How Much Should You Optimize Your Investment Portfolio? The Pros and Cons of Each Approach

Today, you are going to learn about how much you can save in fees and taxes on your investments, depending on how much time you want to spend optimizing your investment portfolio.

In Canada, there are inexpensive options that make things extremely easy and automated for you, but they are slightly more expensive and slightly less tax efficient.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are other investments available to Canadians that are as optimized as you can get in terms of keeping your fees low, and saving you money on both Canadian and international taxes. The trade-off though, is that these optimizations take a fair bit of work on your end to learn and implement.

So how big are these optimization benefits to you?

How much are you really saving by going with a fully optimized approach vs. a semi-optimized approach?

How big should your investment portfolio be before you start optimizing? or should you start optimizing right away?

We also cover where to go to check what fees you’re currently paying on your investments, so that you can have a nice apples-to-apples comparison when you are debating what fund or ETF to buy, or to check whether you are currently overpaying on your investments.

We cover all this and more on this episode.

This week’s episode is a little different since I optimize my investments to this highest level (in terms of paying the lowest fees and lowest taxes), and my guest also does the same. And so, in this episode, instead of the guest doing 90% of the talking, we instead each talk about how we both tackle these questions and I figure this way you are getting two educated perspectives, from two different people, in Canada, who have already been doing this for years.

I think ultimately this approach to the episode will help you make an educated decision on what level of optimization you want to pursue in your own portfolio. 

Enjoy the episode. :)

Kornel