Time to get your collective brooms out and sweep out your investments. Every year you should clean out financially. Clean up old credit cards, plan to clean up old debts. Decluttering financially is an essential start-of-year activity.
As a start of year/end of year task, in 2010, I went through my many investment accounts. I noticed that I had a lot of investment vehicles that I should eject from my portfolio. Why was I keeping them around? Some of the odd reasons were:
- They might actually rebound sorry Charlie, that boat has sailed for these stale leftover investments (some from the tech boom), so that is not a good reason.
- They seem to be paying OK dividends might not be a bad reason, but then again, if I looked at the MER on these Mutual funds, I was paying other people a lot of money to get these dividends.
- I’m a lazy sod who just won’t admit when he is wrong I believe we have a winner!
What investments needed financial decluttering?
- Two AGF Mutual funds that plodded along but had absurd MERs on them
- Some left over Cisco stock that used to pay out, but still has not got back to where I bought it some 10 years ago
- A TD bond mutual fund that was a very high MER fund as well
I took all the proceeds from those sales and bought a Dividend ETF. Unfortunately, the losses cannot be taken advantage of since they were in an RRSP. Should I be buying Dividend devices in an RRSP? Some say no, I like dividends, so that is what I did.
I got some Japanese equities in my self-directed RRSP that I bought in the late 90’s. Keep meaning to put them out to pasture and buy something with a decent return or at least a good prospect of a decent return.
Foreign dividends are regular income, so keep them in your RRSP. But Canadian dividends pay very, very little tax in your hands, so keeping them in an RRSP is basically just giving your money to the government. There’s a small benefit to keeping them in a TFSA, but really, the dividend credit is so nice that you really should consider keeping things that you own primarily for the dividend in an unsheltered account.
The end of the following Canadian Tax Resource post implies that you can declare a deemed disposition of your Nortel shares in 2009 due to the bankruptcy
http://blog.taxresource.ca/what-is-the-fmv-of-nortel/
If true, this would allow you to take a capital loss on your 2009 taxes.
You’re not so lazy. At least you got around to cleaning out your investment portfolio and getting rid of the stuff that wasn’t working for you. Great job.