Tag Archives: Financial Independence

15 ways to flourish financially in a Covid-19 world

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T.E. Wealth

By Aaron Hector, B.Comm, RFP

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

COVID-19 has brought wide-sweeping change. The silver lining with any change is that it opens the door to new opportunities. Here are 15 thoughts on how a financial planner views moments in a time like this:

1. You now have more time to get your taxes prepared. You also have more time to pay your taxes for 2019 and your instalments for 2020.

2. Those of you with RRIF or LIF accounts are familiar with your requirement to take a minimum withdrawal each year, which is fully taxable as income. This year, the minimum payment will be adjusted downward by 25%, which will allow you to report less income on your tax return. Given the situation, this may also preserve some of your OAS if you’re currently being fully or partially clawed back. Cash flow could potentially be replaced by withdrawing the additional 25% from your non-registered account this year.

3. Somewhat surprisingly, the Government of Canada has recently confirmed that if you had previously withdrawn your original RRIF minimum payment earlier in 2020, that you will not be permitted to re-contribute the 25% excess withdrawal back into your RRIF.

4. Let’s recognize that stock markets are down. Let’s also recognize that they’ll go back up. How can we turn this moment into an opportunity?

5. If you make more money than your spouse, spousal loans are a great way to shift income. Now might be a great time to initiate new spousal loans because portfolio values are lower than they used to be and the eventual recovery could be captured by your lower income spouse.

Pension Splitting

6. In other circumstances (typically in retirement after age 65+ when RRIF, LIF, and pension income can be split between spouses), previous spousal loans can lose their merit. In some cases, it’s too costly from a capital gains perspective to repatriate funds back to the original spouse, so these loans remain in place for longer than they need to. If your portfolio has fallen in value then the capital gains cost to unwind a spousal loan may no longer be a detriment. You could look at this time as an opportunity to repatriate the loan and tidy up your overall affairs.

7. If you reported taxable capital gains on your previous three tax returns, you may look to trigger a capital loss today, which you could carry back against those gains. The losses could also be carried forward and applied against gains in the future.

8. If you have a plan to unwind your RRIF, LIF, or investment holding company over the next several years, then you could look at this as an opportunity to extract some money out of those accounts now at their lower values (pay the tax on the dividend or RRIF/LIF income) and then shift your money into a personal non-registered account or TFSA to be better positioned for recovering equity values as we move forward. Continue Reading…

Retired Money: The trouble with playing with FIRE

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My latest MoneySense Retired Money column looks at the trouble with playing with FIRE. Click on the highlighted headline to retrieve the full column: Is Early Retirement a realistic goal for most people?

FIRE is of course an acronym for Financial Independence Retire Early. It turns out that Canadian financial bloggers are a tad more cynical about the term than their American counterparts, some of whom make a very good living evangelizing FIRE through blogs, books and public speaking.

The Hub has periodically republished some of these FIRE critiques from regular contributors Mark Seed, Michael James, Dale Roberts, Robb Engen and a few others, including one prominent American blogger, Fritz Gilbert (of Retirement Manifesto).

No one objects to the FI part of the acronym: Financial Independence. We’re just not so enthusiastic about the RE part: Retire Early. For many FIRE evangelists, “Retire” is hardly an accurate description of what they are doing. If by Retire, they mean the classic full-stop retirement that involves endless rounds of golf and daytime television, then practically no successful FIRE blogger is actually doing this in their 30s, even if through frugal saving and shrewd investing they have generated enough dividend income to actually do nothing if they so chose.

What the FIRE crowd really is doing is shifting from salaried employment or wage slavery to self-employment and entrepreneurship. Most of them launch a FIRE blog that accepts advertising, and publish or self-publish books meant to generate revenue, and/or launch speaking careers with paid gigs that tell everyone else how they “retired” so early in life.

How about FIE or FIWOOT or Findependence?

Some of us don’t consider such a lifestyle to be truly retired in the classic sense of the word. Continue Reading…

A million reasons young people should contribute $6,000 to their TFSAs the moment they turn 18

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My latest Financial Post column looks at how Millennials and other young people can create a million-dollar retirement fund if they start contributing $6,000 to a Tax-free Savings Account (TFSA) the moment they turn 18. You can find the full column online by clicking on the highlighted text: The Road to the million-dollar TFSA is getting shorter for Millennials. It’s also in the print edition of Wed., Feb. 26th, under the headline “The road to saving $1 m for millennials: TFSA likely the best way to start.” (page FP3).

I’ve always been enthusiastic about the TFSA since it was first possible to contribute money to them in January 2009. My wife and I, as well as our daughter till recently have contributed the maximum to them from the get-go, always early in January to maximize the power of tax-free compounding. All three accounts have done very well. (I won’t reveal the balances but they’re consistent with heavy equity exposure through most of the bull market we appear to have been in at least until this week.)

Suffice it to say that our daughter’s TFSA has done better than ours, despite her not having contributed in the last two years because she has been working out of the country. She insisted in owning most of the FANG stocks (including Apple) and even Tesla, which was underwater until very recently but began to make headway in recent months.

It’s purely by chance that having been born in 1991, our daughter became 18 just in time for her first TFSA contribution, which naturally we funded in the early years. We viewed this as maximizing our wealth and minimizing taxes for the family as a whole.

And that’s exactly the thrust of the FP article, which cites several experts who will be familiar to most readers of the Hub: Aaron Hector of Doherty & Bryant Financial Strategies, Matthew Ardrey of TriDelta Financial, Adrian Mastracci of Lycos Asset Management. Mastracci created the chart below that appeared in the FP story:

There was also valuable input from BMO Private Wealth’s Sylvain Brisebois, who created a spreadsheet to estimate the impact of missing contributions in early years. If you can’t start until 25, a six per cent return generates $1,049,000 by age 65, $600,000 less than the $1.63 million earned with the extra $42,000 you’d have saved and compounded starting at 18. Another scenario is contributing for seven years between 18 and 25, then using it to buy a home. Assuming no more contributions the next 10 years and resuming $6,000 contributions at 36, by age 65 you’d have $829,000. Brisebois also created a scenario where you only contribute $3,000 a year, which generates $815,000.

As we experienced in our family, a long time horizon favours Millennials, who can afford to take a little more risk in return for stronger returns. That in turn translates into either a bigger nest egg 40 to 45 years from now, or it means you can get to the magic $1 million mark 5 or even 10 years ahead of schedule. Of course, if you’re even younger than a Millennial (technically they must be age 24 in 2020 to qualify) so much the better, and all these principles apply equally to Generations X, Y or Z.

For that matter, as I have often written, TFSAs are equally attractive for those already in Retirement. Unlike RRSPs, you can keep contributing to your TFSA long into old age: I had a friend who proudly told me she was still contributing after she turned 100!

Mind you, after the Coronavirus fears of the past week, who can really say? Not so good for aging Baby Boomers and retirees but of course if you’re a Millennial any young person with multi-decade time horizons, it should be viewed as good news when stocks go on sale.

 

 

RRSPs are not a Scam: A Guide for the Anti-RRSP crowd

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The anti-RRSP crowd must come from one of two schools of thought:

1.) They believe their tax rate will be higher in the withdrawal phase than in the contribution phase, or;

2.) They forgot about the deduction they received when they made the contribution in the first place.

No other options prior to TFSA

RRSPs are misunderstood today for several reasons. For one thing, older investors had no other options prior to the TFSA, so they might have contributed to their RRSP in their lower-income earning years without realizing this wasn’t the optimal approach.

Related: The beginner’s guide to RRSPs

RRSPs are meant to work as a tax-deferral strategy, meaning you get a tax-deduction on your contributions today and your investments grow tax-free until it’s time to withdraw the funds in retirement, a time when hopefully you’ll be taxed at a lower rate. So contributing to your RRSP makes more sense during your high-income working years rather than when you’re just starting out in an entry-level position.

Taxing withdrawals

A second reason why RRSPs are misunderstood is because of the concept of taxing withdrawals. The TFSA is easy to understand. Contribute $6,000 today, let your investment grow tax-free, and withdraw the money tax-free whenever you so choose.

With RRSPs you have to consider what is going to benefit you most from a tax perspective. Are you in your highest income earning years today? Will you be in a lower tax bracket in retirement? The same? Higher?

The RRSP and TFSA work out to be the same if you’re in the same tax bracket when you withdraw from your RRSP as you were when you made the contributions. An important caveat is that you have to invest the tax refund for RRSPs to work out as designed.

Future federal tax rates

Another reason why investors might think RRSPs are a bum deal? They believe federal tax rates are higher today, or will be higher in the future when it’s time to withdraw from their RRSP.

Is this true? Not so far. I checked historical federal tax rates from 1998-2000 and compared them to the tax rates for 2018 and 2019.

Federal tax rates 2018-2019 federal-tax-rate-1998-2000

The charts show that tax rates have actually decreased significantly for the middle class over the last two decades.

Someone who made $40,000 in 1998 would have paid $6,639 in federal taxes, or 16.6 per cent. After adjusting the income for inflation, someone who earned $59,759 in 2019 would pay $7,820 in federal taxes, or just 13.1 per cent.

Minimum RRIF withdrawals

It became clear over the last decade that the minimum RRIF withdrawal rules needed an overhaul. No one liked being forced to withdraw a certain percentage of their nest egg every year, especially when that percentage didn’t jive with today’s lower return environment and longer lifespans. Continue Reading…

Think you’re the only one without a retirement plan? Don’t press the panic button

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By Jordan Damiani, CFP, TEP, RRC 

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Like many Canadians with retirement on the short-to-midterm horizon, you may have spent more than one sleepness night worrying that you’re not prepared.

In fact, at least half of Canadians over the age of 50 think they’re not on track with their retirement planning and about the same number of non-retirees don’t have a financial plan.

Experience suggests that people may be afraid that they won’t have enough money to retire, but in reality, they may not even know the true answer. I take the view that not having a formal plan in place doesn’t necessarily equate to not being on track to retire. There are many steps you can take in the critical count-down years to retirement that will reframe your planning and investment approach and alleviate anxiety and stress.

Take inventory of present Financial Situation

I recommend assessing your last six months of credit, debit and cash spending: grouping your expenses into categories. To project for the future it’s important to understand where your money is being spent today. This activity will help to identify where better savings could be achieved. Completing a net-worth statement is also important to determine what you own vs what you owe.

Understanding your pension entitlements is also a key stress reliever. Pension plans will typically offer retirement projections. At 65, CPP has a maximum benefit of $1175.83 monthly and $613.53 for Old Age Security. It’s important to call Service Canada to get an accurate CPP projection to find out what you are eligible to receive. Similarly, OAS is tied to Canadian residency, with 40 years being a requirement for the maximum eligible payout.

Goal Setting and Strategic Planning

After taking inventory, the next step would be determining what income you actually need in order to retire. Completing a pre-and post-retirement budget is an exercise that will help determine the after-tax figure to target. Likely the targeted income would be tiered with a higher spend being projected for the first 10-15 years of retirement ($5000-$10,000 a year for travel) and lower lifestyle costs thereafter, with some planning as a buffer against long-term care costs. Continue Reading…