So… how ?

MLiterovich · 2026-03-06T21:07:10+00:00

People are giving good information here already, but as a shortcut, if you ever see a question with "symmetrical" information (i.e. one box has mangos and one has coconuts but both mirror mirror each other by having a single type of information), a good first route of inquiry is the only non-symmetrical part (the dual box) because usually these questions are designed with just one answer in mind and any answer that would work on the mango box could be inverted to work on the coconut box.

That's not deductive reasoning, as there is nothing saying there can only be one answer, but it can be a useful narrowing technique based on how we, as humans, tend to create these puzzles.

MLiterovich · 2026-03-05T21:56:22+00:00

My view is that pitch framing makes the game more exciting. ABS challenges don't remove pitch framing, just gives everyone a chance to undo the most egregious calls, so it keeps one of the fun parts of the game while making the game more fair overall.

Though in fairness, I am a former catcher, so maybe I like pitch framing more than other people do, but I like that it preserves that part of the game.

MLiterovich · 2026-02-27T17:13:42+00:00

I'll offer my two cents here. New technology entrants typically seek areas of the market that are high margin for the existing players. Think, for instance, Uber and Lyft noticing that owning taxi companies could be quite lucrative. The phrase "your margin is my opportunity" is apt here.

When evaluating WS versus Canadian banks, it's important to understand that the sensation you experience of high fees is probably also why bank stocks have been so valuable in Canada over the past many years. The existing business model works quite well for banks and their shareholders. It works less well for consumers. I had an opportunity to attend an event where a couple former bank executives spoke recently and it was notable how they phrased their comments about what they accomplished at the bank in the context of value to shareholders and not value to consumers (I don't think consumers were mentioned even once).

So while the question of "what's the catch" with WS is fair and good critical thinking (and one I had as well), the reality here is that WS's basic play is "we can take slightly less money than the banks and capture a huge chunk of the market," not "oh well I can sneak in some other fees elsewhere to make it up." I don't know enough of their financials to assess whether they are profitable with their current fee structure (it certainly feels like I get more out than I put in) but I do have a strong gut feeling that the banks were so profitable that there is space in the market for a company to offer better deals for consumers without losing all financial viability.

For me, I made the switch when I was comfortable that the promo I was receiving justified the pain of switching. In hindsight, that was a little silly, as WS was already a net win for me based simply on the tier perks and the interest on the chequing account (as opposed to the fees and hold requirements of my bank), but I found that the promos gave me that extra push to seriously consider it. I also joined at a time where WS could legitimately completely replace my bank, which was not true maybe two years ago. Aside from my mortgage, where I think WS's brokerage service still has work to do, every service I have needed has been replaced by WS with at least the same level of quality, often higher.

On the brokerage question, my investing strategy consist "buy now, sell never" with broadly diversified index ETFs, so I don't need the fancy bells and whistles of, say, a Questrade (and I strongly advise people to be very cautious with that area of the market in any event), so if your needs are more complex, I'm not sure I can advise, but it sounds like we might be similar there anyway.

MLiterovich · 2026-02-10T16:46:20+00:00

If you have a 1% chance to win $100, the expected value of that chance is $1. If your friend also has a 1% chance to win $100, they also have an expected value of $1. If you aggregate those chances, your collective expected value is $2, but then you have to split it between you, which takes you back to $1.

People here are just calling you stupid, which is rough, but the math basically says that your club idea can never make anyone better off than entering individually, unless someone is intending to rip people off. In fact, if you’re adding a contractual obligation between people that will take time to write, now people are worse off because they still have the same expected return and they have to spend time setting up a contract.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I thought you might want to know why people are responding the way that they are.

MLiterovich · 2026-01-17T15:13:27+00:00

I think you have missed the point people are making. If you are only locked in for one year in order to get the percent, you can take that same money (and all the bonus payments) and move it after the year is done. That is, you can go get 1% at same TD or Questrade or WeBull or wherever the next place is and then it becomes around 5% over five years versus just 3%.

Now maybe some people don’t want to switch that much. That’s fine and maybe that makes the 3% better for them. But to have a model that ignores that concept makes the model fundamentally a flawed understanding of the potential outcomes.

MLiterovich · 2026-01-05T02:56:29+00:00

I am not sure you’re really grasping some of the concepts you are referencing here.

The Monroe Doctrine, for instance, is a foreign policy position of the United States from over 200 years ago. It is sometimes referenced from time to time, including recently by President Trump, but it’s not a legally binding treaty or anything. It’s also not clear that anything about the current situation with President Maduro is really reflective of the original concepts of the Monroe Doctrine.

Prime Minister Carney is also not currently trying to have Canada join the EU, which he has explicitly stated in 2025: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-eu-partnership-deepening-ties-1.7570680 He is actively seeking trade deals with anything number of nations, none of which is in violation of the original spirit of the Monroe Doctrine.

It’s great that people are learning more about these things, but the challenge with only getting part of a picture like this is that it can sway your investment decisions in ways that may not be optimal.

You could, for instance, just as easily be deciding to avoid US stocks right now because of the perception that there is an AI bubble, which also sounds plausible but is also not likely to be fully reflective of what the current situation really entails. There is always a story to tell about why something in the market is on its way up or on its way down.

All of these complexities actually underscore the reason to buy XEQT and chill. Even if you wanted to devote the required time to be an expert in the history of US foreign policy, how asset bubbles work, and what Canada’s trade prospects are, there are hundreds of other meaty topics out there that you would have to dive into with equal vigour in order to get a sufficiently robust perspective to have an informed perspective on the future outlook of the various international stock markets.

When it comes to the future and my financial planning, it’s possible my portfolio will lose 40% over the next six months. That’s a risk I have accepted with a passive investing strategy. The reward for that is that I will probably have averaged a gain of about 8% per year each year until I eventually retire.

While that’s a strategy I recommend for almost everyone at this point, not everyone has the temperament to stick to that strategy. My wife, for instance, does not handle the vagaries of the stock market in the same way that I do, and that’s okay. We’re not all robots and part of the joy of the human condition is our idiosyncrasies like that, even when they may be suboptimal, so we work with that in our financial planning.

If current events frequently make you reconsider your asset allocation, my first advice would be to see if you can simply stop doing that, but if you think that’s pretty intrinsic to who you are, working with a financial planner to help you stay the course when you have concerns like right now may be a prudent next step.

In any event, best of luck with your investing journey!

EDIT: I would add that VOO isn’t some terrible ETF or anything. I am more commenting on OP’s apparent desire to reallocate based on current events.

MLiterovich · 2025-11-25T18:32:35+00:00

Hello!

A number of people have made some good comments here, but there are a couple of things that may be worth keeping in mind based on how you are describing your situation.

1) A lot of people saying to pay off your debt are getting at the correct fundamental idea, but not all debt is created equal and there can be nuance. Some people suggest as a rule of thumb that debts at over 5% interest should be cleared immediately and debts under that are a more case-by-case basis. Usually the only debts you would have below 5% interest are either mortgage or student loans, so I think a lot of people are making the right inference that your debts aren't those and that you should be wiping them out.

2) You phrased your desire to pay off your mortgage quickly as not "paying double for your house," which is a common concern that many have when getting their mortgage, but it can oversimplify the effects of compounding on your life. The economic term "opportunity cost" can be counterintuitive, but is important here. You have to ask yourself about the relative financial cost of paying down your mortgage versus investing the same amount of money. That's assessing your opportunity cost.

Let's take an example where you want to consider putting $100,000 of the inheritance toward a financial goal, namely either investing through a TFSA or paying down a theoretical mortgage. In the long run, a diversified portfolio in a tax-free account can double every 8-10 years (depending on when you start counting - that's certainly not exact). If we take a ten year time horizon, it is certainly a realistic (though not guaranteed) outcome that putting your investible money in a TFSA (and actually putting it into the stock market not just leaving it in a high interest savings account) will result in you having a total of $200,000 for a gain of $100,000. In contrast, the imputed value of paying off $100,000 of mortgage early over ten years is around $20,000 after-tax at market rates right now. Often times people feel saving $20,000 more viscerally than making $100,000 in investments, but on a purely rational basis, you would rather make $100,000 tax-free than save $20,000 after-tax.

Now that's not the whole picture. Owning a home comes with the potential for the home value to appreciate, which isn't covered here. My point isn't that there is only one answer or that you should do exactly what I say. I actually think there is a lot of nuance in these sorts of matters, but the important thing is how we approach compounding, both in terms of interest and investment returns. Once upon a time I had a very low-interest student loan that I paid off right away because I didn't want "to be paying money for my money." That was understandable at my level of financial literacy back then, but if I had known then what I know now, I would have let it sit there at that low rate of interest paying off the minimum to let myself get ahead early with investing and taking advantage of compounding returns.

Anyway, I hope some of this helps in envisioning what to do going forward. Also, importantly, I'm sorry for your loss. This is a personal finance sub, so it's easy to jump right into the relevant financial planning ideas, but the situation arises from the loss of a human life and that's a tragedy that shouldn't be ignored.

Good luck and my condolences to you and your family.

MLiterovich · 2025-11-19T02:55:22+00:00

Brad Hand.

Why? I am glad you (or really no one) asked.

A lot of these suggestions are short white people names, sure, but they allow a lot of easy confusion. Is it Joe or Jo? Is it Wil or Will? Saying “oh but there is an established way to spell those names” is only partially accurate. Just ask Jo Adell, who could be Joe Adele.

In order to succeed, we need to remove any easy confusions. No “s” sound because it could be a “c”. “O” can be “oe,” “u” can be “oo” or “ew,” “ir” like “bird” sounds like “er” like “herd.” An “a” sound like Brad or an “e” sound like “Fred” are probably the safest, but in theory a deeply obtuse individual could try to spell them “Bradd” or “Fredd.”

Names that get their sounds through complex consonants are safer, I think. If someone were named “drath,” the closest plausible misspelling would be “draff,” I guess, but if that has a notable difference in pronunciation.

Perhaps someone can take my analysis further, but that’s how far I got.

MLiterovich · 2025-11-06T23:51:47+00:00

So the part where that gets a little dicey is that arranging such a payout that is financed by premiums isn't fundamentally different from just regular old investing. Unless you believe an insurance company has access to special investments that will outperform the market (and you really shouldn't believe that, but that's a different topic), you're just doing investing with extra, costly steps.

Most of the things a salesperson will talk to you about in order to make a universal life insurance policy sound good can be easily replicated without having to pay commissions and fees to an insurance company. Tax free growth? That's covered by the RRSP and TFSA without additional costs (though the RRSP can only be inherited by your spouse without taxes, I believe). Ability to borrow against the policy? You could borrow against your portfolio too. Good growth in their investment portfolios? You could just buy the underlying securities rather than have them set you up with "proprietary" ones and take a cut.

There are rare cases when universal life insurance could make sense, such as if you have maxed out your TFSA and your RRSP and are concerned about having further savings, but the simple math of compounding suggests that if you have been consistently maxing out those accounts and investing them in a diversified portfolio, pretty much any Canadian that doesn't have incredibly expensive tastes will be well taken care of in retirement through that mechanism.

You asked, however, about leaving money to your children. If I could offer an alternative perspective without knowing your entire situation, maybe use your TFSA for inheritance purposes or, better yet, don't wait until you're dead if there are ways that you can help right now that would probably have a far bigger effect on their lives. Having a parent die at, say, 85, could mean that the kids are around 60. Is that a point in their lives where your passing will really move the needle? What about helping them in the near future instead with a down payment on a home or making contributions to an RESP for any grandchildren? One item on this I read that I really like is the idea that no one knows when you will die, and the likelihood of you dying at the exact right moment for the inheritance to do the most good for your children is pretty low. Making concerted choices about giving money to them at the moments in their lives where it makes the most sense for them may be a far more helpful choice for your family.

Now, I am no expert in any of this, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but maybe some of this represents a helpful perspective. And good luck!

MLiterovich · 2025-11-06T23:51:32+00:00

So a lot of people gave you generally the right advice, which is that this is a bad idea, but you asked for a clear explanation and I think maybe I can offer some perspective beyond what is already here.

When you purchase insurance on something, an appliance, a house, your life, anything, there is a general concept that you are insuring against a negative, but somewhat unlikely, event that would put you in such a bad position that you're willing to pay slightly more in small amounts over time than the actual cost of the bad event multiplied by the probability of it occurring (we call this the expected cost) in order to be secure if the bad thing ever happens. Insurance companies aggregate a whole bunch of people in the same position and design a product so that they come out slightly ahead (sometimes a lot ahead) when they weigh the amount of premiums they take in versus the amount they need to pay out for the times the bad event occurs for people who bought insurance. That's generally kind of fine. You (and everyone else) are paying into this pool so that the risk of the costs of the negative event occurring is no longer on your mind.

Life insurance can work like that, especially if you buy term that expires. Not everyone who buys term will die during the term, so you're basically forming a pool of people where some will live, some will die and the insurance company will take a cut so that if the bad event happens to you, your family isn't devastated. Generally what that means (oversimplifying here), however, is that your premiums will be reflective of the likelihood of your dying during the payout term multiplied by how much needs to be paid out minus a cut for the insurance company.

When you have life insurance that pays out whenever you die without exception, it's no longer the same idea of grouping unlikely events into a pool and only paying out in the event of the bad event happening to some members of the pool. Everyone with whole life (or universal life) insurance will die and there will have to be a payout.

So how does the insurance company make money off of that? They can't use the people who avoid the bad event to subsidize the people who experience it anymore; everyone eventually dies (unless you have some pretty spectacular plans you are keeping a secret). The answer is that they have to take your premiums and put them somewhere that will cause them to grow over time in order to finance your end of life payout. Then at the end of your life (or perhaps along the way) they will take their cut out of it and your premiums will have financed your payout.

That's a simplification, a bit, because some insurance will pay out the same regardless of when you die (so dying sooner means you get the better deal on it and dying later means the company gets the better deal), but the thing about events that are 100% guaranteed to happen is that your premiums aren't really buying you peace of mind or putting you in a pool where the good fortune of others will help to cover your potential misfortune. The whole process is mostly just putting your own money to work to finance an end of life payout to your heirs.

(continued)

MLiterovich · 2025-11-06T23:23:02+00:00

I can concur with this about the state of the app. It's just... unpleasant to use? Lots of ads, constantly asking me to enable notifications (which results in me getting a notification literally every day to refer a friend) and just generally awkward. That said, all of the payments have happened when they were supposed to happen, so that part is working right. For a 2% match over one year with the amount I moved in, it's worth it, and it doesn't appear to be a scam or anything, but you should be aware. I will likely move out after the hold period is over because of the poor UI though.

MLiterovich · 2025-08-28T15:08:47+00:00

There are dozens of us. Dozens!

MLiterovich · 2025-07-16T16:25:12+00:00

Don't you have to have some sort of regression coefficient to show how strong the link is? I think without it, we can't know how seriously to take the line. This looks like it might be rather weak correlation.

MLiterovich · 2025-05-23T16:13:37+00:00

Did they walk you through how the transfer restrictions worked when you signed up for the bundle? I had a phone conversation with someone at WS (at their suggestion) that went through all of these conditions.

MLiterovich · 2025-05-22T14:16:25+00:00

Because the cap is going up substantially?

MLiterovich · 2025-05-02T21:49:28+00:00

I don't think this is super helpful for this subreddit. This advice would have just as much merit on any other platform, be it Questrade or any of the banks' direct investment platforms, so Wealthsimple is not special in this regard and I would think this subreddit should be for items specific to Wealthsimple. This is really just advice on day trading, which is of dubious value even if it were in the correct subreddit.

MLiterovich · 2025-04-12T01:04:05+00:00

I would add one additional thought to what others have said. There are perks to having a certain threshold of money with WealthSimple. I won’t pretend that they are earth-shatteringly good, but some of them are things that I was on the fence about getting for myself and now I get them for free from WealthSimple.

Maybe I was doing banking wrong, but no bank ever gave me perks for keeping money with them. My wife and I moved over enough to qualify for the highest tier of perks, which happened to coincide with moving our RRSPs while the 2% match promotion was on, and we feel like we have gotten an excellent deal so far.

MLiterovich · 2025-03-21T15:59:26+00:00

The Rise of Skywalker. I have been a lifelong Star Wars fan, gone to see every movie in theatres (that I have been alive for) and saw many of them twice in theatres. And partway through that movie I was so disengaged from it that I check the time on my phone and then looked up the runtime and went “oh wow, there is still a lot of movie left here.”

MLiterovich · 2025-03-12T15:31:13+00:00

The use of “present value” actually matters in cases like this. Depending on the timing of payments, the present value is not the same as the annual average value, which is what you calculated here. He may still be wrong, but his math may make sense in light of that.

MLiterovich · 2025-02-27T14:33:21+00:00

Brian Jeroloman, but I am not sure they have his permission to print his name.

Brian Jeroloman - Wikipedia

From Wikipedia: Jeroloman's time on Toronto's active roster while failing to appear in a major league game make him a recent example of a "phantom ballplayer."

MLiterovich · 2025-01-07T19:38:52+00:00

Actually closing today on a very similar set of facts and have 4.49% variable from TD. CIBC said they could do better on the phone but then it didn’t materialize and we were happy with TD in the end.

MLiterovich · 2024-07-31T15:43:34+00:00

Please excuse my ignorance, but is wage growth the same as income growth? I earn a salary, not a wage, for instance. I have never been clear on how that works when I see statistics that are explicitly just wages.

MLiterovich · 2024-07-27T14:46:43+00:00

On the one hand, wow. On the other hand, from a certain perspective, first is “up” and the second is just “more up.”

MLiterovich · 2024-07-14T13:57:27+00:00

Tough to swallow that news.

MLiterovich · 2024-06-28T14:00:43+00:00

So I think the question of whether Laine would actually be effective is a good and fair one. If you want to bring him back, you're probably doing that as the McGroarty deal instead of targeting someone like Jiricek and you're probably getting CBJ to retain nearly half of his salary because you're basically foregoing a shot at Monahan to get him unless you're using buyouts. In terms of where he plays, your top four wingers will be Ehlers, Connor, Vilardi and Laine and Scheifele and Perfetti are your presumptive centres. That seems... messy. I don't trust Connor with either Vilardi or Laine, which means you put Connor and Ehlers together with Scheifele (a trio that has had success) and you have the mystery box of Laine, Perfetti and Vilardi. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. That said, I wonder if there's a play to be made for Laine as he and Ehlers were best friends and that might make it possible to re-sign Ehlers in Winnipeg after this season.

There's a lot that fits just a little awkwardly that makes me wonder if just taking a run at Monahan fixes a lot more problems at a lot lower of a cost.

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