Financial Planning Advice We've Changed Our Minds On Over The Last Decade

Five pieces of financial advice we'd give differently today

Anyone who's been giving financial advice for a while will tell you the same thing: your views evolve. Tax rules change, products change, and more importantly, you watch enough real situations play out that you start noticing where the standard advice falls short. Here are five things we'd tell people differently now than we would have ten years ago.

1. "Always max your TFSA first" isn't the whole story

The TFSA is still one of the best tax-advantaged accounts in Canada, and most Canadians dramatically underuse it. Half the people who have one treat it like a savings account and miss the entire point. So yes — use it, invest inside it, don't just park cash there.

But the blanket advice of "TFSA before RRSP, always" misses the nuance. The right answer depends on your income, your tax bracket today versus the one you expect in retirement, and what you'd realistically do with an RRSP refund. For someone earning $40,000, a TFSA is usually the better starting point. For someone in a high tax bracket, the RRSP often pulls ahead — especially if the refund actually gets reinvested. For most people, the real answer is some combination of both.

2. Don't bundle insurance and investing

Critical illness and disability policies often come with a return-of-premium rider — pay your premiums for 15 or 20 years, never make a claim, and you get all your money back. It sounds like a great deal. You're "getting your money back" if nothing bad happens.

The problem is what that feature costs. A return-of-premium contract can run two to three times the price of a basic term version of the same coverage. If you took the difference and invested it over 20 or 30 years, you'd come out significantly ahead — even after accounting for the lump sum you'd have given back to you under the return-of-premium contract. The premiums you eventually get back also have no interest attached, so inflation has been quietly eroding them the whole time.

The cleaner approach: get insurance for insurance, keep investments as investments, and don't let the two get tangled up.

3. Tracking every dollar isn't the answer

Detailed monthly budgeting — every transaction categorized, every category capped — is exhausting and rarely sustainable. Doing that exercise once, maybe annually, can be useful for awareness. Doing it every month is usually a waste of energy that doesn't actually move the needle.

A better system works with human behaviour instead of against it. Automate the committed expenses (housing, transportation, financial obligations). Automate the saving and investing. Then take whatever's left for discretionary spending and put it in one account or one card. Spend it down to zero. When it's gone, it's gone. No spreadsheet required.

4. There's no universal "right" savings rate

The old rule was 15 to 20% of net income, full stop. Anything less meant you were falling behind.

Reality is messier. Life has seasons. New grads paying down student loans, parents with three kids in club sports, owners reinvesting in a young practice — they may genuinely only be able to save 5% right now, and that's fine, as long as there's a plan to ramp up when the season changes. What matters more than hitting a percentage is building the habit early and having a clear path to higher savings rates during your peak earning years. Saving 5% of $400,000 later beats saving 20% of $60,000 now in absolute dollars.

The caveat: "I can only save 5%" because of overcommitted housing or a luxury car payment is a different conversation. That's a structural problem, not a season.

5. CPP isn't the bad deal it gets made out to be

It's common, especially for incorporated business owners, to hear advice about avoiding CPP entirely by paying yourself in dividends rather than salary. The logic is straightforward — skip the CPP contributions, take home more cash, invest the difference yourself, beat the return.

The math looks cleaner on paper than it usually does in practice. CPP is guaranteed, indexed to inflation, and paid for life. It functions like a defined-benefit pension, which is something almost no one outside of teaching, healthcare, or the public sector has access to anymore. It also reduces sequence-of-returns risk in retirement — having a baseline of indexed income coming in means you're less exposed to a bad market in your first few years of retirement.

For an incorporated business owner, the employer-side contribution is also a deduction to the corporation, which softens the cost considerably. The dividend-only strategy still has its place in some situations, but as a default rule, it's far less compelling than it looks at first glance.

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