By Harold Phillips | June 2026
It was a completely unremarkable Tuesday night when I found out I'd been financially sleepwalking for a decade.
My partner and I were eating dinner (something quick, leftover dal, both of us half-watching something on the laptop propped against the fruit bowl). They mentioned, between bites, what their RRSP was sitting at. Just dropped it into conversation the way you'd mention the weather or something you saw on your lunch break. Matter of fact. Not a flex, not a lesson. Just a number.
I didn't say anything right away. I remember reaching for my phone, opening the TD app, and spending a long beat staring at a figure that was much smaller than theirs. Much smaller than it should have been for someone who'd been working full-time since 2014.
I was 29 years old. I had been employed for six years. I had contributed to my RRSP in a technically-yes-that-happened kind of way: some money in when I felt guilty enough about not doing it, and then ignored it until the guilt resurfaced. The balance reflected exactly that strategy.
The thing is, I knew what an RRSP was. I wasn't operating in total ignorance. I could have explained the concept to you: pre-tax contributions, tax-deferred growth, you get a refund come tax time, you pay tax on withdrawal in retirement when (theoretically) you're in a lower bracket. I understood the outline. What I didn't understand was what the numbers actually meant over time, and more importantly, I hadn't done anything meaningful with the knowledge I did have.
Knowing and doing are genuinely different problems.
I spent that weekend with a spreadsheet. Not a fun spreadsheet, not a project-manager-enjoying-a-clean-dataset spreadsheet. The grim kind. I pulled together my contribution history, my current balance, my available room (which turned out to be a number so large I had to check if I was reading it correctly), and started running projections.
The projections were not encouraging.
Compound growth is relentless. Everyone knows this in a vague, abstract way. Sitting there on a Saturday, watching the numbers fill in column by column, it stopped being abstract. If I had contributed $300 a month from the time I started working at 23, even assuming modest average returns, the gap between what I'd have had and what I actually had was genuinely uncomfortable to look at. I stared at it for probably twenty minutes. Then I closed the laptop and made coffee, which is my brain's standard way of asking for a brief change of subject.
So what had I actually been doing with my money instead?
Honestly, nothing strategic. I was saving (I had a savings account, I wasn't reckless), but I was saving in the way that feels responsible without being particularly purposeful. A bit here, a bit there. The RRSP had a few hundred dollars go into it most Februaries, usually the week before the deadline, usually because I saw a bank ad reminding me the deadline existed. I was treating the "avoid feeling bad about it" minimum as a contribution strategy, which is not a strategy.
The startup folding in 2018 had scrambled my savings badly. I spent two months unemployed over winter, burned through more than I was comfortable with, and landed at my current job feeling financially drained and a bit gun-shy about locking money away anywhere I couldn't access it quickly. I think some version of that fear had calcified into an excuse. I told myself I needed liquidity. I told myself I'd catch up when things were more stable. Things kept being not-quite-stable enough.
This is the kind of reasoning that sounds practical until you look at it from a decade later.
The RRSP vs TFSA question I still don't fully know the answer to
Here's where I'll be honest about the gap in my thinking, because I think it's a common one: I'm not entirely sure that maxing out my RRSP first was even the right call for my income at the time.
The standard advice is that TFSAs benefit people in lower tax brackets more, because the RRSP deduction is worth less when your marginal rate is lower. As a junior QA analyst earning $48,000 in 2014, I probably would have gotten more long-term benefit from the TFSA, which has the advantage of flexibility: withdrawals don't reduce your eligibility for income-tested benefits the way RRSP withdrawals in retirement can. The calculus shifts as income rises, and by 2019 my situation had changed enough that RRSP contributions were making real sense. But the years in between? I genuinely don't know whether a 24-year-old me would have been better served by being more aggressive with the TFSA first.
I've read about this specific question enough to have an opinion now, but I didn't have enough information at the time to make a considered choice. I wasn't choosing TFSA over RRSP deliberately. I was just defaulting to minimal effort across both, which is the worst version of the dilemma. Not a wrong answer so much as no answer at all.
If you want the full breakdown of why I've come to think of the two accounts as genuinely complementary rather than competitive, I put that together in a separate post on TFSAs specifically, which goes into the contribution room mechanics, the investing-versus-savings distinction, and a few things I wish someone had told me twelve years ago.
What I actually did about it
The Monday after that spreadsheet weekend, I called my bank (still TD at that point) and moved my RRSP contribution to pre-authorized monthly, so money went in automatically on the 15th of each month. Not a huge amount. But automatic, which meant it happened before I could find a reason it shouldn't.
That one decision, moving from "contribute when I feel guilty enough" to "it moves on its own," made more difference than any research I've done since. Not because the amount was significant at first (it wasn't), but because I stopped treating it as optional. The optionality was the problem.
I switched from TD to Wealthsimple in 2022, and brought my RRSP with me when I did. The process was less painful than I expected. Wealthsimple lets you open an RRSP, buy low-cost ETFs inside it, and actually see what you're holding without navigating a maze of product tiers and branch appointments. My money is in a simple all-equity fund now. I don't touch it. I don't try to time anything. Boring on purpose.
If you're doing the same switch, the Wealthsimple review I wrote covers what the process actually looked like, including the parts that weren't quite as smooth as the onboarding flow suggested.
The other thing I did was stop waiting for the "right time" framing to feel true.
For years I'd been telling myself that I was in a transitional period, that I was still getting established, that I'd catch up later when the numbers were bigger and the picture was clearer. The 2018–2019 unemployment gap had been real. The recovery had been real. But somewhere along the way, genuine circumstance had shaded into a convenient story I was telling myself to avoid an uncomfortable task.
There's no ideal moment to start. The ideal moment was a few years earlier, and since that's unavailable, the next best option is now. This is one of those things people say that feels clichéd when you read it and turns out to be completely true when you do the math for yourself.
I don't have a clean ending for this story, because the story isn't over yet.
I'm still catching up. My RRSP balance is a lot better than it was in 2020, meaningfully better, but I'm not going to pretend I've closed the gap that a decade of minimal contributions opened up. Compound growth works forward. It doesn't work in reverse.
What I'd tell a 23-year-old me — not as advice, just as an honest observation — is that "I'll deal with this later" is the most expensive sentence in personal finance. Not because later never comes. Because it comes slower than you think it will, and the numbers you meet there are more stubborn than you expected.
My partner, for their part, had no idea that dinner conversation was going to send me into a weekend of spreadsheet reckoning. I mentioned it to them afterward and they were vaguely sympathetic, the way you are when you can't fix something but you're sorry it happened anyway.
I've been paying more attention ever since.
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