Today, you’re going to learn how you can save money on your investments, by having the right investments, in the right accounts so that you pay as little tax as possible here in Canada.

For example, if you hold Canadian stocks, or ETFs that hold Canadian stocks, should you put those in your RRSP? Your TFSA? Or your taxable account? Which one of those is the most tax efficient?

What about your US and other international ETFs and stocks? What accounts should they go into so that you pay the least foreign tax on those investments?

For us Canadians, different investments are taxed differently depending on what those investments include, and what investment accounts you put them in.

It’s essentially an optimization puzzle that you can solve, by putting the right investments in the right accounts to pay the least Canadian and foreign tax, on those investments.

If you choose to optimize to this extent like I do, you can essentially reap the benefits of these tax savings for the rest of your life, since those savings will compound over your investment lifetime, and can accelerate your net worth, since every dollar saved in taxes on your investments, is a dollar that stays invested, and continues to grow and compound for you.

Resources mentioned in the episode:

• My guide on How to do Norbert's Gambit
• The video guide on: How to Setup Passiv to Pay the Least in Investing Taxes (for Canadians)
• You can get a free Passiv account at this link.
• Instructions on how to get the free PREMIUM account from Passiv is here.

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

Today I’m going to be answering your questions, to help you out as much as I can in the world of personal finance and investing, here in Canada.

We’re going to focus on actionable, practical advice, specifically for Canadians while taking into account the investment options that we have here in Canada, factoring in our Canadian taxes to make sure that we’re not overpaying, and much more.

In today’s Q&A session, I’m going to be answering questions around:

1.     How to determine if you should sell a particular investment that you own.

2.     How to evaluate whether your investment returns should be higher. 

3.     What rate of return should you expect on your investments?

4.     Where can you go to check your “total return” on your investments (growth + dividends) and not just the increase in price.

5.     And much more. 

If you would like to submit a question, the easiest way is to sign up anywhere for free over at buildwealthcanada.ca. When you do that you’ll get taken to a page where you can leave a comment with your question. Also, when you do that, I’ll email you my guide on the “Top Personal Finance and Investing Tools” that I personally use. Enjoy the episode :)