quality of someone else’s work!?! This feels like a really bad system to me. Dining out is supposed to be a pleasant & relaxing experience. Thinking about all this stuff is anything but! I really don’t know how the average server in Canada feels about all this, but I really enjoyed the Aussie experience as a consumer. And Aussie service staff seem to like it too.

I’m not sure if we can change anything for the better up here, but if there are there any Canadian restaurants that are boosting pay & prohibiting tipping, please let me know where. I’d certainly be willing to pay a little more to dine in that kind of environment. Assuming the chef wasn’t screwing up the food every time! LOL

It’ll be back to boring investing type stuff next time but, despite the horrendously long journey & the awful jet lag, I highly recommend a visit to Brisbane. It is a wonderful city, in an amazing country, with really nice people, & great weather. While I would probably try to avoid the heat of the Queensland summer (🥵), it’s definitely a worthwhile bucket-list destination & experience at other times of the year!

If you want to learn more about saving & investing from the ground up, I’d like to suggest that you check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.

DIY Financial Planning … Is it for You?

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 2 Comments
Retirement Planning Made Easy!

I’m jumping the gun on this one, but I’m so excited to have stumbled across this financial planning tool that I want to share it with you now. Funny enough, Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot introduced me to this. I asked Copilot to help with a financial plan & after providing some insights & encouragement, the first link it provided was to planeasy.ca. This led me to their financial planning platform adviice.ca. While I’ve only played with it for a few hours yet, I’m really excited about what these guys are doing. And what this platform can do for DIY investors who are also doing DIY financial planning.

One of the drivers for DIY investors to do the DIY thing is our frugal nature. We want to save on investment & advisory fees so that we keep more of our money. That may, or may not, work out well for us, but we just can’t escape the desire to be frugal. This frugal nature also extends to financial planning. Though many DIY investors recognise the value of a financial plan, we tend not to want to pay the fee for having a plan done professionally. And no wonder, it’s not difficult to find fees in the two to five thousand dollar range for having a single financial plan prepared by a professional. Despite the value, that’s still a lot of coin for a one-shot deal. I’m not sure what plan revisions would cost in subsequent years, but it’s fair to assume that as time goes by & circumstances change, it probably makes sense to have the plan updated periodically.

Enter Adviice.ca!

If you’ve watched YouTube® videos on financial planning, you’ll have seen them use software for those sexy charts & graphs that are easily modified for viewing different scenarios. We know we want this, but the software isn’t available to non-professionals in many cases. And some of us are unwilling to pay the price for the professional to do a plan. The Adviice.ca platform costs $9 for a 30 day trial. And $9 a month if you decide to keep the subscription. At these prices, that’s almost 28 years of DIY financial planning for the same cost as one $3,000 plan! There are so many threads to weaving an accumulation or retirement plan. It is very difficult to do it on a notepad or with spreadsheets. Adviice does the calculation grunt work in the background & shows the results in an easy-to-read visual format. It’s also updated to reflect current details on taxation, government income streams, etc. At this point, I haven’t played with the platform for long enough to write a review. Frankly, I’m not qualified to do a real review anyway. The best I could do is provide a DIY appraisal of what I’ve found. However, this post is more about my early enthusiastic reaction to finding it & using it.

Within 2 hours of signing up for this platform, I had a rough-tuned retirement plan done. Much of that time was spent inputting the foundational data. It took another couple of hours to learn enough about how it worked to improve on the first pass. This particular plan embraces a situation that covers another three or four years of working, reviewing different RRSP drawdown strategies, looking at the tax implications of different withdrawal rates across different account types, & so on. I still have much to learn & a lot of fine-tuning to do, but I think I’ve got a pretty respectable financial plan pulled together already. Now the beauty of this is that you can spend as long as you want fine-tuning a plan. Or, to avoid the law of diminishing returns, you can book a one hour session with an advisor at Planeasy, or with other professionals using the platform. You can do this right within the Adviice platform. And for only $499! Or you can book a more comprehensive package for $1,999.00, which could include multiple retirement scenarios, additional tuning sessions, etc. The beauty of this offering is that you can do the DIY thing at a low cost, but then you can add some professional assessment at a lower price than the typical financial planning service might cost. Along with pandering to the hands-on thing favoured by many DIY folk, this could be a cost-effective combination of DIY & professional advice.

Rather than share screenshots, which won’t capture the full scope of what this platform really does, here’s a link to a PlanEasy YouTube® video that covers one example of doing a retirement plan for a couple. It captures a lot of the features & functionality of the system. If you’ve watched financial planning videos in the past, you’ll find a lot you can relate to in this. This clip shows the software with the green PlanEasy branding, mine has the blue Adviice branding, but is otherwise identical. Though there may be some additional features on the latest version. It’s not yet a perfect solution for all scenarios. I’d like to try scenarios where I pass away earlier than my spouse, for example. You can work around most of these limitations by manually adjusting the data columns, but it looks like they are working on improving the functionality & adding features on an ongoing basis. I joined their Reddit® group (r/adviice) where you’ll see feature requests & the company’s responses to these. They are really quick to respond to questions.

The biggest limitation to the client version that I’ve seen, so far, is that we can only create one foundational data set. In other words, short of starting over, we can only do our own plan, for a single or a couple. And that’s fair enough. The advisors pay more & can obviously prepare plans for multiple clients. For those who take advantage of a session with an advisor, the advisors can then use our base plans to add their professional input on top of ours. I guess part of the reason we can get the lower cost professional oversight is because we have already done the work to build the foundational data set. We can still, however, create multiple scenarios based on our own foundational data set. That allows us to explore different accumulation & withdrawal strategies, & so on.
The other limitation is that we cannot create reports. Those are delivered to us after a session with an Adviice advisor. That too is fair. It would be possible to change the foundational data to create reports for others if this was open. Just doing the DIY thing for ourselves, we can get all the relevant info right on the screen. And we can export the plan’s data, for those who want to play with the numbers in a spreadsheet. The reports are not essential for getting value from this software.

Bottom line is that I think this is the first affordable solution that is accessible for Canadians who want to be more involved in creating their own financial plan. Not only is it more affordable to begin with, but it may offer access to professional planning & fine tuning at a more affordable price too. It is a really smart product approach from this company. I think they will find many takers at $9 a month that might otherwise never have spent a penny on financial planning. And I think many of those takers will avail of the tune-up sessions with a professional advisor. And there will be those who will take advantage of the larger, more comprehensive professional support packages too. I hate this way-overused phrase, but this product has all the feel of one of those really good win-win solutions!

If I’m sounding like I work for these guys, I apologise, but I have absolutely no affiliation. I found it last weekend & I ponied up the $9 within 10 minutes of reading about it. Within an hour of playing with it, I knew this was going to be an enjoyable experience. When I compare the number of hours I spend with calculators & spreadsheets trying to do all this, Adviice is a great option for me. However, learning anything new does require some brain activity. And it might not be suitable for everyone. Of course, we all know that we need to challenge our brains as we age. And learning to use this will certainly exercise the brain.
In my case, that might be a bonus! 😜

Despite my enthusiasm, I would also strongly caution against using this as the total solution to a problem that you might not fully understand. If you don’t know enough to have confidence in your current DIY financial plan, you might not know enough to understand if the results produced by Adviice are good enough to live by. Particularly when it comes to depending on a plan that needs to survive your retirements years. I know I’ll enjoy playing & refining a plan with these tools going forward. But I will also take advantage of a one hour session with a professional down the road. Just in case I’ve screwed it up.
Please be careful here!
It may turn out that this product is not suitable for you. But if you enjoy doing this kind of thing, & if you are spending a lot of time with spreadsheets & online calculators, I highly recommend investing the $9 to test drive it.

While I have focused on the older demographic in the course of this conversation, this is also of potential value for the young accumulator.
At long last, there is almost an app for this stuff! LOL

A more recent update on using the Adviice.ca platform can be found at DIY Financial Planning… An Update

If you want to learn more about saving & investing from the ground up, I’d like to suggest that you check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.