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spoof posted:Tax question: Assuming you can do it (never checked), you'd also owe interest on the amount of the deduction for the 2016 tax year, which would mean it takes that much more of a change in marginal rates to be worthwhile.
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Jan 17, 2017 06:42
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pokeyman posted:Have you read the OP? I get the impression that you're unsure about what you're doing. I read every dang post in this thread before starting out and it is totally worth it. Take a month and work through it on the bus ride home. You will find your question, and many more, answered within! I have read the OP, and much of the thread, but quiet a while ago. You're right in your impression that I don't know what I'm doing. My method of saving money has thus far been "don't spend it", which has worked pretty well. I put 26k into various savings accounts at Tangerine and Scotiabank. The return on these over 2 years or so is about 500 bucks. I have no debt, no mortgage. My expenses are currently minimal, though I'll buy a car soon. I'd say I have two broad goals: 1) Get a better rate of return on my money. I'm not saving for anything in particular, but I might as well make my money work for me, as they say. 2) Start experimenting with stocks and assorted bullshit like that. This is probably not the wisest option but I'm curious about it. I could devote 1000 bucks or something to this as a trial run I can afford to lose, and see what comes of it.
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Jan 17, 2017 20:17
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Count Roland posted:I put 26k into various savings accounts at Tangerine and Scotiabank. The return on these over 2 years or so is about 500 bucks.  Yeah, you can do better. But as the OP says, the most appropriate strategy for the majority of us is going full on couch potato. You don't have to "experiment with stocks". The thread is filled to the brim with suggestions of ETF allocations, starting with Canadian Couch Potato's model portfolios. If you're saving for the long run/retirement, then that's your best bet. Of course, that all depends on your purpose. If you're hoping to put your savings in a more efficient vehicle for an imminent purchase (i.e.: car), this might not be the safest bet -- the markets tanked in 2008 and who's to say if it'd happen again this very year? But in the long run, the market always recovers just like it did since then.
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Jan 17, 2017 20:27
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Jan posted:
Its pretty hard for me to follow the market right now. We've got Brexit, we've got Trump, a housing bubble in Canada, and the DOW is at record highs! ETF's seem designed to grow with the market, which sounds good when the market is growing. I'm pretty purposeless right now, tbh. Saving money because I can? Or maybe I should just go for the weed stocks...
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Jan 17, 2017 20:38
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The market seems to be growing? What do people think of whole life insurance, for someone who is maxing their other tax-exempt options?
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Jan 17, 2017 22:55
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Subjunctive posted:The market seems to be growing? Do not EVER buy Whole Life insurance as an investment vehicle. Only buy permanent insurance if you actually have a need for the insurance product. Even if the gains are tax-exempt the fees (not to mention the absolutely horrendous returns) make it in no way worthwhile.
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Jan 17, 2017 23:37
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Count Roland posted:Its pretty hard for me to follow the market right now. We've got Brexit, we've got Trump, a housing bubble in Canada, and the DOW is at record highs! ETF's seem designed to grow with the market, which sounds good when the market is growing. The point of couch potato is to have diverse holdings and hold onto them in the long term (with rebalancing mainly as you put more money in). You get some bonds (or bond-aggregating ETFs) as safe holdings, and index ETFs representing market holdings in different parts of the world for growth. In the short term there are booms and crashes. In the long term (ie between now and when you want to retire), you should see overall growth. Buying individual stocks is basically gambling, though. Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Jan 18, 2017 |
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Jan 18, 2017 00:20
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Buying individual stocks is basically gambling, though. Or just get a cat. 
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Jan 18, 2017 00:42
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grack posted:Do not EVER buy Whole Life insurance as an investment vehicle. whole life insurance can be useful for estate planning but as far as i know there's no way to gain a tax advantage from life insurance as an individual
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Jan 18, 2017 03:38
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the talent deficit posted:whole life insurance can be useful for estate planning but as far as i know there's no way to gain a tax advantage from life insurance as an individual Yes, it would be for estate planning.
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Jan 18, 2017 03:52
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the talent deficit posted:whole life insurance can be useful for estate planning but as far as i know there's no way to gain a tax advantage from life insurance as an individual I was talking about the savings portions of whole life policies being tax exempt, because let's face it, the savings portion will never be greater than the face value of the policy. Whole Life policies can be useful in certain situations, like paying estate taxes on non-principle residence property, charitable bequests, funding a Trust or insuring an inheritance for children or grandchildren (all of which could be done with Term-to-100 as well). Unfortunately a shitload of Whole Life is sold on the savings portion even though the returns will be stomped on by a ton of options on the market. Also Whole Life pays 10x (or more!) the commission as a comparable face-value Term policy.
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Jan 18, 2017 03:54
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Count Roland posted:Its pretty hard for me to follow the market right now. We've got Brexit, we've got Trump, a housing bubble in Canada, and the DOW is at record highs! ETF's seem designed to grow with the market, which sounds good when the market is growing. You don't need to follow the market. Ignore all this stuff. You just throw your money into an index fund and forget about it. Full disclosure: I do have 3% of my money in weed stocks. The rest is in index funds.
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Jan 18, 2017 15:02
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This is going to be a hell of a financial newbie question, but here it goes. I was wondering if my ETFs which are in CAD but hold US and global stocks (not real estate) would be affected if the CAD crashes, rather than if those same ETFs were held in USD. I know you can't time the market and markets stay irrational longer than you stay solvent and all of that good stuff, but would there be any advantage in having my Questrade accounts be in USD rather than CAD?
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Jan 19, 2017 18:53
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Check if they're hedged or not
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Jan 19, 2017 18:57
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Olive Branch posted:This is going to be a hell of a financial newbie question, but here it goes. I was wondering if my ETFs which are in CAD but hold US and global stocks (not real estate) would be affected if the CAD crashes, rather than if those same ETFs were held in USD. I know you can't time the market and markets stay irrational longer than you stay solvent and all of that good stuff, but would there be any advantage in having my Questrade accounts be in USD rather than CAD? This comes up fairly often here. As the Postess with the Mostest said, it's all about hedging. If your ETF is hedged then currency fluctuations don't effect its value. This sounds good, but as you say, you can't time the market, and predicting Forex fluctuations is pretty much impossible as far as I can tell. Then there's tracking errors and higher MERs with currency-hedged ETFs. Here's a post I've made in the past regarding hedging: Rick Rickshaw posted:From what I've read, hedging isn't worth it due to index tracking errors. What if the CAD stays below USD 0.75 for the next 10 years, and you've been hedged the whole time waiting for the payoff? What if it drops to USD 0.60 before it goes back up? Since I've made that post, the CAD has netted an extra 3 cents on the USD. Would hedging have been worth it since then? Maybe, maybe not. But where would I place my bet right now? Everyone is saying CAD should be lower over the next year, meaning hedging will lose for non-CAD assets. But who the hell knows. So hedging is like placing a bet, and that bet costs you money in the form of MER and index tracking errors. To come out ahead you need to win the bet, and enough that it pays for the cost. I just realized I think you have your understanding backwards as well. If the CAD crashes and you hold non-CAD assets, you don't want hedging, because the value of your assets would rise relative to CAD. Hedging is only good when the value of the CAD goes up. Rick Rickshaw fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 19, 2017 19:05
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Ugh. Can you only change the Questrade smart alerts from the desktop software? I'm getting kinda sick of daily "high volume" emails because 1% of the shares of some ETF I don't want to touch got traded. I mean, I could set up an email rule to autodelete them, but would probably rather not.
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Jan 19, 2017 19:49
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Thanks for the replies, goons. I'm quite certain they're not hedged and I'll just forget the market and keep on investing with the CAD. No sense in overly complicating what should be the lazy strategy.
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Jan 19, 2017 20:09
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Rick Rickshaw posted:I just realized I think you have your understanding backwards as well. If the CAD crashes and you hold non-CAD assets, you don't want hedging, because the value of your assets would rise relative to CAD. Hedging is only good when the value of the CAD goes up. I think the question is maybe more about CAD-listed ETFs tracking international indexes? I'd guess they'd go up in CAD in that case. I mean, CAD ETF tracking international assets should be valued at whatever those are valued, converted into CAD. So if the CAD crashes, but the ETF's holdings remain steady because they're international, then the ETF value would increase in CAD to compensate. (Or do I have that completely wrong?) All the US/international ETFs I hold seem to be traded in USD on US exchanges, anyway.
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Jan 19, 2017 20:25
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grack posted:Do not EVER buy Whole Life insurance as an investment vehicle. Thanks. I may have need for the insurance product, which is how I started looking at it in the first place. I guess there's no substitute for doing a bunch of math.
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Jan 20, 2017 09:59
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Subjunctive posted:Thanks. I may have need for the insurance product, which is how I started looking at it in the first place. I guess there's no substitute for doing a bunch of math. What's the need? I can probably give a suggestion. You can PM me if you don't want to discuss it publicly.
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Jan 20, 2017 18:57
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Welp, I just learned that my understanding of RESPs was off. I always thought they were considered foreign income trusts for can/us dual citizens, but that only applies to the owner and not the beneficiary. Which means I can open one for my dual babby  Can't believe I only picked up on this now, but on reflection that kinda info ain't easy to find (imo).
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Jan 20, 2017 19:13
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My wife is pregnant and so I need to start thinking about RESPs. Any tips in general?
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Jan 20, 2017 19:22
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RESPs are also a great tax shelter given you only need to spend the government contribution money on actual schooling. The rest can go back to the person contributing the money. 'Free' $7200 from the fed.
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Jan 20, 2017 19:28
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Risky Bisquick posted:RESPs are also a great tax shelter given you only need to spend the government contribution money on actual schooling. The rest can go back to the person contributing the money. 'Free' $7200 from the fed. This isn't true. If a withdrawal is made under the Refund of Contributions rule or transferred to a subscriber's RRSP the CESG is automatically returned to the government.
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Jan 20, 2017 20:34
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Lexicon posted:My wife is pregnant and so I need to start thinking about RESPs. Any tips in general? Not all discount brokerages are equal in their support of the misc provincial RESP programs that come and go. For example, TD only supports basic grant at Waterhouse and makes you stick things like the BC TESG into a separate GIC account. Also there's a strict time limit on when the plans have to be wrapped up (30-35 years after creation? Can't remember) which may be relevant with family RESPs... And if you transfer between accounts, oldest date is used. If you jump on creating RESP immediately after birth of first then have additional kids enough years later, this could create an issue with sharing funds. At least one of the RESP books I read gets the individual -> family account transfer / account aging facts wrong.
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Jan 20, 2017 21:10
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grack posted:This isn't true. If a withdrawal is made under the Refund of Contributions rule or transferred to a subscriber's RRSP the CESG is automatically returned to the government. But that is only if you are making the withdrawal prior to the student sucking the CESG out themselves as an EAP...
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Jan 20, 2017 21:12
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James Baud posted:But that is only if you are making the withdrawal prior to the student sucking the CESG out themselves as an EAP... Bingooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo  ed: To be less obtuse You can direct your CCTB to a RESP for an extra 20% on your government issued tax free money, and top up the account if you have run out of other tax shelter room. Government money begets more government money 
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Jan 20, 2017 21:28
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James Baud posted:But that is only if you are making the withdrawal prior to the student sucking the CESG out themselves as an EAP... When used for a qualified EAP the funds withdrawn from an RESP are treated as from a single source. So no, this wouldn't work. The CESG will be drawn down at the exact same rate as funds are withdrawn from the RESP as a whole. It's only when funds are withdrawn for a non-EAP purposes are the sources of funds in an RESP treated separately.
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Jan 20, 2017 21:45
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RESPs are such a bizarre policy. You're making the educational support for the child contingent on the parents having both the cash to invest, and the wherewithal to do it properly and not gently caress it up or get fleeced.
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Jan 20, 2017 21:52
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Lexicon posted:RESPs are such a bizarre policy. You're making the educational support for the child contingent on the parents having both the cash to invest, and the wherewithal to do it properly and not gently caress it up or get fleeced. This is actually the reason why the law puts the responsibility for tracking all this poo poo squarely on the shoulders of the financial institution overseeing the funds. Unfortunately it also means that garbage like the Heritage Trust and other group RESP plans can really gently caress people who have little financial sophistication. Maximum length of an RESP is 35 years from the date of creation. You can also freely transfer money between individual RESPs of siblings related by blood, marriage or adoption so long as it doesn't exceed the $50,000/account limit. grack fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Jan 20, 2017 |
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Jan 20, 2017 22:03
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Looks like my TFSA transfer from PC to Questrade is finally in motion since my PC account is now gone. Is there usually a few business day delay before it appears in my Questrade accounts?
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Jan 21, 2017 00:56
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Anybody have any experience with the td mutual fund accounts? We transferred my wife's rrsp from investors group (holy poo poo, she was paying 2.4% MER with them, at least her work did contribution matching, and they dragged their rear end on it as we started the transfer at the beginning of October and only had the money in the td account now.) and we want to invest it into the td e series funds. I'm used to webbroker/direct investing for my TFSA and the interface for the mutual funds is so watered down it's confusing. Due to us wanting e series, they placed all the money in a money market fund. Now, our issues are figuring out how to transfer those to the funds we want to hold. The purchase button results in using funds from the checking account so we made an accidental contribution to her retirement, even though it let me select the money market fund as the source. The switch funds again let me select the money market fund but denied all fund switches. There's an option to redeem funds but it's giving warnings of early withdrawal penalties so I'm worried it'll just transfer everything into the checking account and that's definitely not what we want. Any ideas? TD is being unhelpful as they want us to invest in their high MER funds, how did they get webroker so right but made easyweb such a mess? Oh and of course there's no way of seeing pending transactions or anything... E: From everything I gather online, this should be the easy step yet we hosed it up somehow. Going to let it settle for a couple days then re-try the "switch funds" option again and see if works this time around unless anyone points out something. Bajaha fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Jan 21, 2017 |
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Jan 21, 2017 01:41
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It might be that your investor profile with TD indicates that you're too conservative to be owning stock funds. If that's the case you'll have to call or setup a meeting to update your profile - I don't think you can do it online. Just check all the boxes that say you're looking for the riskiest and longest term investments and that should let you buy all the e-series funds you want.
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Jan 21, 2017 09:03
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So, even though they emailed yesterday that they "are unable to process your orders", today we check the account and it's now holding the e-series funds we wanted and the money market fund is depleted.  Makes no sense but it's distributed how we want so I guess meh, crisis averted.
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Jan 21, 2017 19:12
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The e-Series funds (and the non-brokerage TD mutual funds account) seem to exist in some weird, forgotten department of the company. They're in the office in the back corner and nobody out front seems to quite remember what they do in there, but with a little work and luck you can find out and make good use. I think there's maybe a phone number somewhere to talk to a "mutual fund specialist" and they might be more helpful/knowledgeable than your typical branch employee? Anyway there's no shortage of odd tales online about trying to actually set it all up, so it's not super surprising to hear that you're struggling a bit. It's probably most straightforward to do it through a standard TD Waterhouse brokerage account, but that's understandably intimidating when you're just starting out.
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Jan 21, 2017 21:33
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Bajaha posted:So, even though they emailed yesterday that they "are unable to process your orders" That is exactly the message that I got when I tried buying an allocation of mutual funds that "didn't match my investor profile". Except in my case, the purchase never actually went through, and I bailed the gently caress out of eSeries afterwards.
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Jan 21, 2017 21:43
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pokeyman posted:It's probably most straightforward to do it through a standard TD Waterhouse brokerage account, but that's understandably intimidating when you're just starting out. TD Waterhouse / Direct Investing seems so much more intuitive and easy to understand than this. I've got it setup for my TFSA to invest in e-series as well and I'm finding it to be a pretty nice interface. But I can see it being intimidating in that it actually provides you with a lot of useful information and that can be overwhelming. Unfortunately my wifes RRSP is below the threshold for waiving the fees on the waterhouse rrsp account so we went with the mutual fund account. We've got almost 40 years for it to grow so after seeing her account statements from investors group where over the past 5 years she's only seen a 2.05% return while having an MER of 2.48% The first post is right, chuckle fucks is apt description of their practices.
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Jan 21, 2017 22:18
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I'm buying e-series funds through the awful TD easyweb interface and it's awful and the info it gives you every quarter really tells you gently caress all for how the fund is doing. You basically have to build your own excel sheet and track things your self. If you do it through waterhouse is the interface and feedback better? What's the minimum to have it for free?
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Jan 21, 2017 22:31
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Bajaha posted:TD Waterhouse / Direct Investing seems so much more intuitive and easy to understand than this. I've got it setup for my TFSA to invest in e-series as well and I'm finding it to be a pretty nice interface. But I can see it being intimidating in that it actually provides you with a lot of useful information and that can be overwhelming. Hopefully not recently - TD changed account fees to be waived after 15k or 25k in all household accounts, with no per-account minimum. But probably no point in rushing to change things either.
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Jan 21, 2017 22:34
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James Baud posted:Hopefully not recently - TD changed account fees to be waived after 15k or 25k in all household accounts, with no per-account minimum. But probably no point in rushing to change things either. As far as I can tell from the account paperwork and talking with branch representatives, the mutual fund account through TD and the TFSA through Direct Investing / Waterhouse are both free of any fees. The Self Directed RRSP through Direct investing is the one that requires $15k of deposits in all household accounts for having the fee waived. Although between my investments and my wifes we're over the minimum combined so I guess in the future when we open a TFSA for her in the next year or two, we'll deal with somehow transferring the RRSP over to a self directed RRSP through direct investing to have the slicker interface. I'm a nerd at heart and the charts, statistics, and overload of info make me feel all warm and fizzy.
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Jan 21, 2017 23:35
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