@calmmoneycoach: A $500,000 RRSP was never $500,000 New series. This is the opener. While on vacation this month put together a series on retirement stuff I wish was taught. You spent 40 years being told one thing. Save. Max the RRSP. Don’t touch it. Then you hit 60 with a pile of money and no instruction manual for getting it back out. That’s the hard part, and it’s the half nobody hands you a manual for. One thing I’d bet gets misread. Everyone wants to know which account to draw from first. Fair question. It’s just not where the money is. The whole bundle of drawdown decisions is worth about 1.59 points a year (Blanchett and Kaplan, Morningstar, 2013, US data), and the account-order piece on its own is only 0.23 of that. The real money sits in two places. Whether you’ll flex your spending in a bad year, and whether you use the years when your brackets are empty. The order is close to a rounding error next to those. Which brings up a term you’ll hear me use all series. The golden window. That’s our own label for it. It’s the stretch between roughly 55 and 71, after work stops and before CPP, OAS and RRIF minimums stack up, when your brackets are the emptiest they’ll ever be. Most people sleep right through it. Why the rush? The year you turn 72, the RRIF minimum is 5.28 percent. On a $500,000 RRIF that’s $26,400 forced out and taxed whether you need it or not. You didn’t choose it. It chose you. So a $500,000 RRSP was never really $500,000. The CRA is your silent partner on every dollar in there, and the bill comes due on your terms or on theirs. The math is teachable. We’ll do all of it. The permission to spend is the harder half. That’s where we start. This is education, not advice. It’s the map. Your accountant and planner do the driving.

Brian | Calm Money Coach

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Tuesday 11 August 2026 19:27:50 GMT