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We’ve made several improvements to the TIME MACHINE result reports to make them easier to explore, compare, save, and print.
Choose your default TIME MACHINE view
In PREFERENCES, you can now choose which TIME MACHINE report view you want to see by default.
There are three views, depending on how much detail you want:
Summary cash flow
This is the most summarized report. For each year, it shows total cash coming in, total cash going out, and now also Net Worth, including account balances totalled by account type. This is now a complete summary financial report, and it is the new default view for new users.
TimeTable view
This is a more detailed view showing public pension income for each spouse, totals for taxes paid, spending, net savings, along with net worth, and each account's balance, net deposits, and growth. This was previously the default TIME MACHINE view.
Detailed cash flow view
This is the most comprehensive report. It includes detailed tables for Cash flow, Taxes, Balance sheet, Account Gains, and Legacy values. The detailed view breaks out items such as:
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- each source of income and expense
- taxable income by type
- taxes paid and tax rates
- net worth by spouse
- balances for accounts, loans, and real estate
- investment growth by account and growth type
- final taxes, probate, and amounts to be inherited
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All views now include all charts
Previously, many charts were only available in the TimeTable view.
Now, all three views show all the charts.
You can now also click on 📊 in the table headers to see additional charts for those numbers in the table. Charts make it easy to see the info in the tables. and to understand what is happening in the results.
And as before, you can click on any year to open a detailed report for that year, including Sankey cash flow diagrams.
Switch views easily
Whichever view you prefer, you can switch between the Summary, TimeTable, and Detailed views from the bottom navigation bar in the reports.
From that same navigation area, you can also:
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- save your run and scenario
- download tables to Excel
- open the full Report download everything to PDF
Customizable full Report and PDF
The full Report is now customizable. This feature should be most useful to Advisors who want to provide a PDF report to their clients.
The table of contents on the left lets you navigate the report, choose what will be included in the PDF, and reorder report sections by drag and drop.
You can also save your layout. That means if you hide, show, or reorder report elements, the Report can remember your preferred layout.
You can even save a layout as your default, so future reports open with the same structure whenever possible. Changes to accounts, loans, or other plan details may still affect ordering and visibility, but the Report will do its best to preserve your saved layout.
We hope these changes make the TIME MACHINE results easier to read, explore, and save. Let me know if you have any suggestions for things you want in the reports.
gregariousApples0 wrote:
I have a gap between retirement and CPP/OAS where I want to deliberately draw down RRSPs beyond spending needs to optimize lifetime tax — melting as much as possible at a lower bracket before government benefits fill it. Proceeds should route to TFSA and non-registered, not spending.
Two questions:
- Does the bracket top-up entry actually force withdrawals when there's no spending deficit, or does it only fire when cash is needed?
- If I want to control meltdown pace more aggressively than bracket top-up allows — e.g. target a specific annual withdrawal amount regardless of spending — what's the recommended way to set that up while routing surplus to savings vehicles rather than the spending bucket?
What I've tried so far:
- Bracket top-up entry on the RRSP — unclear whether it's actually firing in gap years where spending is already covered by minimums
- Forced spending buckets paired with matching automatic savings entries into TFSA — this moved money but routed it through spending rather than cleanly repositioning it, which distorts the plan's accuracy
- Fixed dollar withdrawal entries — workable but requires manually estimating the right amount rather than letting MR optimize dynamically
- Does the bracket top-up entry actually force withdrawals when there's no spending deficit, or does it only fire when cash is needed?
It will force a withdrawal to the top of the tax bracket, whether needed for spending or not. Note that it may not make additional withdrawals if the account has already been converted to an RRIF and the Required Minimum withdrawal has already brought you up to the top of the tax bracket before that minimum withdrawal. - If you want to force more then you can set up an Automatic Withdrawal of the RRSP for a specific amount.
You can also set up automatic savings to the TFSA to make sure it's funded. Not sure what you mean by forced spending buckets.
If the account withdrawals are not needed for spending or savings, then you'll have a surplus after all is done, and your Deposit Priorities will determine which accounts the surplus goes to, probably TFSA, then Non-registered if TFSA maxed out. The Spending priority limit should be 0 so that there's no extra spending.
The best way to optimize your strategy after retirement is to run the Withdrawal Optimizer to see if and how it comes up with a better strategy.
To optimize the RRSP withdrawals specifically for yourself without knowing the exact amount, you can run a SCAN on the Automatic Withdrawal amount and see what does best.
Several things come into play with RRSP melting. You have the differential tax brackets, and people get that it's better to make withdrawals when in a lower tax bracket. What is harder to grasp is that such prepayment of taxes can be costly, as that money that could have been invested and grown tax-free is gone early. So it's not just tax rates to consider, it's also growth rates and time. Thankfully, the TIME MACHINE and Withdrawal Optimizer are good at these calculations!
Yes.
You tell it what age you want the DCPP converted to an LIF, that's in edit the Account's properties.
There's no need to do anything else. The program assumes you've unlocked any amount needed after age 65.
We worked on making reports more dynamic this past month:
More charts:
📊 Any column or row headers of tables with amounts over years in the TIME MACHINE can be clicked to see a chart of those values. Much easier than looking at numbers in the tables.
The extensive REPORT is now customizable:
A table of contents on the left lets you easily navigate the full HTML report. You use it to select what is visible and will be printed in the PDF, and you can reorder elements by drag and drop. You can save your custom layout as the default.
Le mois dernier, on a travaillé à rendre les rapports plus dynamiques :
Plus de graphiques :
📊 Il est maintenant possible de cliquer sur les en-têtes de colonnes ou de lignes des tableaux présentant des montants sur plusieurs années dans la TIME MACHINE pour afficher un graphique correspondant. C'est beaucoup plus facile que de regarder les chiffres dans les tableaux.
Le RAPPORT complet est maintenant personnalisable :
Une table des matières située à gauche permet de naviguer facilement dans le rapport HTML complet. Vous pouvez l’utiliser pour sélectionner les éléments visibles et ceux qui seront imprimés dans le PDF, et réorganiser ces éléments par glisser-déposer. Vous pouvez sauvegarder votre mise en page personnalisée comme disposition par défaut.
Thanks for clarifying. You can specify if you want distributions reinvested or not for each investment. The TIME MACHINE grows the investment and calculates the distributions. Setting an AUTOMATIC Withdrawal of all Distributions will set all distributions to not be reinvested from the date you set for that, and all distributions go straight to the Wallet account. Otherwise, any distributions not set to be reinvested go to the Cash Investment, while any set to be reinvested are reinvested first (which increases their adjusted cost basis).
Setting an AUTOMATIC Withdrawal, the TIME MACHINE takes the money from the Cash investment of the account and puts it into the Wallet ACCOUNT. Then the account is rebalanced. If the amount in Cash is negative because the distributions were reinvested, the selling of investments may be required and might lead to a capital gain. It depends on the adjusted cost basis of the investments sold.
Just set it up for the TIME MACHINE as you would for real life. Will you reinvest the distributions? Will you withdraw the distributions?
The TIME MACHINE calculates distributions every year and will tax them appropriately in non-registered accounts as interest, foreign dividends, and eligible dividends, given what it knows about your investments. The taxes will be calculated whether you withdraw the distribution from the account or not.
Capital gains taxes will be calculated if you have additional sales of your investments, given their value and book value.
Automatic Withdrawals of given amounts may trigger additional sales and capital gains taxes. It would be hard to match the distributions exactly. I'm not sure why you would try, as it's easy to just withdraw the distributions as they come.
Check the detailed cash flow reports to see what is going on in terms of the withdrawals from the non-registered accounts and the taxes.
L’application MoneyReady est enfin offerte en français! Vous pouvez choisir votre langue de préférence dans PRÉFÉRENCES.
Toutes les pages du site Web ont maintenant été traduites, y compris les pages d’aide. Nous travaillons encore sur les versions françaises du livre électronique PDF et des articles de blogue.
The MoneyReady App is finally available in French! You can set your language preference in PREFERENCES.
All pages on the website have now been translated, including the help pages. We are still working on the French versions of the PDF eBook and our blog posts.
The only impact your current settings have is that they set the scenario that the results of the CPP/QPP and Withdrawal optimizer will be compared to (when showing you the difference in liquid legacy).
This optimizer will go through all combinations of ages and show you the best one, so your current settings in the CPP and OAS section don't matter, and you should probably set them to your preferred ones. If the tool finds a better result, it will not change your settings automatically. We leave that up to you to decide if you want to change your preferred ages to use in future runs of the TIME MACHINE.
The Legacy amount you specify is already the amount of the last-to-die legacy. Last-to-die will first have inherited from first-to-die, so their Net Worth goes up at that time (and the first-to-die's net worth goes to zero).
If you have not yet made the TFSA deposit for this year, make sure to set your TFSA room in the screen right before running the TIME MACHINE. If you've already made the contribution such that the current TFSA balance reflects it, the report for the remainder of this year will not show the previous deposit.
The TIME MACHINE calculates your taxes for you, so do not enter taxes in Expenses, even quarterly payments.
What’s very important is to capture the taxes you’ve already paid this year in the screens that capture that, right before running the TIME MACHINE. It needs
Taxes and deductions paid year-to-date (at source taxes, CPP/QPP and EI contributions, tax instalments)
For the current year in the TM, it shows you the expected cash flow from today to the end of the year.
That is: what expenses are left to pay, incomes to be received, taxes left to pay.
In the detailed year report for the current year, the taxes shown are then the total taxes minus whatever you’ve told it you already paid.
It may show you that you'll get a refund.
For the commuted value estimate, use GROSS income. The estimates of the transferable portion and the taxable portion will also be gross, but the TIME MACHINE will calculate taxes on your pension, and you'll see those in the reports.
If you're using the TVM calculator (or the AI ChatTVM) to get a present value calculation, then use NET amounts; it has no concept of taxes.
For defined benefit pensions and annuities, we could consider adding the present value to net worth, although that is not usually done, so it would cause confusion.
New Year checklist:
My favourite time to run the TIME MACHINE is early January. This is because the current year then acts very much like a future year in the TIME MACHINE. There is no need to consider what contributions have already been made, what taxes have already been paid, and no need to prorate any amounts for incomes, expenses and savings. Here is a list of things that need to be updated at the start of the year, and sometimes throughout the year, to keep the current year calculation as accurate as possible.
1. CPP/QPP table(s). An entry for pensionable earnings for last year will appear. You will need to estimate what those were until the actual amount is updated at the CRA or Retraite Québec later in the year.
2. RRIFs and LIFs. For each of these, within 'Edit Account properties', enter the balance of the account at the end of last year. If you make any withdrawals during the year, update the total withdrawn this year.
3. RDSPs. 'Edit Account properties' for these, and update the table of previous contributions if one appears. If you make a contribution this year, enter the amount once made, and you will need to come back and check the box once the grants/bonds have been received so that they are not double-counted in the TIME MACHINE.
4. TIME MACHINE. There are up to 3 screens that capture current year tax information before running the TIME MACHINE: one for yourself, one for your spouse and one for your CCPC when applicable. Please update the amounts asked for the current year, and keep them updated throughout the year.
5. Tax owing or refund. If you expect a tax refund from the previous year's taxes, you can enter it as an Income (Other, not taxable) with start and end dates on the date you expect to receive it. Similarly, for tax owing, enter it as an Expense for the date you expect to pay it.
Happy New Year!
Click AUTOMATIC SAVINGS and WITHDRAWALS in the left menu.
Click +Add Saving or Withdrawal
For select the account you want from the dropdown list.
Enter a Date (YYYY-MM-DD) to start the withdrawals.
For Set the amount: select Withdraw all distributions.
Click Save and Continue
You are looking at the results in Today’s dollars which are discounted for inflation. Anything growing with inflation will look flat. Look at the Time Table (and other reports) in Future dollars, and you’ll see the amounts increase.
The program is not indexing the CPP and OAS to inflation, it's the same amount all the way down.
There’s no need for a separate account type, both spouses can contribute to it. eEnter it as an RRSP.
Great question.
The TIME MACHINE will convert the RRSP accounts to RRIFs at the age you set to be converted.
Default is 71, but you can change that: Edit Account Properties, and I on the next screen after you Save/Continue the first.
You can also run a SCAN on the age to convert if you want to explore a range of values.
Once converted to RRIF (you’ll see that in the Warnings/Info column of the TimeTable), minimum required withdrawals will be withdrawn in the TM.
You’ll also see withdrawals in the detailed report or year report, as voluntary or required.
The TM treats all withdrawals from RRSPs or RRIFs after age 65 as splittable pension income. In real life you need to do a partial conversion to RRIF for it to be considered splittable income. So be careful, the TM assumes you will do that.
The Withdrawal Optimizer also considers all of this.