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Yes, we can certainly use Wealthica to update your investment values. But those updates do not affect the expected rates of return you entered for those investments. Wealthica does not provide us with rates for dividends or other distributions. We have distribution information for tickers from Funddata, so we show you those where appropriate so you can use that information to guide you. However, we do not assume past rates of return will apply in the future, and we want you to enter your long-term expected rates yourself.

The MoneyReady App bridges the gap between short-term portfolio management and long-term financial planning by allowing you to manage your current portfolio while realising that your current portfolio will probably change in the future. The TIME MACHINE projections use the rates set for your current investments assuming they will be replaced with similar investments. So think long term for the rates you set.

 

 

 

Yes, easy and flexible is what we aim for. Thanks.

On a 100% fixed-income investment, it will apply that global expected yield you enter for fixed-income in the income yield for that investment. It will override your entries. If you don't want the globals you set applied to some specific investments, you can still change the yields for any investment you choose and set them to what you want afterwards.

Setting up Portfolios instead of detailing every investment is fine. That's why we have that capability. Entering investments with Wealthica is a convenience we offer for ease of entry, and as it allows you to keep the values of your investments and accounts always updated. If you're not a Wealthica user, you can also enter them manually with a stock or mutual-fund ticker and we'll use Funddata market data to keep them updated and track distributions (you just have to update any trades you make). Although we show you the past year performance in the tool-tip, that is just for your information, and I don't recommend using short-term returns for the long-term of the TIME MACHINE.

We do allow you to set individual expected rates of return for every investment. You can even change them to apply different rates in the future. This is for maximum flexibility.

But you can set all your expected rates of return at once which makes it very fast and easy. There's a button to "Change all investment rates of return at once" below your table of ACCOUNTS. Click on that and you can set your expected yields for capital gains, dividends, fixed-income and cash. The tool will consider the asset-allocation of every investment in every account to determine its rates of return for you. For investments with a stock or mutual fund ticker (entered with Wealthica or Funddata), we know the asset allocation from the Funddata market data and use that default unless you've changed it. For a portfolio investment, you will have entered its asset allocation

 

 

focusedGranola0 wrote:

Confirmed everything is ok. Somehow, I must have set something differently along the way. I started over the defined benefit pension income and bridge benefit, entered all the values again and presto! Things are adding up.

Great to hear!

Considering the complexity of all of this, I'm pretty amazed at what you've built and I'm very grateful it's available to anyone.

Merci!


 

De rien. I'll let you figure it out, but just a thought on what you said. A normal Salary contributes to CPP, a Defined Benefit Pension does not. The CPP amount you'll get depends on how much and for how long you contribute to the plan.

Yes, the rules vary by province, but there is currently no "official" way to do unlock a LIRA in the App. It's been a feature request for a long time. The unofficial way we currently deal with it, is by allowing the TIME MACHINE  to make withdrawals from LIRAs after 65. Essentially it assumes that you have already done some sort of conversion. It still only allows withdrawals up to the maximum amount for a LIF though (that depends on age and province), so it probably won't allow a 50% withdrawal.

For projections it doesn't matter whether the money stays in the LIRA account or put in the RRSP, unless you plan to invest completely differently with different expected returns for those two accounts, or if you plan to make large withdrawals beyond the required minimum withdrawals. Those are uncommon circumstances, so that is why there has not been too much motivation on my part to implement an "official" way. It would bring a lot of complication, as I said the rules vary, it would require additional inputs from users, and if it requires creating an RRSP account that hasn't been entered yet, could also complicate the output. That said, for you or anybody else reading this, you can comment here or on the forum/topic/98-partial-unlocking-of-lira-lif in the feature requests forum and let me know how you would use that feature.

When a DB pension plan says it works with CPP, that is to indicate that if you start taking the DB pension earlier than 65, the pension provides a bridge-benefit that is meant to be a CPP-like benefit untill age 65 (when CPP is presumed to actually start). There is actually no synchronization or even communication with CPP. You can start CPP any age from 60 to 70 whenever you start collecting DB pension benefits, and the DB will not affect CPP payments in any way (only when you stop contributing to CPP affects it). If you delay CPP past 65, the CPP amount is increased, and you will see that in the TIME MACHINE results. We use a slightly greyer font to indicate amounts owned by the Spouse in the TIME TABLE, it doesn't mean anything else. I suppose that is an unfortunate use of colour, I'll see if I can change it.

BTW In the MoneyReady App you can enter a bridge pension, as a separate INCOME entry.

 

Yes. You are reffering to the Pension Adjustment (PA) which is a applied for both private and public defined-benefit pension plans and reduces the RRSP contribution limit. The PA calculation depends on the specifics on the pension plan. Your pension formula determines what is called the accrued benefit that determines the PA. You can ask your pension provider for what that is. For most public pensions, it is 2% (the max), and we ask you for that when you enter or edit a pension income. You must  make sure to click Submit on the the Add/Edit income form, and if the income is a DB Pension it will then ask you for specifics on that pension including:

Percent of salary accrued benefit per year, usually close to 2 (percent), check your pension formula

If you don't know, enter 2. The TIME MACHINE does calculate the PA given that and reduces the contribution room automatically.

That form also asks you for the salary it is linked to if you are still contributing to the pension, and you would have to have entered that as a seperate income previously. Other inputs on that form are for calculations of survivor benefits, and for estimating a commuted value (although that is only a gross estimate, only your pension provided knows for sure).

 

You can now receive email notifications from the MoneyReady Forum.

This is turned off by default. To turn it on, first log in. On the Forum page, click on the arrow next to your username to go to Settings. There you can select from 3 options:

  1.  Email me when there is a new Post in a Topic that I track
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  3.  Email me when there is a new Topic in any Forum

Click Save once you've made your selection. You can select all 3 options but you will only get 1 email if more than one option applies for a new post.

I recommend you select option 2 to be immediately informed of any new features and changes on the MoneyReady App.

You can turn off the emails anytime by changings your Settings again.

 

Today Wealthica announced Free to Fee. That is no more free automatic updating of your accounts, you need to subscribe for a fee with them.

How does this affect your investments entered in the MoneyReady App?

We update whatever Wealthica gives us, so if you are subcribed with them that will continue.

We also update any investments you've previously entered with Wealthica with FundData automatically. This updates current values based on market data, given the number of shares that were entered. If you no longer have a Wealthica subcription, you just have to make sure to update your investment shares and cost basis any time you make a transaction on those investments.

If you've never had a Wealthica subscription (or never linked) and want your accounts updated automatically, for each of the investments you want to track, make sure to "Add investment" to the account its in, by the investment's currency, and in the "Symbol Search. Start typing name or symbol for Stock, ETF, Mutual F und or Segregated Fund" box enter that investment. For these  entered investments, values are updated nightly with market data from FundData. You just have to make sure to update your investment shares and cost basis any time you make a transaction on those investments.

If you have a valid Wealthica subscription and linked to Wealthica, even transactions are automatically updated for you so you will see updated values, shares and book values automatically.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is an old post, but I only recently realised the negative credit card balance can come from a Wealthica automatically uptated account, so not one you entered manually. It is dealt with by adding it as a deposit to your Wallet account in the TIME MACHINE so it's automatically taken care of.

I have finally addressed the issue of not letting you run the Withdrawal Optimizer without a TFSA.
For optimizing to make any sense in the first place you need at least two of the three types of accounts (TFSA, TDA, and Non-registered), or there is no optimizing to be done. This is true for each spouse (as they are actually optimized individually). The app still requires that, but no longer requires one of the accounts to be a TFSA, you can delete your wife’s TFSA.
 
If no TFSA is set, the Optimizer sets the TFSA room to 0 in in all years so no deposits are ever made to it, and will only use the Non-registered account instead if it really needs to deposit excess RMDs so you truly just get optimization over the two accounts (TDA and Non-Registered). 
 

Ouch, that’s a tough one. What you did was good, but the Withdrawal Optimizer algorithm creates its own AUTOMATIC deposits/withdrawals and ignores your Priorities. That’s kind of the point of the Optimizer. Let me look into it to see if I can remove the requirement for the TFSA, or at least give you the option to if the holder is a US citizen. Strictly speaking the algorithm does not require a TFSA, but for most Canadians it is so advantageous to have one (for both spouses), that I kind of force it on people. I did not think about the tax problem for US citizens. Removing it from my implementation of the algorithm might also not be trivial. 

I’ll be in touch,
Elisabeth
We haven’t  implemented reverse mortgages per-se as these are contracts with many bells and whistles, too many questions to ask.
However we allow you to enter LOANS linked to properties and we allow you to modify the payments. For a reverse mortgage I’ll assume the payment is 0, the interest is all added to principal.
 
If you enter it as an amortizing term loan, modifying the payments to 0, you’ll get an error that the loan can’t be amortized.
However you can approximate it with a HELOC interest-only Loan. We also allow you to modify the loan to not make payments on it.
 
Enter the reverse mortgage as a HELOC loan, make sure to link the REAL ESTATE property where it asks "Select the collateral Property if mortgage loan,
You need to enter the interest rate charged, be careful to enter it as the rate above prime (enter a negative rate if below prime). 
Then click on Modify payments at the bottom.
 
I’ve added the possibility of not making payments altogether if you enter -1 as the new payment amount (otherwise it’s the amount to add to principal repayments).
Setting -1 will tell the TIME MACHINE to add the interest to the principal.
You can set the From date to whenever the loan started (or will start), and leave the To date blank. 
The Time Machine will repay the loan when the property is sold or at death.
You can add as many loans this way as you like, each for the amount borrowed at the time it was or will be borrowed.

Ah ok. Now I understand why the balance kept jumping up from zero. 

The $1 workaround works well. 
 
Thank you
The app calculates the RMD for each account separately and pays it from that account. Only if it can’t get the  full RMD due to lack of funds will it try to get it from another account (hopefully a rare situation).  Not much I can do about that.
So the trick to set the previous year’s account value to 0 would work for the current year to not have an RMD. Except, that given that many users skip entering last year’s balance and current withdrawal, if the reported balance is set to 0 (the default), the app sets  it to the current balance to calculate an approximate RMD that is probably more reasonable. Set it to 1$ to work arount that.
You want to enter your expected yields  not actual current yields,  and I wouldn’t want to assume long term future rates based on the current rates.  We show you the past 1 year yields in the tooltips from the data we get from Fundata if we have it for that security, (Wealthica doesn’t give that, just the price). 
 
You might want to use the “Change all rates for all investments at once” to set all your rates. It’ll set the rates for each investment according to the expected rates you input on that form and the asset association of the investment. It’s convenient but a little dangerous, so I suggest you save your current rates by running a TIME MACHINE and saving the scenario so you can retrieve it with your current rates if necessary.

Make sure you have set an expected dividend yield for all the investments.

The Withdrawal Optimizer does not optimize expenses, only withdrawals. It maximizes the Legacy doing just what you describe (see https://www.moneyreadyapp.ca/blog/post/8 for details). If we were to allow it to optimize expenses, it would set them to 0 in all years! We can only optimize withdrawals given a known level of consumption, and in all years since it optimizes over your whole retirement.
 
The approach to take is to first use the Choose your Legacy tool to determine the spending level that gets you close to what you want in terms of legacy. That algorithm also considers taxes, clawbacks and RMDs in every year (see https://www.moneyreadyapp.ca/blog/post/10 although I don’t go into quite as much detail in that post ). It does not assume the amount to increase/decrease expenses will be the same every year, so you may see jumps up and down in the suggested expenses depending upon the scenario. It does try to minimize the number of times you would need to change the spending to make it easier for you to plan, but it will change it if it has to, particularly to avoid running out of money in any year. For example it might be financially advantageous even after tax to not spend a dime until the day you die and spend it all then, but that would not be a very useful plan. 
The Choose your Legacy tool  does not optimize the account withdrawals, it just uses your set strategy given your PRIORITIES and AUTOMATIC deposits/withdrawals.
 
Use the Withdrawal Optimizer as a second step to optimize the withdrawal strategy that meets that level of consumption suggested. If that gives you a much higher legacy, then use those results to check them against the results with your set strategy (your PRIORITIES and AUTOMATIC deposits/withdrawals) to see if you can improve it. It’s best to understand what the plan is doing, and if you can match the Withdrawal Optimizer, then you can be confident your plan is optimal.
 
Those two tools are sophisticated and work well, and their combination is powerful. I’m always looking for better optimization algorithms,