The Dirty Little Secret of Financial Planning

Today I’m going to tell you guys the dirty little secret of financial planning.

You know, those documents that a planner will charge you $2,000, $3,000 or even $5,000 for? Or, worse yet, give to you for “free” in exchange for extracting a 1% management fee off your hard-earned cash for decades.

Slide in close, because here’s the secret:

That financial plan the industry thinks is worth thousands of dollars? Software does a lot of the work.

My vendetta against the financial advice industry is decades old at this point — fees are a return killer, always will be, and it’s easier than ever to avoid them in 2025 — but it really accelerated starting a couple of years ago.

Here’s what happened.

A friend went to a fee-only advisor and emerged with a plan that told him that he was on track for a prosperous retirement.

Essentially it told him to keep shovelling dollars into his TFSA/RRSP, retire at 55, and then take the RRSP dollars out when he had very little income. After RRSPs were withdrawn, take CPP/OAS, spend $x per year, and ride off happily into the sunset.

He and I have talked about his financial situation many times. He’s in his mid-40s and has a net worth of about $1.5M. He’s been a hardcore saver for decades. He’s done 98% of the work already. All he needs is a withdrawal strategy that isn’t a complete disaster.

There was nothing wrong with the document, but what astounded me was the cost. He paid $2,500 to get an advisor to tell him to basically maintain the course. He was doing the heavy lifting himself. All the plan did was to confirm a strategy that he was already doing.

I’m not here to disparage the financial plan itself. I think it’s an incredible document and something that everyone should do. I meet so many investors who don’t have any overarching strategy besides “I like dividends” or “I want to end up with as much money as possible at the end of my life.” Those are the beginnings of plans, but they’re not a financial plan.

What I am here to tell you is the following:

1. Financial plans aren’t that complicated

2. You can easily figure out most of it yourself and

3. For the stuff you can’t figure out, there’s low-cost help available

So, let’s do it. Here’s how to build your own financial plan, why a lot of details don’t matter, and some low-cost solutions if you need a little help.

Your financial plan doesn’t need to be complicated

Let me take you through the ridiculously simple way I constructed my own financial plan.

I started at the end. I asked myself what financial independence looked like for me, and it came down to just a few different things:

• I wanted a retirement that would be funded by dividends

• With dividend growth to inflation-proof the whole exercise

• Spending just the dividends so I’d end up with a large nest egg (with plans to donate it to charity)

• While being agnostic to any potential government support in my golden years. I want to make it on my own, not be dependent on OAS

That’s really about it. After that, the rest became just details. Such a strategy doesn’t mesh really well with large RRSP withdrawals in old age, so I’ve started slowly liquidating my RRSPs when the time has been right. I put any new funds into my TFSA and then taxable account, respectfully.

I aim for about a 4% average dividend yield because that meshes really well with a 4% retirement withdrawal rate. I also think that’s a nice mix between dividend growth and yield. Some stocks I buy have higher yields, while others are lower. Some have higher dividend growth rates, while others don’t offer much. On the average, it works out to about a 4% yield with 4-5% dividend growth — a compromise I’m happy with.

From there, I follow the Pareto Principle theory of financial planning. As long as I get the big things right, the details don’t really matter so much. Besides, I think that details like figuring out the best age to take CPP are both a) fairly easy to figure out at the time and b) not really that important in the scheme of things. As long as I make a pretty good decision there, I’m good.

Taxes are another area soon-to-be retirees are worried about, and my answer to that is pretty much the same. As long as you follow pretty good tax strategies — like collapsing RRSPs during low income years — you’ll end up just fine. Online tax calculators are a huge help here, too. You can play around with certain scenarios and figure out the best way to proceed tax-wise.

I use the excellent taxtips.ca site, there are a bunch of calculators there.

Some may argue that the real value in a financial plan is the professional taking a look at your situation and giving it their seal of approval. Well, good news. You can get that seal of approval at only a fraction of the cost.

DIY financial planning software

Once I realized how much heavy lifting financial planning software actually does, I made it my mission to find a decent DIY option.

I first went to try the financial planning software the pros use, but, alas, Conquest Planning doesn’t want anything to do with plebs like me. They’re happy to sell their software to planners on a cost-per-use model, but there’s nothing for the DIY community.

Shucks. Onto plan B.

So I Googled. And I Googled some more. I ended up finding quite a few different options that range from almost as good as the software the pros use to free resources that’ll allow any DIYer to get a solid grip on the important stuff.

Here’s what I did. I tried them all. I took my info and put it into every online financial planning service I could find, using everything from free services offered by the banks or the government to paid services that promise an experience every bit as good as you’ll get with a planner.

And one emerged the winner. Ironically, it was the one I tried first, making the rest of my experiment a bit of a waste. But that’s okay. I’m willing to sacrifice for you guys.

Anyway, Optiml was the best one. Here’s why.

Optiml

Optiml is the most robust of all the financial planning softwares I tried. So, what makes it so good?

The level of detail is quite impressive. Every service asked for investment account info, to estimate when you’ll want to collect CPP, and so on. But Optiml went above and beyond that, asking detailed questions like what I wanted spending to be, ongoing goals, and much more. It also factored in potential inheritances, which many competing services didn’t do.

I took about 20 minutes to give it all the info it wanted — and I didn’t have to spend a lot of time looking stuff up. So it might be even longer for y’all. But it also flows smoothly and isn’t too complicated. I’m confident most of my readers are smart enough that they can use the software correctly — even if someone from a certain industry might not think so.

It’ll give you detailed financial plan and then offer suggestions — like steps you could use to max spending, max savings, or to achieve whatever goals you’d like.

It’s an excellent service, head and shoulders above the rest on this list. It’s every bit as robust as the stuff the professionals are using, it looks great, ease of use is there. I walked away legitimately thinking this service is an advisor killer.

The only downfall is the cost. Optiml costs $99 per year for the essentials plan, or up to $349 per year for the advanced plan that’ll let you play around with more options. I used the bottom tier, and it did everything I needed it to. But those of you with more complicated financial situations will want to upgrade to either the middle or top tier. You’ll need to upgrade to add things like business income or rental property analysis into the plan.

There is a free trial available, which lasts 14 days.

For me, Optiml really just reinforced my priors. I already knew my retirement was in good shape, but it further cemented that. It also gave me suggestions on how I could end up with the most amount of money, or to maximize my spending. According to Optiml, I should be spending a lot more than I currently do. I’m not about to do that because, as I stated earlier, my goals include using my money to make a difference at the end of my life. But it was nice to be able to see that plan with just a couple mouse clicks.

The bottom line

I want Canadians to have a prosperous retirement filled with more dividends than what they know to do with. I hope this newsletter helps y’all with that. Or, failing that, I hope it’s still useful for those of you who aren’t as hardcore about their dividends as I am.

My issue with the financial advice industry is two-fold. Firstly, the attitude that DIYers are doomed without their help just grinds my gears. And secondly, I’d like to see their services cost a whole lot less. The fact is the people who need financial planning help the most are ones that can’t really afford to pay thousands of dollars for a financial plan.

I’m super grateful I live in 2025 for a few different reasons. We’re better than ever at accepting those with a different lifestyle than the norm, even though we could get better. And technology has made so many things in our lives easier — including financial planning.

But mostly, I’m a fan of a solution that costs 90% less than the alternative. That’s more money back into your wallet, and that’s always a good thing.