Tag: opinion

By Harold Phillips | June 2026

I've been lifting weights for about five years. Mostly strength training: squats, deadlifts, pressing things, the boring stuff that works. I train at Anytime Fitness three or four times a week. I eat high protein, cook most of my own food, and genuinely enjoy meal prep in that slightly-unhinged way that makes my coworkers ask questions.

And in five years of doing this, the supplement industry has tried very hard to get my money.

It has mostly failed.

The Problem with the Supplement Aisle

Walk into any GNC or Popeye's in this country and you are immediately surrounded by tubs the size of small appliances, each promising to do something vague but impressive-sounding: "fuel your performance," "ignite your gains," "support lean muscle." The price tags on these things are genuinely staggering. You can spend $100 on a month's supply of something that has never been tested in a properly controlled trial, or $200 on a "proprietary blend" that lists its key ingredients as a ratio you can't verify, produced by a brand whose entire marketing budget appears to be influencers in gym parking lots.

I'm not a scientist. I don't have a degree in nutrition or biochemistry. But I am the kind of person who, when spending money on something, reads things. And what I've found, after years of reading things, is that the supplement industry is largely selling expensive urine.

That's the take. Here's what I mean.

My Take

The honest truth about most supplements is that they're filling a gap that doesn't need filling, or filling a real gap in the most expensive way possible.

Take protein powder. This is probably the most defensible supplement category because protein intake actually matters, and some people genuinely struggle to hit their targets from food alone. Fine. But protein powder is, at its core, food. Concentrated food, shelf-stable food, convenient food. But still food. And when you compare the cost-per-gram of protein in a $70 tub of whey isolate to the cost-per-gram in chicken thighs from No Frills, the gap is often embarrassing. I can hit my daily protein target from eggs, Greek yogurt, chicken, and cottage cheese and spend less money than a supplement habit would cost. So I do that.

BCAAs (branched-chain amino acids) are a particular pet peeve of mine. The pitch is that you need them to preserve muscle and reduce soreness. The problem is that if you're eating adequate protein, you're already consuming BCAAs. The research suggesting standalone BCAA supplements provide additional benefit, beyond what you'd get from sufficient dietary protein, is genuinely weak. You're paying for something your chicken breast already gave you. It's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist for most people eating reasonably well.

Pre-workout is its own category of problem. Some of it is just caffeine, which means you could have a coffee instead. Some of it has caffeine plus a handful of other stimulants in combinations I'm not comfortable with, marketed aggressively to people who are already spending their mornings in a gym. The dependency cycle that builds around pre-workout is real and kind of uncomfortable to watch. I've seen people who genuinely can't train without it, which seems like the wrong direction to be moving. A cup of coffee costs 30 cents. The pre-workout doing basically the same thing costs $3. Hard pass.

Fat burners are where I stop being polite. The category is, at best, wishful thinking, and at worst, an exploitation of people who are already trying hard and deserve better than expensive placebo. There is no supplement that burns fat in any meaningful, sustained way that isn't just a stimulant making you temporarily more alert. Thermogenic supplements are not moving the needle on your body composition in ways that diet and training aren't already responsible for. The "studies" cited in the marketing often involve small sample sizes, short durations, or results that don't replicate. I have never met anyone whose body composition actually changed because of a fat burner. I have met many people who bought several rounds of them.

Mass gainers are interesting because they do work, in a narrow sense: consuming an enormous number of calories will cause you to gain mass. But a mass gainer is mostly maltodextrin and milk protein. It's expensive powder you're buying instead of just eating more food. If you genuinely struggle to eat enough calories (and some people do), you can make a high-calorie shake at home with oats, milk, nut butter, and a banana for a fraction of the cost. The convenience premium on commercial mass gainers is massive. I've never bought one.

What I Actually Take

Two things. That's it.

Creatine monohydrate. The unflavoured, boring, five-dollar-per-hundred-grams stuff. Not creatine HCL, not buffered creatine, not anything with "advanced" in the name. Just creatine monohydrate, which is one of the most-studied supplements in existence and one of the very few that has consistently demonstrated benefit in proper research. It works. It's cheap. The mechanism is well-understood: it supports phosphocreatine stores, which helps with short, high-intensity efforts, exactly the kind of thing that happens in strength training.

Here's what creatine doesn't do, to be honest about it: it's not magic, and it's not fast. The water retention when you first start is real. I put on a couple of kilograms in the first two weeks, almost none of it from muscle. This surprises people who expect to immediately feel different. You probably won't immediately feel different. The benefits accrue over weeks, not days.

And the loading phase that supplement companies push — taking four or five times the normal dose for a week to "saturate faster" — is pretty unnecessary. Taking three to five grams a day and being patient works fine. The loading phase mostly benefits supplement companies who sell you five times as much product in week one.

I don't cycle off it. I don't take it at any specific time. I just take it. It costs me roughly $20 every few months.

The second thing is electrolytes. Specifically, Organika's Wild Raspberry electrolytes, post-training, on harder days. This one took me longer to come around to, because for a long time I thought electrolyte drinks were a sports-marketing product aimed at people who don't drink enough water. And a lot of them are. But when you're training hard, sweating, and trying to recover, there's a real case for sodium, potassium, and magnesium beyond what plain water provides. The question is whether you're paying for those minerals or paying for branding.

Organika is a Canadian company, and their electrolyte product is straightforward. The ingredient list reads like an ingredient list, not a chemistry exam. The Wild Raspberry flavour is good enough that I actually want to drink it after a workout rather than tolerating it. The price per serving is competitive with the US brands that get more attention online. I found it at a Shoppers near me and I've been buying it since. You can find it through their website if you want to try it.

That's it. Everything else in my routine is food. I wrote about how I've been eating to support training in a bit more depth in my post about trying Factor meals while prepping for a powerlifting meet. That piece covers the food side. This one is about why I've never bothered with most of what gets sold alongside it.

The Other Side

The reasonable counterargument is that I'm missing out on benefits I don't notice, or that specific training goals demand more targeted supplementation. And sure, if you're a competitive athlete, there are edge cases where specific interventions make sense. But I'm an amateur lifter who trains at a community gym and has never competed in anything. My goals are straightforward: get stronger, stay healthy, feel good. You don't need a stack for that.

The other counterargument is that I'm being unfair by focusing on the worst-case products. Also fair. There are decent supplement companies making clean products with honest labels. Creatine exists. Vitamin D is probably worth taking if you live in Canada and spend nine months indoors. Magnesium has reasonable evidence for some people. I'm not anti-supplement as a category.

I'm anti-spending money on things that don't work, which a lot of the industry is.

Look, I'm not a doctor, and I want to be clear about that. My creatine habit is based on my own reading and my own experience, not a conversation with a sports medicine professional. If you're on any medication or have underlying health conditions, you should talk to someone who actually went to medical school before adding anything to your routine. That applies to me too. I just haven't had a reason to revisit it.

Where This Leaves Us

The supplement industry in Canada is a largely unregulated space, notably less scrutinized than pharmaceuticals. It's structured to sell you more things than you need at prices higher than they should be. The marketing is sophisticated, and the fitness influencer pipeline means the promotion machine is enormous. The people spending money on this stuff are mostly people who are already doing the right things: training consistently, trying to eat well, putting in the work. They deserve better than what most of those tubs are offering.

My approach is food first, always. Supplements for the gaps food can't close, and only where the evidence is solid. That leaves me with two products and a lot more money for groceries.

The proprietary blend gathering dust at the gym is not the reason anyone's making progress. The training is the reason. The food is the reason. The consistency is the reason.

Everything else is, mostly, noise.

• This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience with supplements and strength training. I'm not a medical professional — talk to your doctor or a registered dietitian before making changes to your routine. I've included a referral link for the Organika product I personally use; if you buy through it, I may receive a small reward at no extra cost to you.

By Harold Phillips | June 2026

A few months ago I was on the phone with my dad, and he asked me (not for the first time) whether I was ever going to get a car. I live in Toronto. I take the TTC. I have a cat and a one-bedroom apartment and a partner who has also never owned a vehicle. My dad grew up in a town where a car was as basic as having shoes, and to him the absence of one is a choice that requires explanation.

I gave him the same answer I always give: it's cheaper.

But this time he pushed back. "Is it actually, though?" And I realized I had a general sense of the math but had never actually sat down and totalled the thing properly. So I did.

The Numbers I Was Actually Spending

Let me back up and show what I'm currently spending to get around Toronto without a car.

TTC monthly passes for both me and my partner run $312 a month together ($156 each at the current adult fare). I've had an occasional back-and-forth about whether the monthly pass is really worth it versus paying per ride, and the answer is yes, easily, if you commute at all.

Then there's the rideshare line. This is the number that surprised me when I pulled it. Over the last twelve months, I averaged about $85 a month on Uber and Lyft combined. That's not every month: some months are $40, some months are $150 when the weather is bad or the TTC decides to have one of its moments. If you want the breakdown of how I think about Uber versus Lyft, I wrote that up separately, and that comparison lives here.

The cottage runs are the other variable. The family cottage is in Quebec's Eastern Townships, my parents' place, summer weekends, a stretch in July. The 401-to-10 drive is not something I can do on a TTC pass. We rent a car a few times a year through ZipCar or Enterprise, depending on what's available. I'd estimate we spend roughly $600 to $700 a year on car rentals for those trips. Call it $55 a month averaged out.

Total monthly transport cost: roughly $450.

Annualized: about $5,400.

What a Car Would Actually Cost

Here's where it gets genuinely uncomfortable for the pro-car argument.

A used car in Toronto right now (nothing exciting, a 2019 Civic or equivalent) is running $18,000 to $22,000 on the used market, which has never fully recovered its pre-pandemic price sanity. If you finance that over five years, you're looking at payments in the neighbourhood of $350 to $450 a month depending on your rate.

Then there's insurance. Ontario car insurance is its own special frustration. A 34-year-old male in Toronto, especially someone without years of continuous driving history, is looking at $200 to $280 a month minimum. Some quotes I've seen were higher. The insurers treat Toronto addresses as evidence of something terrible.

Gas. The average Canadian drives about 20,000 kilometres a year. At Toronto-ish gas prices and a reasonably efficient car, that's around $200 a month, probably more if you're doing regular 400-series highway runs.

Parking. A monthly parking spot in or near downtown Toronto runs $200 to $350 depending on the neighbourhood. If you're parking at your apartment in Leslieville, add that to the bill. If you're parking on the street and counting on luck, add the cost of the occasional ticket.

The 407 gets its own line. If you're commuting by car anywhere across the top of the city, you're on the 407 regularly, and those tolls add up to a number that feels like it should be a joke but isn't. I've heard people cite $200 a month in 407 tolls as not unusual for regular users.

Oil changes, tire rotations, tires themselves (you need winters in Ontario), licensing, and the periodic repair you didn't plan for. Budget $150 to $200 a month for maintenance and you're probably being optimistic.

Add all of that up for a baseline Toronto car ownership scenario: payments plus insurance plus gas plus parking plus the 407 plus maintenance. You're looking at $1,100 to $1,500 a month.

Annualized: $13,200 to $18,000. Minimum.

The Comparison

My transport spending: about $5,400 a year.
Entry-level car ownership in Toronto: $13,200 to $18,000 a year.

The gap is somewhere between $7,800 and $12,600 a year in favour of being car-free. That's not nothing. Over five years, that's $40,000 to $63,000, and that math doesn't even account for the depreciation baked into a financed vehicle losing value while you pay it off.

I mentioned in my monthly spend breakdown that my personal spending runs around $30,000 a year after shared costs. A car payment and insurance alone would push that number up by $6,000 to $9,000. That's not a rounding error. That's real money going somewhere other than my RRSP.

The Part Where I'm Honest About the Tradeoffs

Here's the thing: I'm not a car-free evangelist. The math works for me because of specific conditions that don't apply to everyone.

Leslieville is a walkable neighbourhood. I can walk to a grocery store, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, the gym. The Queen streetcar stops three blocks from my apartment. The Don Valley Trail is close enough that I run it without needing transit first. If I lived in Scarborough or Etobicoke — further from the core, less served by frequent transit — the calculus would shift. Taking an hour-long bus to reach a subway is a different life from my commute.

The cottage run is a genuine inconvenience. Every summer I'm doing the rental car shuffle: making the booking, arranging pickup, returning the vehicle, dealing with limited weekend availability during peak July when everyone else apparently also rented a car. It works, but it adds friction that actual car owners don't have. If the cottage were mine, or if I went up every single weekend instead of three or four times a summer, I might do the math differently.

Groceries without a car are a logistical puzzle. My No Frills haul depends on either carrying bags on the TTC (which caps how much I can carry at once) or the occasional Uber for a big run. It's fine, but I won't pretend it's as easy as driving a car to a parking lot and loading the trunk.

Kids or a suburb change everything. If you have school runs, extracurriculars, and a detached house in Mississauga or Brampton, car-free is not a choice; it's a genuine hardship. I don't have kids, I live in the inner city, and my partner also takes the TTC. That combination is the whole reason this works.

Winter TTC is a specific category of Toronto suffering. When the line is delayed in January and you're standing on a Broadview platform at minus fifteen, every person pulling out of a warm underground parking garage looks like they made the correct life choice. I've had months where the rideshare tab was $200 because of weather-related transit failures. That's factored into my average, but barely.

My Actual Take

I'm not going to pretend the car-free life is obviously correct for everyone. It isn't. The suburbs don't work without a car. Families, mostly, don't work without a car. If your job requires vehicle access or your medical situation makes transit hard, this is all irrelevant to you.

But for me, living in Leslieville, working hybrid, taking the TTC to everything within reasonable transit distance, the car-free math is not close. I'm saving somewhere between $650 and $1,000 a month compared to what owning a car would cost in Toronto right now. Over five years of ownership, I could theoretically have funded most of a down payment with that difference, if this city's market were sane enough for that to mean anything.

The pressure to own a car in a city like Toronto is partly cultural, partly the assumption baked into how Canada's suburbs were designed, and partly genuine. The transit isn't always good. The weather is real. The city keeps growing in directions that make transit access worse, not better.

But the numbers are the numbers. Honest.

• This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different, so do your own research.

By Harold Phillips | June 2026

Every quarter I sit down with a coffee and go through every recurring charge I'm paying. I've written about that process before — the quarterly audit, the $97 I found last time, the Neon situation I'm still mildly embarrassed about. The system works. But this round, the audit almost wasn't enough, because the things that nearly got me weren't the monthly charges at all.

They were the annual ones.

The Dangerous Ones Bill Once a Year

Here's the thing: monthly subscriptions have a built-in detection mechanism. They show up every four weeks. You see them enough times that eventually one catches your eye when you're scrolling through your statement. The $16.99 from an app you forgot about pings your brain at least occasionally.

Annual renewals don't do that. They land once, you're briefly aware of them, and then they disappear for eleven months. By the time they renew, you might not even remember signing up. The charge looks unfamiliar. You Google it. You think, "oh right," and move on without asking whether you actually used it enough to justify another year.

I found three of these this quarter. Three annual renewals I had mentally filed under "handled" that were about to auto-renew, or already had.

The first one: a cloud storage tier I'd bumped up during a project last year when I needed more space temporarily. Project finished. Storage need gone. I'd been intending to downgrade for months. The annual renewal date hit while I was travelling in March, and I missed it by four days. Full year charged.

The second: a password manager family plan I had convinced my partner to try. They tried it, didn't like the interface, went back to their old app. I kept using it but didn't need the family tier. That annual renewal was coming up in two weeks when I caught it. Downgraded in time, saved about $40.

The third was a software subscription for a tool I use maybe four times a year for a specific work task. Not useless, but $89 CAD/year for four uses works out to over $22 per use. I could just expense it per-use when I need it, but the subscription pricing felt cheaper when I signed up. The annual renewal is what forced me to do that math.

Free Trials Are a Whole Other Category

I want to separate these out because they operate differently. A free trial that converts to a paid subscription is a classic trap, and I've been caught by it before. But this year I ran into something more specific: trials that converted at a discounted rate, then raised the price six months later.

One streaming service I signed up for last fall had a promotional first year. Fine. The follow-up email telling me the regular rate was kicking in arrived during a busy week, and I almost auto-dismissed it. The jump was from $7.99/month (introductory) to $14.99/month. That's not a "welcome to the standard price" situation. That's nearly doubling.

I cancelled and re-signed up using a different payment method. Same account, new promotional rate. I know that's a pain. The fact that it's worth doing is the problem.

The "Cancel by Phone" One Is Still Out There

Look, I thought this was dying out. It's not.

One of the services on my list (a home security monitoring add-on my partner and I set up a couple years ago) requires a phone call to cancel. Not chat. Not an online portal. A phone call, during business hours, to a retention team whose entire job is to talk you out of leaving.

I genuinely considered just letting it renew because I didn't want to deal with the call. That's the point. That's the design. A service I was paying $18.99/month for nearly got another year out of me because the cancellation process is friction by intention.

I made the call. It took twenty-three minutes. They offered me three different discounts and a "pause" option before they'd process the cancellation. I said no to all of them. The representative was perfectly pleasant. The architecture of the situation was not.

If a company needs to make cancellation that hard to keep customers, they know their product doesn't justify its price at full rate. I don't know what else to conclude.

The One I'm Keeping Anyway (Even Though It's Probably Bad Value)

Not everything I flagged this round, I cancelled.

There's a premium tier for a read-later app I've been paying for annually. I've done the math: the free tier would cover 90% of what I use it for. The premium features I actually use come out to maybe one or two things. The price is $45 CAD/year.

I kept it anyway.

Partly because I've been using the app for four years and I want them to stay in business. Partly because it genuinely is part of how I work, and the value of something that's woven into your habits is hard to quantify. Partly because $45/year is, as my partner helpfully pointed out, not worth the forty minutes I spent agonizing over it.

I'm not anti-subscription. I'm anti-autopilot. There's a difference. A subscription you've thought about and actively chosen to keep is fine. A subscription that's still billing you because the cancellation process is designed to wear you down is a different thing entirely.

How I Track Renewal Dates Now

The quarterly audit catches a lot. But annual renewals only appear once, so a quarterly sweep can still miss the window for some of them. This year I added one extra step.

For every annual subscription I keep, I create a calendar reminder seven days before the renewal date. Just a simple event: "[Service name] renews on [date]: $XX. Keep or cancel?" Seven days is enough time to decide and, if needed, to make the phone call without rushing.

Setting these up took about twenty minutes when I added them to my system. I'll save more than that in the time I won't spend disputing charges or doing the "wait, what is this?" search on my statement.

The seven-day window matters. Most cancellations need a few days to process. If you wait until the actual renewal date, you may already be charged for the next period. I learned this the hard way with the cloud storage situation.

The Pattern Across All of These

Annual timing. Introductory rates that step up after a year. Cancellation flows designed to create friction. All of these are different tactics doing the same thing: counting on the gap between when you made the decision and when the consequences hit.

You signed up in a moment of enthusiasm or need. The renewal comes back around when that memory has faded and the mental cost of cancelling feels higher than just going along with it.

I'm not saying companies are evil for doing this. I'm saying it's worth understanding the dynamic, because once you see it you can build systems to counter it. Calendar reminders. Annual billing in your spreadsheet, flagged separately from monthly. A twenty-minute check every time a free trial ends to ask yourself: was that actually good enough to pay for?

The quarterly audit is still the core of my system. But the annual renewal traps needed their own layer. Now they have one.

• This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different — do your own research.

By Harold Phillips | June 2026

Last verified: August 2026.

I didn’t leave TD dramatically. There was no single moment, no letter from the branch manager, no particularly egregious fee that pushed me over. I just sat down one afternoon in early 2022 with a spreadsheet and a bank statement and started adding things up. By the time I was done, I had a number on the screen that made me feel genuinely stupid for not having done this exercise four years earlier.

That number, roughly speaking, was somewhere north of $600. For nothing. Five years of monthly service charges, out-of-network ATM fees, the occasional overdraft, and a brief stretch where I was paying for e-Transfer sends because I hadn’t bothered to find out which account tier let you do them free. Six hundred dollars to TD — in exchange for a chequing account I could have had elsewhere for zero.

That’s this article.

The Fees, Itemized

The main one was the monthly account fee. I was on the TD Everyday Chequing account for most of my time there, which at various points over those five years cost me between $10.95 and $16.95 a month. There’s a waiver if you keep a minimum balance ($2,000 for the lower tier, more for the premium ones), which I sometimes had and sometimes didn’t. During the two months I was unemployed in 2019, I definitely didn’t. During stretches when I was putting money toward the RRSP I’d neglected for a decade, the balance dipped below the threshold more than once.

The math on that is annoying. You pay a fee to avoid a fee. Keep $2,000 sitting in your chequing account doing essentially nothing, or pay $15 a month for the right to have less than $2,000 in your chequing account. It’s a false choice, and it’s one that mostly catches people who actually need the money. Not people with comfortable six-figure household incomes who can effortlessly park two grand and forget about it.

I was paying the fee more months than I wasn’t. Call it an average of $10 a month across the five years. That’s $600 right there from the monthly fee alone.

Then there were the ATM charges. TD has a big network and I tried to use it, but there were enough times I was somewhere without a green machine visible (a late night in a neighbourhood I didn’t know, a road trip stop off the 400) where I used whatever was around. Non-TD ATMs charged me $3 to $5 per use, and TD charged me another $2 on top of that. I estimate I did this maybe twice a month on average, though it was probably higher before I got smarter about it. At $5 a pop, twenty-four times a year: $120 over five years, give or take.

E-Transfer fees I didn’t pay for long. I think I sent maybe ten paid ones before I figured out the tier situation, but it was still irritating to realize I’d been charged $1.50 per transfer to move money to a friend or pay a landlord, which is a completely normal thing Canadians do constantly. The fact that e-Transfers are now free on most plans everywhere is the minimum standard, not a feature.

The overdraft was a one-time thing and I’m slightly embarrassed about it. A payment processed a day earlier than I expected, my account went negative by $40 for about eighteen hours, and TD charged me $5. Not the end of the world, but it’s the kind of fee that exists purely to extract money from people who made a small timing mistake. The banks call it “overdraft protection.” I’d call it a fee for being briefly wrong about when your rent goes through.

The Minimum Balance Gymnastics

Honestly, this is the part I find most indefensible when I think back on it.

There’s a whole mental game that comes with having a “free if you maintain a balance” account. You have to monitor your balance continuously. You leave money sitting idle that could theoretically be somewhere more useful, even in a basic HISA, because you’re scared of triggering the monthly fee. It’s not a huge cognitive load, but it’s a consistent low-grade annoyance that has a real opportunity cost if you think about it carefully.

I did the rough math once: if I’d kept that $2,000 balance in a Wealthsimple account earning even 3% in those years instead of in my TD chequing account earning 0.00%, the interest would have been meaningful. Not retirement-changing, but $120-ish over five years on that balance alone. The bank was getting the float on my money in exchange for waiving a fee on an account that shouldn’t have had a fee in the first place.

That’s the part of big-bank fee structures I find genuinely hard to defend. The business model asks you to pay for the privilege of banking with them, or to give them free access to your idle cash as the cost of avoiding the fee. Either way, they win.

The Switch

I moved to Simplii and Wealthsimple in early 2022, and I’ve written more fully about both over on the blog. My Simplii review has the details on the day-to-day banking setup, and my Wealthsimple review covers the investing and cash side of that picture.

The short version: Simplii gives me a free chequing account with unlimited transactions, free Interac e-Transfers, and no minimum balance requirement. Wealthsimple holds my TFSA and RRSP and also has a spending account I use for some purchases. Between the two of them I have everything TD gave me plus actual interest on my savings, and the annual cost is zero dollars in account fees.

The switch was not complicated. I moved my direct deposit, updated my pre-authorized payments one by one over about two weeks, and closed the TD account. My partner, who has been watching my “optimization phases” since at least 2019, said it was the least annoying one I’d done, which I’m choosing to take as a compliment.

The Other Side of This

Here’s the thing: I don’t think TD is useless for everyone. I don’t, actually.

Big banks have physical branches, and that matters for certain people. If you’re new to Canada and trying to establish credit and banking relationships, walking into a branch and talking to a human being is sometimes worth paying for. If you’re a small business owner who handles cash regularly, you need somewhere to deposit it, and the online-only banks don’t do that. If you’re applying for a mortgage and you’ve had a twenty-year relationship with your bank, that relationship can have real value in ways that are harder to put in a spreadsheet.

There are also people for whom having everything under one roof (chequing, savings, RRSP, mortgage, credit card) is genuinely worth the monthly fee because the convenience and simplicity matters to them. I’m not going to tell those people they’re wrong.

But that’s a pretty specific group of people. For someone like me in 2017 (renting an apartment, TTC commuter, no complex banking needs, doing occasional e-Transfers to split bills), there was nothing TD offered that justified what I was paying. I was paying premium prices for the default option I’d chosen because I walked into a branch near campus when I was nineteen.

That’s not a reasonable basis for a financial relationship — and it’s one I think a lot of Canadians are in.

What I Think About Now When I Think About This

The five-year total I came up with, somewhere around $600, isn’t a life-altering number. I want to be honest about that. Six hundred dollars over five years is $10 a month, and there are bigger financial leaks in most people’s lives than a $10 monthly bank fee.

But it’s the principle that bothers me more than the dollar amount. The big banks in this country earn billions of dollars a year in profit. They charge fees that are, in a lot of cases, not justified by any particular service you’re receiving. They’re just the cost of the default, the thing you pay because you haven’t gotten around to looking at alternatives. And the alternatives, in 2026, are genuinely good. Simplii has been around for years. Wealthsimple has a full suite of products now. A comparison like Simplii vs Tangerine shows you the actual differences if you want to read the fine print.

The banks count on inertia. Most people don’t switch because switching feels complicated, and because no one wants to spend an afternoon updating direct deposit and pre-authorized payments. I understand that. I was that person for five years.

But the switching cost is a few hours, one time. The fee savings are every month, indefinitely. Interest rates on high-interest savings and cash accounts have come down some from their 2023-2024 peaks, but they’re still comfortably higher than the flat 0% most default chequing accounts pay, which keeps the math pointing the same direction it did when I made the switch.

Look, I don’t think you’re an idiot if you still bank at TD or RBC or any of the Big Five. These are genuinely easy defaults to fall into, especially if you’ve been with them since student banking. I’m not here to tell you that you’re a fool for not having done this analysis already.

I’m here to tell you what I found when I actually did it, and what I did about it.

• This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Banking fees, account structures, and available alternatives change over time, so do your own research before switching providers.