Cashflows and Portfolios Best of 2021

Happy Holidays everyone!

Thanks for being part of our journey at Cashflows & Portfolios. Welcome to our best of 2021 where we will highlight some milestones and top posts from the last year.

Our mission on this site is something quite unique in Canada. We’re not running this site to share any personal finance journey perspectives like many other blogs. In fact, we don’t share very much of our own stories on this site on purpose. The reason is: this site is targeted towards you, the reader, at any age.

Beginners Guide to Saving and Investing

Maybe you’re new to saving and investing, so you want to understand key cash flow management principles to help build wealth. Well, we have posted on that:

Building a Portfolio

Maybe you have some experience as an investor, but want to better understand what funds or products are best to build wealth with (and which ones you should avoid)! We have you covered there too:

Retirement Decumulation and Efficiency

Maybe you’re approaching retirement or semi-retirement. So, you want to understand how best to draw down your portfolio to:

Be tax-efficient;
Fight longevity risk;
Provide ample retirement income;
To maximize your retirement spending.

Or, all the above.

Here are some posts that may help:

Need some free retirement calculators? We have you covered.
You may wish to retire early but don’t rely on the 4% safe withdrawal rate to do so!
Managing any poor sequence of returns risk is essential in retirement.
Yes, you can retire just using your TFSA.
Last but not least, we believe you should consider taking CPP at age 70. That’s our plan.

Best of 2021 – Customer-Focused Retirement Projections/Reports

Here at Cashflows & Portfolios, in addition to providing free, actionable financial content on a weekly basis, we started a new service in 2021 – Retirement Projections. The biggest reason why we’re different in Canada:

We offer unbiased financial projections for you today, next year, and beyond!

In growing your wealth towards retirement, we know you have questions. We have the same ones:

Do I have enough to retire?
When can I retire?
Will I run out of money in retirement?
How much can I spend in retirement?
How much of a financial legacy can I leave behind?
Should I take CPP at age 65 or 70?
How do I minimize OAS clawback?
Which account (and when) should I withdraw from during retirement for the highest tax efficiency and estate value?
And more!

Until now, you had to pay some fee-only planners thousands of dollars to get these answers.

Well, we’re different.

We want to be different.

We are offering these services because we feel, essentially, we can help Canadians in a major way in a much lower cost and customer-service-oriented structure.

We are currently using professional financial projections software that planners use; and that we use; making it available to our readers. In fact, we use this software every few months for our very own financial projections – and we can honestly say that the software has significantly boosted our confidence in our early (or semi) retirement plans!

We also feel there is a huge gap between fee-only planners who advise folks vs. folks who simply want some personal confidence in their own retirement projections. As passionate Do-It-Yourself (DIY) investors, we know the hard part really isn’t about investing or asset accumulation any longer with all the tools, services and resources available to Canadians – including this new site.

The challenging part is really about solving the asset decumulation puzzle. That asset decumulation puzzle is a process that is often very personal and must be tailored to your specific retirement or semi-retirement needs and goals. We know – we’re working through that process ourselves right now!

Financial advisors will typically charge between $1.5k – $11k for a financial plan or require that you invest through them and charge a percentage of your entire portfolio. By using our intake process and our services, we offer personalized retirement projections for a fraction of the cost. We also have no desire to manage any investors’ financial assets (and we do not provide specific investment advice), so we avoid that conflict of interest!

Do You Need Support with your Retirement Income Projections?

Knowing when to take CPP or OAS or how to draw down your personal investment assets for a healthy retirement is very important and critical work – to solve your own retirement decumulation puzzle.

If you are interested in obtaining private projections for your financial scenario, read more about our retirement projections service.

Our Best of 2021 summary

At Cashflows & Portfolios, we work with you, take your inputs, your assumptions, then work on providing you with an optimized Retirement Projections Report(s) that is customized to your needs and goals.

We’re passionate about our approach, we’re passionate about helping others and we want to deliver value to Canadians over time. We hope that in 2022 you consider our services, our support, and hit us up for any comments, questions, ideas and more. We’re all ears.

Thanks to the dozens of clients that have worked with us in 2021 and we can’t wait to help dozens more in 2022 and beyond.

While everyone’s financial situation is always different, just make sure you’re making an informed decision. We can help.

Best wishes, Happy Holidays, and see you on our site in 2022.

Mark and Joe.