The Canadian Investor - How to Avoid Big Investing Mistakes and Build a Retirement Plan with Mark McGrath

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

In this episode of The Canadian Investor Podcast, Simon is joined by Mark McGrath, a CFP and advice-only financial planner focused on helping Canadian physicians with comprehensive financial planning. Mark explains how advice-only planning works, how it differs from traditional portfolio management, and why a full financial plan often needs to cover cash flow, taxes, retirement, insurance, estate planning, debt, and investment strategy together rather than in isolation.They also discuss common investing mistakes, including chasing returns, taking advice from the wrong people, overconcentrating in single stocks, relying too heavily on AI tools, and focusing too much on investments while ignoring risk management, insurance and estate planning. In the second half of the episode, Simon and Mark dig into retirement decumulation, annuities, the 4% rule, variable withdrawals, sequence-of-returns risk, and why retirement income planning is highly personal. They also discuss why investors should avoid wasting low tax brackets and how proportional withdrawals across RRSPs, TFSAs and non-registered accounts can be a useful starting point for retirees without a detailed decumulation plan. Subscribe to our Our New Youtube Channel! Check out our portfolio by going to Jointci.com Our Website Our New Youtube Channel! Canadian Investor Podcast Network Twitter: @cdn_investing Simon’s twitter: @Fiat_Iceberg Braden’s twitter: @BradoCapital Dan’s Twitter: @stocktrades_ca Want to learn more about Real Estate Investing? Check out the Canadian Real Estate Investor Podcast! Apple Podcast - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Spotify - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Web player - The Canadian Real Estate Investor Asset Allocation ETFs | BMO Global Asset Management Sign up for Fiscal.ai for free to get easy access to global stock coverage and powerful AI investing tools. Register for EQ Bank, the seamless digital banking experience with better rates and no nonsense.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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there's going to be some great opportunities for investors this has to be one of the biggest quarters I've seen from this company in quite some time Welcome to the Canadian Investor Podcast. I'm Simone Beranger. I'm back here with the previous guest on the podcast, Mark McGrath. Mark, welcome to the podcast. It's been, I think, a year and a half, maybe two years since you've last been on. So welcome back. Yeah, yeah, thanks, Simone. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know when the first episode we recorded was, but yeah, I would think it was probably two years ago. So, yeah, it's nice to be back. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so for those are not familiar with you, can you just go over your background a little bit? I know you're, you changed. You changed in terms of where you're working and the type of financial planning. You do so feel free to mention that as well. And I think since we've talked, you also published a book. So if you want to talk about that, it would be great to.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, what can I tell you? So I've been in the industry in the financial planning and investment advice industry since roughly 2010 in some form or another and kind of just worked my way from like investment fund sales into financial planning and portfolio management. Most recently I was working with PWL Capital, which hopefully many of your listeners are familiar with because they put out a lot of incredible research and content. Really enjoyed my time there. And about a year and a half ago, I want to say, my wife and I just kind of started thinking about life and what we want from life.

We've got two young kids and how we want to structure our kind of family and work and careers and stuff. And I decided to step away from all of that. We went traveling for a few months. we went to Spain last summer for most of the summer and traveled around Spain and a few other parts of Europe. And then I came back and I would get back into it. But I'm just doing what we call advice only planning now. So, you know, traditionally a lot of advice in this country is based on some form of portfolio management, whether it's like commissions products or trailer fees or some kind of AUM or percentage fee on a portfolio.

And that works very well for many people. But I just wanted to get rid of all the licensing and compliance. I dropped most of my designations except for the CFP design. designation, and now I just do advice only planning. So clients will come to me for a complete financial plan. They pay me just for that planning work. I stick around to help them for a couple of months, but other than that, off they go. So there's no product sale or commission or anything like that. I don't manage portfolios anymore. And I find myself working primarily with physicians just because in my career, that's where I've spent most of my time. And that's the people are

into a track. And that's who I work really, really well with. So the company is called finance, P-H-Y-N-A-N-N-C-E. And it's really geared towards financial planning for Canadian physicians. Yeah, and are you the only one, the only financial planner there, or do you have other people working with you? It's just me. My wife is involved as well. My wife's the system's an industrial engineer, so she has a whole bunch of skills that I just do not have and do not care to acquire. So she's really good with like systems and automations and, you know, efficiency and that type of stuff. So we've got two young kids who are not in school right now, so she's not working as much as she will, but once they're kind of settled in school, and we just moved from Squamish, BC to downtown Vancouver.

So it's been a bit of a hectic couple of months for us. So she'll get back into it. But other than that, it's just her and I. I'm not looking to build an empire. I don't think I would manage staff very well. I've never been a manager of staff. I've managed clients, but never staff. So I'm not looking to like hire and build a big business.

This is like a lifestyle practice for us. I can take as many clients as I'm comfortable taking, work really slowly, go really deep, work with one or two clients a month. And it's just the two of us. Okay. And in terms of advice only, like, what do you do you just review portfolios? to just like create a kind of accumulation and decumulation plan for people that might be kind of mid-career and, you know, five, ten years out of retirement.

Do you do tax planning? Like, you want to just give us a little more information on that? Because I'm a big fan at advice only. Generally, like I think financial planners are great, but especially advice only where for self-directed investor, I think it makes a whole lot of sense. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it really depends. So my preferred kind of method of planning.

is full-blown comprehensive plans, like every single nook and cranny. I don't like to do what some people call more modular planning. Some people will contact me and say, hey, I just want a decumulation plan for retirement. And like, look, I can do that, but it's probably a disservice because your finances are so interconnected that without me looking at your insurance and risk management, your estate planning, your portfolio, your tax planning, education for kids, it's very hard for me to just kind of compartmentalize one component of a person's finance. and just work in there.

And I find it's a bit riskier to do that because I could be giving you advice that is actually incorrect or dangerous, specifically because you've engaged me just for that one slice of your personal finance. And I'd rather look at everything kind of falsely. So a plan for my clients covers everything you mentioned, like we go through cash flow planning, debt management, incorporation for physicians, compensation planning, salary versus dividends, saving strategies, RSPs versus TFSAs versus corporate retained earnings, maximize. education plans for kids, all that kind of stuff.

The portfolio itself, now I can't give specific portfolio advice because I'm not licensed anymore. No. But at a high level, talking about asset allocation and fees and risk profiling and diversification, like at a broad level, I can speak to portfolio management. I have to stop short of saying go buy, sell, or hold this specific security. But I often just give clients like the first chapter of my book, which covers my philosophy on markets and how to invest.

And many of them come to me already with that philosophy. because they've been following my work for a few years, so that we're already pretty aligned on the portfolio stuff. Sometimes there's some cleanup to do. And then a lot of it is the retirement planning, goal setting and goal planning. It's less about getting really into the math of trying to optimize a few percent points 20 years from now.

And it's more like, am I going to be okay? Can I achieve all my goals? And what are the big things I can do today to make my plan more defensible and more robust? So depending on the client, that could be 20 to 30 hours of work, sometimes more culminates in like somewhere between 80 to 90 pages of information often. And that's not just like tables and stuff. That's like pertinent information.

So it really depends on the complexity. And I charge based on complexity as well. So everybody's a little bit different. And I try to meet my clients where they are. Like if they come to me with a very specific concern, we'll make sure that's addressed. Some are just like, I think I need to talk to somebody because I don't know what I'm doing. So let's go through the whole thing systematically. It really just depends.

Okay. No, that's great. And one example I always give is sometimes we will come and see me because they know, I do the podcast and they're like, oh, I heard you do the podcast and what do you think about like my investments here. They'll give me like a quick look. And I'm like, well, I mean, do you have other assets? Like what's going on?

Like, I can't really, you know, if you don't give me a bit more information about your overall situation, it's hard to, you know, not give them advice, but at least some guidance. So I completely understand that. So in terms of what you see with clients, like what type of portfolio do you see right now? Like, have you seen a change that you've always, I think. pretty much work with physician that's been your core group, if I remember correctly. Have you seen a change in terms of the portfolio construction? Are they kind of 60-40? Are they more fully equities? Are they, you know, Yolo just making some crazy bets, 40% of their portfolio

in SpaceX? What are you seeing exactly? Yeah, you know, I don't know that I've seen any like systematic change in how people are managing investments. I think over the years, I mean, and there's some bias in my response too, right? Because the people who are coming. to me or coming to me to solve a problem. So I'm not seeing every physician portfolio. I'm seeing physicians who have a portfolio who also need help with some aspect of their finances. So often, I'd say one or two out of 10 clients that I see, their portfolio is, in my opinion, like, perfect. It's a single globally diversified, low-cost index ETF, right? And that's my preferred method for investing in most cases. So rarely do they come to me and I'm like, look, your portfolio

is good. We don't need to touch it. We don't even need to talk about it. Oftentimes it'll be that plus a couple other little things. And a lot of the time, it's because they've had advisors, or they were do-it-yourself investors taking like stock tips from their brother or following some influencers online and trying to do something by themselves. And then they went and hired like a portfolio manager or somebody who put them in a bunch of different funds. And then they decided they wanted to take back some control. So they transfer that portfolio back to themselves. And there's some legacy positions in there, like some individual stocks. But they're now trying to accumulate like an index fund portfolio. So sometimes it's messy and it's spread out across a bunch of different

institutions. But in terms of like the kind of acid allocation, like the 6040 versus 100% equities, that is really, really personal I find. I mean, there's a lot of discussion, especially on social media about what we call risk tolerance. And you'll find some advisors who are like, oh, it's all BS. There's no such thing. Your risk tolerance changes depending on your mood and day to day and that type of thing. So everybody should just hold 100% equity portfolio. And that's largely untrue. Like there are some aspects of a risk profile that do change. But like a risk profile is built on more than just how you're feeling today, right? It's like your risk tolerance is one thing. Your capacity for risk based on your financial situation and prospects is another thing. But then there's things like risk composure, like how you actually handle the risky event when it shows up. A risk perception, which is like how do I view this particular tradeoff or bet right now? That thing can change quite a bit and is quite variable. But a lot of these other things don't really change. change a lot in time over time. And it's based on like your upbringing and your culture and your values and that type of

stuff. So I do a lot of risk profiling with clients now where we'll go through that and try to tease out the optimal portfolio from a risk standpoint. And then just ensure that that's being matched in their portfolio. So I'd say like I don't often see anything more conservative than 60, 40, like 60% equity and 40%. That's probably the lower bound that I see. And a lot of clients are 100% equity.

And I also tend to attract clients that are between like 30. and 50, I would say, which is relatively young. And so they've got a long time horizon. They're very high income earners so they can tolerate a lot of risk. It really depends, but I'd say I'm not noticing any big structural changes. Like there's always stuff to Yolo into, like SpaceX is just the newest one that people are talking about. There's always stuff. There's the AI trends.

There's the marijuana trend back in 2017. So there's always ways to make mistakes. As long as you're doing it with a very small component of your portfolio, like I'm not going to come and like wrap you on the knuckles and say, don't do anything except for buy this global index fund, right? Like, you got us in a little, I think. Yeah, no, that's great. And that's something we've talked about a lot on the podcast, is you can really mitigate risk with allocation.

Like I tell people, you know, 1% in SpaceX is very different than 25, 30% in SpaceX. You still have exposure, right? But it's very different. And like, has there been a difference in the way that the you do or the financial planning industry looks at risk appetite or risk tolerance because I'm just thinking about bonds here. And unless you're living under a rock, I mean, the risk profile of bonds has changed a whole lot in the last decade, right, when you're starting, especially post-COVID where you saw governments really take on, tack on a whole lot of debt. Bonds have been a pretty poor

return over the last five years or so where they were facing huge tailwinds ever since the 1980s. So have you adjusted the way you look at risk based on that? that or are you seeing that more of a blip in time? Yeah, it's a bit of both, right? Like, it's, we have this recency bias where we tend to remember the recent past and put more weight on it than the distant past, right? And so coming out of COVID, especially I think it was, was it 2022 and stocks and bonds, the correlations went to one and everything dropped all at the same time, right?

So that was supposed to be the kind of buoy in your portfolio, your bonds, like when stocks are dropping rapidly like that, the bonds are supposed to be mitigating that risk. And of course, interest rates were going up. So bonds got smoked at the same time. And I think for a lot of investors, that was kind of their first experience going, oh, like, these assets can be non-correlated and still, you know, non-correlated over long periods of time, but still have short periods of time where they move together. And so a balanced portfolio got absolutely wrecked when in a normal historical, you know, market drop, that balanced portfolio would have held up a lot better. So I think it's kind of both, right? Like now it's more apparent that, okay, stocks and bonds can move in lockstep.

And there are certain macroeconomic events that can take place, like rising interest rates while stocks are dropping. that can really hurt the bonds out of a portfolio. But I don't know if this is like a structural change in the risk of a fixed income product at a systematic level or not. I don't know that that's the case. I mean, there's a lot of things you can get worried about like government's printing money and that kind of stuff.

If you think about what a bond is, it's just you lending some party money, whether it's a government or a corporation. So you can control a lot of the risk in the bond section of your portfolio by determining how long are these loans going to be for and who am I lending to? If I'm lending to the federal government of Canada for three months,

the risk is virtually nil because they can just print the money to pay me back. If I'm lending to Mum and Pops pizza shop down the street on a 30-year term, like, yeah, that's going to be a very high-risk bond. It's going to be very sensitive to interest rate movements. So for me, when I think about bonds, it's like, if you're going to need bonds in your portfolio, you have to accept lower returns. We know that. Like, that's the whole point.

You're trading off higher returns for ideally lower volatility and lower risk. So if you want a low-risk component in your portfolio, then keep it very low risk. Like keep it short term, keep it high quality, high credit quality, keep it government, and don't deviate from that

because as soon as you start looking for returns from the bond part of your portfolio, you kind of get to a point where it's like, well, I may as well just invest in stocks then. Right? Like if you're going to go with like long-dated corporate bonds or whatever,

you're going to get almost the return profile and volatility of stocks, just own stocks if you're comfortable doing that in the first place. No, no, that's a good point. Having cash on hand is essential for any business. Additional business accounts hit you with high fees while paying little to no interest on the cash you need for day-to-day operations. That was our experience, too, until we switched to the new EQBank business account.

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open and fund your account with code TCI and receive $50. Conditions apply. I guess on the same theme of things potentially being different. And I know you know Ben Felix well from PWL Capital puts out a whole lot of great content, very evidence base. And one thing that, you know, I have a lot of interests is the foreturning by Nihau and William Strauss. I'm sure you're familiar with that. Where you have Western societies that move through these 800 to 100 year cycles.

And according to them right now, we, you know, We are in the fort turning, especially when you start considering the U.S. and the global world order. And do you view the future potentially different based on that? Because evidence base is fine, but most of that evidence is essentially post-second World War. There is a little bit before that, but a lot of the data comes from that. So if we're starting to move forward in a different environment, how much can we rely on that past evidence? and with the rapid, with AI, what's happening right now and this new technology, like all of that together. Like, has it shifted your view of how you should construct a portfolio?

Maybe not even for your client, maybe just for yourself, right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's a lot to impact there. So I haven't read the book, The Fourth Turning. It's come across my desk like a number of times. Lots of people have brought it up to me. A lot of people really liked the book and are very kind of dogmatic in their approach. So this is true. Look at the patterns that they've noticed.

I will say, like I said, I haven't read the book. I will say I'm very skeptical, not just of this, but in general, when somebody can make a claim based on some kind of observation or history, because a lot of this stuff is pretty short-dated. And I mean, if you think about it in like a universal scale, like even just the data that we produce as humans, say like stock market data, it's just it's actually not a lot of data. Like we see stocks moving in nanosecond increments all across the world and trillions of dollars of flowing through it. And that sounds like a lot of data. But like we're one little race on this one tiny piece. planet in this one little corner of the solar system. And, you know, we don't have, like, data from other intelligent races from across the galaxy to compare, like, financial markets to,

right? So we just have this kind of one linear history of market data. So I am careful in kind of inferring too much from just looking at the past, right? Like, you see people online saying, well, stocks return 10% per year. You can't say that. Like, you can say that historically that is true over long periods of time. Nobody knows. what the future holds. The future is uncertain by definition, of course. We have no idea what the future is going to hold. But at the same time, I don't know that that means you should do anything differently, right? Because it is the only data that we have, and it's the best data that we have. And so if you are intentionally deviating from that evidence or data to do something with your portfolio,

you're saying, we don't have great data, but I'm going to ignore all the data that we do have and take an opposite bet on the market, right? Like, I like to pose this sometimes to clients. If you had absolutely no way to know what any asset class, any stock, any sector had done in terms of market performance historically, ever. You were in a vacuum. You could not determine what the performance of anything had been historically. And you had a million dollars to invest. How would you invest it? If you could not look at historical performance, right?

And I think the answer to that, the logical answer there is, well, I would want to hold a global cap-weighted or portfolio, right? Because I can't determine what's going to outperform or underperform. So I should probably just hold everything. And it would make sense that you hold those things in proportion to how large they are by market cap, right? And so I still think that's true, right? Like, even if you believe that we are in a fourth turning or something like that, I don't know that you can really do anything about it. I do believe that the U.S. is not destined to outperform the world into perpetuity. And so I would never go like 100% U.S. equity or something, but they are the largest market in the world. And so I want to participate.

And the nice thing about something like a global market cap portfolio is that all kind of sorts itself out over time, right? Like if the U.S. market drops and is no longer the dominant market player and Canada or the UK or China is, those countries will begin to be more highly represented in your portfolio anyway. So it's kind of a self-solving solution to just hold the global market cap portfolio. Yeah, that's a good way to do it. Do clients ever say like, oh, well, global market cap, but including fixed income, including other assets? when they answer that question? Yeah, for sure. Like on the fixed income side,

I always talk about like a globally diversified index fund portfolio. When I say that, I don't mean necessarily 100% equity. Because again, going back to like a risk tolerance discussion, I do think if you need fixed income in your portfolio, then you should put fixed income in your portfolio.

And likewise, you should try to diversify that at least to the degree that you can while maintaining the risk profile of the fixed income. Like we said, like if you want short-term government bonds, that's fine, but maybe don't buy one, buy a bunch over, you know, multiple durations, maybe from different levels of government or maybe U.S. bonds or whatever, right? So try to diversify. But on the equity side, I think it should be a global market cap portfolio.

As for other assets, like, I don't know, like a lot of people come to me, most people who want to discuss Bitcoin with me do it because they already own Bitcoin. Like rarely does a client come to me and be like, hey, I don't have any Bitcoin, but I'm thinking about buying some. Most of the time, it's just like, hey, oh, and I've got this Bitcoin portfolio as well. I'm not like, I don't, like, I don't, get super aggressive about that stuff anymore. I think, again, it's a matter of risk management, right? So if you've got 70% in Bitcoin, you better have a damn good reason for it. And if you can articulate that reason, then it's in line with your view of the world. I'm probably not

going to talk about it anyway from just a portfolio manager standpoint, you know? But if it's like, I don't know how much I should have, or I bought in early and now it's 80% of my net worth, then my job is to help have the discussion around concentration risk and diversification. So, like, if you've got 5% or 10% in Bitcoin or whatever, great. How about it? As long as you understand the tradeoffs, and as long as you can articulate why you own it in the first place, and it's not just chasing returns, right?

If you've got like an economic view because you're more of like an Austrian school of economics type person and that's your viewpoint, then yes, Bitcoin is a way to take that view in your portfolio. So sure, how about it? It's another one that comes up as well. Yeah, I was going to say gold, like how do you view that, especially in the last few years there's been a lot of prominent voices just saying could be a good substitute for fixed income or bonds in a portfolio.

essentially some non-yielding but also cannot be inflated away. Yeah, I mean, it can be inflated away in the sense that like if you look at gold's performance over some periods, like you absolutely lost purchasing power on that. I don't remember when gold last peaked before this recent peak. Was it like 2012? I think it would have been 2011, 2011 around there. Yeah, early 2010s. Between then and like the recent run, it was essentially like down to flat to slightly positive.

So you did lose purchasing power. Your portfolio was inflated away for those 10 years. And yes, it's kind of caught up now, which is great. But that's easy to say in hindsight, right? I mean, we're not on a gold standard, so I don't know that we can say that gold can't be inflated away. I mean, we could mine an asteroid tomorrow with 10 trillion tons of gold, and then what, right? So I understand gold's role from that perspective.

I think as a fixed income substitute specifically, it's not an apple's orange comparison. It really depends, right? Like if the goal of your fixed income is to generate income, then gold does not do that, of course. Unless you're like, you know, using some kind of covered call. I know, yeah, there are a size that we'll offer. Yeah, I think you've heard of them. There are a size that will offer them. But again, typically you just hold it for the metal.

Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people just want it because it's done well, right? Like most people, like there's nothing that will change sentiment like price, right? And so as soon as something starts doing well, everyone starts talking about it. And it is a positive feedback loop. And they want it in their portfolio because it's done well, not because they wanted to buy it when it was doing really poorly, because, again, they could articulate some kind of theory about

why they needed to hold in their portfolio. It's like, hey, gold's up 100%. Should we have gold? It's like, yeah, but you should have had it a year ago before it went up 100%. Right? So most people are just chasing returns when they add this stuff to their portfolio. They're not taking like a systematic multi-asset view of the portfolio and owning things regardless of recent performance. So I think like I hold some gold just via ETFs. I hold some Bitcoin. I have since like 2017, I think, not a ton, but a little bit. I have no problem with those in a portfolio. Again, Sin a little.

As long as it's not dominating your portfolio, I think it's totally fine. And I say this not because I'm predicting any type of performance from these assets, right? Like, obviously Bitcoin has done incredibly well. And it's easy to say you shouldn't own that much Bitcoin. It's stupid. But then if it quadruples overnight,

it still wasn't a good decision to own it. It was still a very silly and risky decision to own in most cases. But you can have a great outcome when you own these things. So, yeah, hold some. If you have a good reason for it. holding it. Other stuff like private equity and private credit, I'm not a big fan of, and I find virtually no reason to hold any of that stuff. Yeah, what I'm getting from you is you're very process oriented, not results oriented. I play a decent amount of poker and, you know, that's one

thing that good poker players will do is like they're process oriented. They don't really care about the results as long as the, you know, the right thinking was in place. And I think that's, you seem, that's what I'm getting from you is that's kind of your approach as well. Yes, maybe Bitcoin will quadruple, gold will quadruple or stocks. ABCD might do extremely well, but you also were taking a extremely large amount of risk by putting too much of your portfolio in those assets to begin with. Yeah, I think you need to take a systematic and repeatable approach to things, right? Like people tend to forget, like your investment time rise.

And like, I'm 42. I hope to live to 95 and beyond, right? I've got 50 years ahead of me of investment performance that I have to manage. So me chasing. You're looking good for 42, way more hair than I have. I don't know if I have a filter on. I don't know if I have a filter on my camera or something, but I don't look that good in person.

But that's a long time horizon to manage an investment portfolio and to earn reasonable returns, right? And so people get so hyper-focused on the near-term and, like, what's the next big bet and the next big thing? And, like, you could do that 100 or 200 times over the next 50 years. And the probability that all of those bets are going to accumulate to the point that they actually outperform,

like just holding the global market cap portfolio, I think is very low for most people. You'd have to hit some real mega home runs and then still capture reasonable returns throughout. So we get these unbelievable bull markets like we've had. And everyone's a genius and everyone's buying, you know, call options on triple leverage, NASDAQ ETFs or whatever and making a ton of money. But they're holding the potato when the music stops too, right? So they lose a lot of those returns because market reversals tend to be quick and violent, right? And you often aren't going to capture all of these returns.

especially in a bull market, and then not be greedy about it. You're not going to be like, okay, I'm going to take my profits and go back to owning an index fund portfolio and lock in those incredible returns. No, you're going to keep thinking that, oh, well, I'm going to take more and more risk and more risk and keep doing this. And then you're like Taylip's turkey. It's like a thousand days in the life of a Christmas turkey. Every day is great.

They wake up, they get fed. They wake up, they get fed. And at the end, they get their head chopped off. But you don't see the cleaver coming to chop off your head until it's too late. And so that's what I worry about with a lot of people is the hyperfocus on the short term, they're trying to beat the market in the short term when what gets people really rich, you know, beyond starting businesses and that type of thing is earning reasonable returns over very long periods of time. Like you do that and you're going to be just fine in most cases.

Yeah, the consistency. And again, like it's, there's so many parallels with poker investing, but in poker a lot of what drives poker players and I think it's the same for investors is fear, right? So you have the fear or loss aversion you don't want to lose money or the fear of missing out where you start getting greedy. There's always, and it's almost a pendulum, right? Depending on who you're dealing with, it's going to be anywhere in between on that scale. Very few people actually will be steady as they go. Those who do probably feel that fear one way or the other, but they actually kind of dismiss

it and just keep with the plan. And that's a learned skill, I think. Like, I have no idea what my portfolio is worth today. I literally could not tell you the value of my portfolio. I don't know what the market is doing today. I don't know what it did yesterday or the day before or last week. The only inkling I get about market performance is just because I'm on social media. So I see people talking about or posting charts about certain stocks being down 10% or up 10% or by the dip or whatever when the market's down 1%.

And you're like, oh, is there a dip? Like I have no idea what's going on. But that took years and years and years of like, you know, not stoicism per se, but of kind of understanding that I can't influence the outcome. All I can do is hold a portfolio that I'm comfortable with over the long run. and I don't like to check my portfolio because I think whether we realize it or not when you check your portfolio especially these days when it's so easy

to just open the wealth simple app. You're getting notifications on like, oh, the wealth simple draw this week did I win? And you want to open the app and check and you do it and you see your portfolio balance right there and you're just like, oh, that's down from last week or that's up, what's going on? And so it's like that's why they design these types of people is.

Yeah, it is a gamification, right? So I try not to participate in that because I know if I look at my portfolio subconsciously, whether I realize it or not, I'm making a decision to buy, sell, or hold something, right? I can make a change to my portfolio at any time. And even if I just look at it, I go, hmm, like should I own more of this or less of this? Or should I do something?

And in most cases, you don't want to. You just want to stand there and hold your assets. So I find it difficult, but it's a learned skill. If you can just ignore and, like, just tune out the noise and hold the near optimal portfolio for you and your family over the long run, then you get rid of all that fear, all that fomo and the fear of loss and that type of thing. Because I can't be scared of losing if I literally don't know if I'm up or down right now, right? I literally have no idea what my value is for my investment assets.

And for me, that works really, really well. Some people I know they're blogged in every day, every five minutes. They're messaging me on Twitter like, oh, this is down and this is up and this is down. Noise, like, so what? Like, ignore it all and get a hobby, you know? Did I get their blood pressure, I feel like it fluctuates quite a bit. There's one guy that messages me like daily on Twitter. And I keep telling them, like, go pick up a guitar and go for a walk or something. You're going to give yourself a heart attack because you're so hyper-focused on your investment portfolio and what's going on in the markets. It's not good for your mental health. Having cash on hand is essential for any business.

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You have a high mountain bikes. So is there a hobby or something? Yeah. No, I tried mountain biking. And I bailed and I thought I broke my arm. And so I never tried it again. My son was like to you or something. We had moved to Squamish, which is like the mecca for mountain biking out here, right?

Oh, yeah. But I wasn't into any of that stuff. And I was like, I'm going to get into mountain biking. So I bought a fancy bike when riding with my brother and tried to like jump off a ladder or something. It almost killed myself. I was like, yeah, the risk reward when you're a parent, I find of these like higher risk sports. I was like it's just not there for me anymore. Sounds like you started too intense.

You should have been a bit more gradual. Maybe. And like I grew up on bikes. I can ride a bike really well. Right. I grew up like BMXing and stuff. But mountain biking, I think I just over, I was overconfident in my abilities. So no, I don't do like any extreme sports.

We just moved to downtown Vancouver. and it's been a great summer for that because FIFA was here and the weather's been beautiful. So we've got a pool in our complex. So I've been taking my kids like swimming every day and to the parks and the beaches just down the street. So I spent a lot of time with my kids because I can. And that's part of why I wanted to kind of design this lifestyle practice

so that we could do all that kind of stuff. But beyond that, like I'm into playing piano and guitar. I've been playing guitar since I was a kid. I don't play as much as I'd like to anymore, but started taking piano lessons a couple years ago. So we'll play music. My son's big into video games and I've always been a gamer. So we play a lot of video games at home.

got a home gym to try and, you know, stay healthy and fit and that kind of stuff. And I just got into F1 racing. So last year, my wife and I became like big F1 fans. We spent a lot of time like watching races and that kind of stuff. Nice. No, I love to hear it just to give people some idea. Like I think it's good to disconnect from investing. And again, before we get to the decumulation, like what are some of the biggest mistakes you'll see from clients who have been self-directed for for some time?

A couple of mistakes you see just so people try to avoid them. I guess you talked a little bit about it with people just being too frequently under account, checking what's going on. Anything else that could bring some insights to our listener? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like some of the stuff we already talked about, like chasing returns and FOMO investing and that kind of stuff, that's really damaging over the long run, I think. And a lot of people don't understand how markets work. And you don't look at like I'm not an expert in markets by any means. But I think if you understand a little bit about market efficiency,

and I'm not saying markets are perfectly efficient all the time or anything like that, but when you're buying and selling stocks, you got to understand, like, you're buying and selling, your competition is fierce, and they generally have better resources and better information than you in most cases. So the people who are setting prices in the markets, yes, part of it is retail, but a big part of that are institutions and algorithms and, you know, institutions sitting on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with $300 million supercomputers pointed directly.

at the stock exchange. Like, you're probably not going to beat these guys, right? So buying something because of just feelings or you think you've got some edge because you read a newsfeas, or you asked Claude or Chad CheapT, and you think that's an edge? Like, dude, everyone's got AI at their fingertips. Like, that's not, you don't have an edge because you've got an AI subscription, right? So just understanding that you probably don't have an edge in the market and that things are generally going to be priced in such a way that you don't have an advantage buying or selling stocks in any particular moment. I think if you can approach it from that perspective, then you start to understand, like, there's probably not a huge benefit to trying to

time markets and pick stocks. I know a lot of your listeners are going to be, you know, stock investors and that kind of stuff. I'm not saying everyone's wrong. This is just my philosophy on investing, right? There's no right or wrong way to do all. There's probably some wrong ways to do it. But there's no universally perfect approach to, to investing, I think. I do think there's a lot of terrible advice. Like, we've kind of crossed this like lexicon into or Rubicon into AI is incredible. and I use it daily and I spend a ton of time and a ton of money on AI

and I know a lot of people do. The technology is really, really good. Social media is at our fingertips. There's so much information, so easily accessible at such a high speed, but it doesn't mean that you know how to parse that information

really, really well. And so I'll see people now just outsourcing their thinking to AI. Like even on Twitter the other day, I was in a tax discussion and I was like, oh, we were talking about attribution rules on RSPs. And someone called me.

I was like, no, you're wrong, look, chat GPT says you're wrong. And I'm like, chat GPT is wrong. Here's like the income tax act. Here's the actual CRA ruling on this. It's chat GPT that's wrong. But people will put too much confidence in the technology and think that they don't have to think for themselves anymore.

And I think that just gets a little bit dangerous the longer that goes on. And a lot of it's just the concentration risk stuff we talked about or just had one client who like 50% of their portfolio is a single stock and it was a blue chip stock, fine. I'm like, why did you set up your port? portfolio like that. It's like, when my brother's an accountant, so he gives me stock tips. I'm like, your brother's an accountant, what education and experiences you have in investing?

He's good with money, though, like he's an accountant. But that's a different discipline. Yeah, that's different. We'll take advice from the wrong people and think they're getting good advice. And then I think lastly, like just over-focusing on investing in tax. It's like your investment portfolio is a big engine for your success. But it's not the only thing, right? Like, people don't get wills. They don't have insurance. it doesn't matter if you get really great returns if you then get disabled and have to blow your whole portfolio in the first year

because you didn't have disability insurance, right? Like you need to play defense before you can play offense. So set up the foundation of your plan from a risk management standpoint before you get hyper focused on paying less tax or getting high returns. Okay, no, that's great.

And on AI, I mean, I totally agree. I use it as a tool for research, but I always double-checked the sources when it gives me spits out information. and I guess I set it up in a way that it knows to give me this source. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can actually set up whichever one you're using. And like usually it will, I think by default, but you can be very explicit about it.

And yeah, to me, it's more like a research assistant. But again, if I had a human research assistant, I'd still double check the word that he or she does. So I think, yeah, I totally agree with you. Yeah, I think people just rely too heavily on it. Yeah, it's like they say it's like AI is amazing. It's really, really smart on all the time. topics I know nothing about, but really dumb on the things that I'm an expert in. And I think that

just sums it up so well. Like, if you know nothing about a topic and you ask whatever it is, Gemini or Claude or Chow Chbett, whatever, to explain it to you, you aren't smart enough to find the mistakes in what they're telling you because you don't know anything about the topic. But if I ask it tax questions or portfolio questions or whatever, I'll find it making mistakes and I'll have to correct it. And it'll be like, that's on me. You're absolutely right. But if I didn't correct it and I just took the information it's fed back to me at face value, it's very, very risky for investors to do that. And this will probably get better over time, right?

But I just think, to your point, you have to be able to improve so much. Yeah. Taking a very unbiased approach, even to prompting, like a good friend of mine, any time he tries to prove me wrong, he's like, no, watch this. And then he'll Google something with the most biased prompt ever. Like, tell me why this thing is bad. I'm like, no, no, no, no. If you ask it to tell you why it's bad, it's going to tell you why it's bad.

If you ask it to tell you why it's good, it'll tell you why it's good. You have to take a neutral approach so that you don't, like, taint and poison its response. So just learning to use the tool. I think is a skill in itself. Oh, no, definitely. So now let's go on decumulation. It's something we get a whole lot of questions for. One of the most common one is like, oh, do you have any advice regarding decumulation,

like the 4% rule? And obviously we don't give financial advice. And I think to me, I tend to approach decumulation, at least for my parents. There's, you know, mandated withdrawal. They have to do with rifts and lifts. So that is one thing that, you know, they still have. to do. But for them, the approach I took and I spoke to my mom and I'm like, look, have you thought about annuities? So about five years ago, I mentioned that. She's like, oh, I actually

really loved that idea of getting like a stable monthly payment. So obviously annuities will cost more or less depending on all the bells and whistle that you're going to take with it. But she took a little bit of our portfolio for that extra stability on top of CPP on top of her pension. And then essentially for the most part, like all the investment income is basically bonus money. for them at this point. So for me, it's kind of hard to tell people all use the 4% rule, because I don't know, you know, maybe they have a defined benefit pension that's fully index, extremely well-funded, acts essentially as fixed income. So the rest of the portfolio could be more risky with equities. You know, everyone's a bit different. So do you have a general approach

that you use and maybe just some pits falls for people to avoid while they think about the accumulation. Yeah. Yeah, I love annuities. Like the concept of annuities, I think, is so great. The one thing I wish we had in Canada was a properly indexed annuity, like indexed to inflation. As far as I know, we still can't buy this.

You can buy indexed annuities, but the indexation is set in advance. So it's like 2.5%. So it doesn't actually solve for inflation risk, right? Because if you get an inflation spike, it still just goes up 2.5%. And then you're buying that. You know that going into it, right? And so the insurance company, they're not cheap either, right? as soon as you get some indexation.

I think in the U.S. you can get like proper indexing. So that's my only concern with annuities. But as a concept, I think it's great. Like if you can put a fixed income floor under you with CPP pensions, OAS, or annuities, you know, I'll tell you this. The happiest client I ever had in my entire life

was he was around 80 at the time. And I had just taken him on as a client so I didn't get to see before. But I sat down with them for the first time and his portfolio was like relatively small. He had a nice house, small portfolio. Happy as a client. clam. I was like, where's your income coming from? He's like, oh, I put like almost all of my money

into an annuity. Like, I think it was in the 90s or something like that. Interest rates were pretty good if you're an investor. And so he got a very good return on his annuity. And so he was getting something like $8,000 or $9,000 a month for life. Didn't care what the market was doing, you know, just like to go and play tennis and golf with his buddies. Like, all of the stress of managing the decumulation and the risk of a portfolio in retirement, he had solved it with an annuity and he just got his paychecks every month. And I think there's a lot to be said about reducing that stress in in retirement. So on the decumulation side, like you said, it really depends because everyone's different. Some people have pensions. Some don't. A lot of my clients,

because they're incorporated, they have a choice between salary and dividends. And if they're paying mostly dividends and they don't get CPP, they might get some old age security, but they don't really have any fixed income, right? They won't have RSPs because they're not paying salaries, so they're not accumulating RSP rooms. So they won't even have like a RIF to rely on. It'll just be like their corporate investments, which are subject to 100% market risk. And then on the other side, I'll have clients who will set up like pure salary, individual pension plans or IPPs, as we call them, which are like big RSPs, essentially, if you're an incorporated business owner, you can set these up for yourself. So they'll have a ton of fixed income. And that does change how you want to approach decumulation. And the reason I think is that at a minimum, like there's no real rule of thumb, I think, with decumulation except for probably one thing, which is don't waste low tax brackets. Right. Like there's eight or ten different strategies you can apply to decumulation. Wasting those low or nil tax brackets is probably the only thing that you should avoid doing. So if you have no fixed income and all of your portfolio is in, you know,

pre-tax registered accounts or corporations or something like that, and you've retired 65 and you haven't taken CPP or OAS, you've got no taxable income. You want taxable income because those low tax brackets are so beneficial that you at least want to fill them up, right? To the degree that you can income split with a spouse as well, you want to try to equalize. those and try to fill up those lower tax brackets. But beyond that, I don't think there's a great rule. You're talking about like the whatever 15 or

what it is, $20,000 where there's like no tax exempt, right? Okay. Yeah, and that's indexed, right? So I did this episode on the Rational reminder where I tried to look at the TFSA versus RSP purely through modeling.

And so I use a financial planning software called Conquest Financial Planning. It's very, very good. I've used it for years. It's very, very powerful, especially on the tax side. and I was doing this RSP versus TFSA thing because the rule of thumb you hear on like Reddit or whatever in personal finance forums is like oh the RSP doesn't make sense

until you're at like 60 to 70,000 of income or something like that and so I started testing RSP versus TFSA and even at like $38 to $40,000 worth of income I was seeing that the RSP would actually win out in the end and I was kind of like that doesn't make a ton of sense I must be doing something wrong so I call the buddy of mine Arabind who's a very very bright guy I was like look at can you just look at this with me and just like

help me figure out why this is happening. And what we realize is like, yeah, because the basic personal amount, like that $15,000 of tax-free income that you get is indexed to inflation, and the model I was using, by the time these people turned 65, in future value, they had like $40,000 each of basic personal amount, where they could take that much income and pay no tax. But all they had was TFSAs. And so they had paid high tax on their income while they were working, put it in a TFSA and never paid tax again. But in those years, the RSP is actually better than the TFSA is actually better than the tax. TfSA because if you contribute to an RSP today, you get a full tax deduction. That dollar has

never been tax. And then you can take it out theoretically at zero tax in that window or by using your basic personal amount. So it's even better than the TFSA. So just using up those, and even the lower tax brackets on top of that are quite low too, right? So I don't think there's like a perfect line in the sand, but using up the low tax brackets, I think is like the only the golden rule that I would apply. Beyond that, it's really, really situational. And I will say I tested a whole bunch of different strategies for this. And to my surprise, the one strategy that was never the worst and was always in like the top three was pro-rating your withdrawals from the various accounts you have, which is something

that nobody really does. Okay. Can you explain that a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. So if you pro-rate your withdrawals, basically if you go into retirement with, let's say, I don't know, a million-dollar RSP, a $500,000 TFSA and a $500,000 non-registered portfolio. right? 50% of your money is in an RSP, 25% is in a TFSA, and 25% is in a non-registered portfolio.

So your withdrawals should be 50% RSP, 25% TFSA, and 25% non-registered. So the makeup of your income from those accounts is prorated to the relative size of those accounts, right? This is, you would, I don't know why this works. I think it's just because the tax makeup over time relative, like the tax-free income and the taxable tends to stay the same. So you're generally not paying too much tax. You're topping up your income with some tax-free withdrawals and some relatively tax-efficient withdrawals via capital gains,

but you're maintaining that same kind of tax relationship amongst your accounts over time. And so you're not like dying with a massive RSP and nothing else. You're not melting down your whole RSP too early and paying too much tax in the early days. So it's just, I think, a good, like, in the absence of any kind of planning, I think that's an approach that people should maybe think about taking. right? And again, I don't know specifically why it worked. I didn't dig too deep into it. But when I ranked the eight strategies across like sustainability of retirement income, old age security clawback, total taxation paid, total net estate value at the end of the eight strategies, that one was never the worst and it was almost always in the top three. So if you don't have a real decumulation plan, I think that's an interesting starting point. Okay. And like do you, what do you say about that 4% rule? Like is it, I guess, a good rule of thumb. I know it was created decades ago. Things have changed quite a bit. We talked about fixed income just being very different in the last five years compared to previous decades. I know that that one, I don't know why. It just keeps coming up and up. I've also seen, I think, a paper from Vanguard a while back where they were looking at variable withdrawal. So depending on how well you're, returns have done, I guess you, I can't remember exactly. I think if you've done better,

you can withdraw a bit more and vice versa, if the returns have been lower, if I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah. And so that approach, a variable withdrawal will largely solve for what we call sequence of returns risk, right? So let's start with the 4% rule. So the 4% rule, I think, it's not, first of all, it's not a rule. It's an observation, right? Bill Bangan just looked at some market history and determined that 4% was essentially sustainable. Given the data that he was using, which was only U.S. data over a fixed period of time, he determined that a 4% withdrawal adjusted for inflation led to a very, very high probability of success. It was an observation. He never called it the 4% rule. It was basically named that after, and then he became very famous for it. It's very

interesting data. I do think there's a number of problems with it. I think one, it makes absolutely no allowance for tax. So withdrawing 4% from your RSP versus 4% from your TFSA is going to leave you with significantly different after tax spending amounts, right? And that's what we're trying to solve for is this after tax spending in retirement. So it makes no allocation for that. It was a very fixed period of time. It was only U.S. data, right? So there's a number of kind of problems with it. I would never rely on the 4% rule as gospel. Some people are like, it's a rule. It's a law. A lot of people do. That's why I brought it out. Yeah, no, for sure it isn't. And this is US data. Canada's withdrawal rates have actually been very, very high as well, like

for north of 4%. And if you look at the history, that was sustainable. Other countries, that wasn't the case. Like Italy and Japan's safe withdrawal rate was like 0.8% or something like that, right? And people say, well, yeah, you know, those markets did really, really poorly. Well, yeah, we don't know how our market's going to do for the next 50 years either, right? So you shouldn't, again, going back to our initial discussion on using history to infer decisions about the future, there is no universal cosmic law that says stocks must return 10% and 4% is the safe withdrawal rate. So don't use it as a decumulation of retirement plan. I think where it's useful is if you just naively approach the problem of roughly how much money

do I need and you have no professional advice and you have relatively low financial literacy but just need a North Star. Like you just need something to kind of aim towards. I think, yeah, 25 times your expenses, which is the inverse of the 4% rule, is a really. reasonable place to aim for. Beyond that, I don't think it's very, very useful. I think it's, I don't know that it's dangerous per se, but I don't think it's actually sustainable in any way, like as a, as a plan, right? It's just not, it's just not a plan. And the variable withdrawal, is that kind of fixes the sequence of return rates or minimizes the risk? I guess you can't really fully fix it, but you also have to realize that maybe in down years, you're going to probably have to

cut back on some spending too, right? That's one of the downsides of this rule. That's the downside. So to the degree that you can remain flexible in your spending, at least in some categories, like, look, we all have fixed expenses. If you've got a mortgage, you can't not pay the mortgage, right? But if you like to shop at the fancy butcher, you might have to go down to, you know, whatever, save on foods or Safeway or something instead for a few months when the market's, you know, not performing up to your needs. If you can be flexible in that type of spending, then you largely solve the sequence of returns risk. The sequence of returns risk just basically says even if you take two people who got the same average returns over a period, when you're withdrawing

from a portfolio, the order of returns that you earn actually impacts the outcome, right? So even if you got 6% over 30 years, two investors get 6% over 30 years on average, we know it's not a linear 6% per year. We know it's up 10, down 12, up 15. If you had all your good years first and then all your bad years, you're going to end up with way more money than if you had all your bad years first and then all your good years. So it's the sequence of the returns you earn determines your outcome. Now, again, when you're doing retirement planning a lot of the time, you're just thinking of like the 4% rule or a fixed level of spending.

And you can see that that sequence risk could lead you to running out of money too early, right? But to your point, if you can be flexible and variable with the withdrawals from the portfolio, so when markets are down, you cut your withdrawals. When markets are good, you step them back up a bit. you largely solve the problem. There's a kind of a tack-on system to that that are known as guardrails. And so it's like you take a permanent spending cut or like if the market drops 5%, you don't do anything.

But if it drops 10%, you drop your spending 10%, and you can do it permanently or temporarily. If it drops 20%, you might not drop your withdrawals further, but you kind of put guardrails around the flat spending line that you are aiming for. So if you can just adjust your spending in response to the returns of your portfolio, then you largely solve it, right? But again, it depends because your mom has annuity, CPP, P, PEOAS.

If people have pensions, their fixed income floor is high enough that that's less impactful. But if your portfolio is doing all of your spending work for you in retirement, it becomes a little bit more difficult and risky. Yeah. She's at a point I have to encourage her to spend her money. It's a legit problem.

Yeah, she's an accountant. So sometimes she doesn't realize that she has more money to spend than she does, but it is what it is. I think, no, I think that's a great approach is to people just give them some, just a mental framework. I think the withdrawing proportionally, I think that's a great concept. Just looking at being flexible, maybe just not applying the 4% rule because you heard it and a lot of people swear by it because it has its drawbacks. It was a relatively small sample too, I think. And obviously, US only that it was done on.

So I think that's some great guidelines. Before I let you go, anything else that you wanted to share with our audience, because we do have. a heart stop because of me. I do have a doctor's appointment, which you're very familiar with the doctor. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. No, and I had to change the time of our podcast. So thanks for accommodating that. Or we might have had more time if I could have stuck to the original time. But that was my bad. So no, I just think there's, look, there's a lot of information out there. Just kind of be careful if you listen to when you need professional advice, seek it. There is no right to model for investment advice, right? Some people need a full on handholding portfolio

manager to do everything for them. Some people can do it themselves forever. Some people need a check in once in a while. So approach it like any other service model. If you need financial advice, seek it when you need it and seek it in the style and at the cost that makes the most sense to you. And play defense before you play offense, I think is probably the biggest takeaway. Like get all the other defensive areas of your plan solved like insurance and risk management and estate planning and all that kind of stuff first before you worry too too much about the rest. And honestly, if you just don't screw it up most of the time and make catastrophic mistakes, you're probably going to be okay.

So that's the risk management coming into play. You got to stick around long enough and be able to play the game long enough to not get totally knocked off course. Right? If you can do that, probably be okay. The long game. So I think that's a good way to end it. Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining the podcast. We'll have to have you back now wait for two years.

I think this is really useful, especially for a self-directed investor, just getting some more guidance and of course just been following you quite a bit, talk to you before. I highly recommend for people looking for advice only financial planner. I think, you know, you could do a lot worse than going with you. I would highly recommend to anyone asking for that. I would point them over to you whether they're physicians or not. So thanks again for coming on the podcast. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. The Canadian Investor Podcast should not be construed as investment or financial advice. The host and guests featured may own securities or assets discussed on this podcast.

Always do your own due diligence or consult with a financial professional before making any financial or investment decisions.