Blessed by the Potato

Back when robo-advisors were new — who are we kidding, for financial services they’re still new — people had lots of concerns about the new services. Chief amongst those concerns were whether investors’ money would be safe if/when one of the firms went under. We predicted that this would be a risk of inconvenience rather than a risk of losing real money: because of the custodian broker relationship, you would still have your assets somewhere (though those have their own risks), but the firm would no longer manage them. But if a firm went under, you wouldn’t lose your assets with them.

What happens if a firm goes out of business? Then the underlying investments — which are held at a “custodian” — can be transferred to another broker on your behalf. You can ask each firm about the details of their custodian arrangement, but as far as we were able to determine, every firm listed holds your investments at a custodian that is a member of IIROC.

So, aside from the usual risk of the investments themselves and completely unforseen events, investing with the relatively new robo-advisors should be no more risky than traditional means.

Well, we have our first robo-advisor failure! Planswell suddenly shut down operations this month, and we’re seeing those predictions play out in practice. Investors’ assets are still held at the custodian, and other than the inconvenience of having to move them and pay a transfer fee, nobody’s assets went up with the firm — the custodian brokerage relationship is working as predicted.

Planswell customers now have to figure out what to do with their assets. One choice is of course to learn to DIY and move to Questrade for ETFs or TD for TD e-series. Otherwise they can move to another robo-advisor if that’s what worked for them and still the right choice. Planswell is suggesting a few that use the same custodian (e.g. Justwealth and Wealthbar), which saves on transfer fees. Note though that if you ask and have enough assets to move, many firms will cover your transfer-out fees.

As for prognosticating, I’ve been surprised so firms have lasted as long as they have. I keep expecting a wave of consolidation — not necessarily abrupt closures like Planswell, but I’m surprised someone (the big banks and Wealthsimple are obvious acquirers) hasn’t been buying up the other firms. Dale has a post up on the slow growth of the robos which may add to the issues and stress in the future.

This is a surprisingly hard post to write (I’m also clearly out of practice on the blogging front), so let’s resort to the Q&A format:

Hey Potato, what’s up?

In The Big C 2: Revenge of the C I let you know that my dad’s cancer is back. Now I’m going to take some time off work (planning for 1 year) to spend time with him while I can, and also to take care of Blueberry and give her other grandparents a bit of a break. Today was my last day at work!

This is mostly a personal finance blog — how did you swing a year off work?

I have money saved, so I’m not worried about feeding myself or paying the rent during the year itself. It will mean pushing off retirement by a few years for one year being out of the workforce (lost compounding, spending more than saving, etc., will mean roughly pushing things back by ~3-4 years for taking a year now) but I actually haven’t done a huge, detailed projection. Indeed, I made the decision without really doing much of anything in the way of formal planning — it just felt right (after several weeks of hemming and hawing and sleeping on it), and I knew I could swing it, which I suppose is the point of all the previous planning and saving and investing. In the end, I wrote up a little one-page summary of the plan and implications, and that was that. My emergency fund will cover a year off, especially if I can pick up a few freelance gigs along the way.

So are you available for projects? Can I hire you?

Possibly! I know it’s not going to take 24-7 to take care of my family, so I will be looking to do some work, but only part-time (not being able to swing full-time with a commute is the reason I had to step back from the day job in the first place). However, I don’t know how cool the ol’ HR department will be cutting a cheque to an independent contractor who’s on leave, which means no grant-writing or other consulting for co-workers. Personal finance projects/writing/doing DIY investment workshops/lunch’n’learns, editing (it’s been a while since I’ve had a novel to edit, NaNoWriMo authors…), or science writing for others should be fine. Hit me up here if you’re interested.

What else will you do with your time?

Some have suggested using that time to learn something new or get a certification — pick up my CFP (which has a practical requirement, so it would require some commitment to switching jobs or picking up a more robust side gig), or get a MD or RN ’cause I spend so much of my time taking care of sick people anyway. I am getting dangerously close to having spent more time in the real world than grad school, so maybe it’s time to go back to learning and test-writing just to make sure I’ll never have a normal work-study balance in my lifetime.

I might also use my non-caregiving time to write another PF book — I’ve had an idea poking around for over a year now, but I’m getting more negative on the idea as I go along, and may have to just let it die. But hey, it is NaNoWriMo, so maybe some fiction…

However, other than a few random thoughts I absolutely have no plan. I figured all that could wait until I was actually off work to figure it out.

Isn’t it scary just leaving the workforce for a while with no plan of what you’ll do and no income stream coming in?

Well it is now. But that’s also why I managed to actually make a decision with no real analysis/spreadsheets/pro-con lists/waffling blog posts — I was just too burned out to go through my usual over-thinking routine. So at the moment I’m too tired to be scared.