How I learned to build my own retirement account

October 2nd, 2025

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Highlights:

See Sabrina went from mutual funds to managing her own investments
How she built her portfolio
Her favourite resources for learning how to self-invest

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How did you start investing?

Neither myself or my husband have a pension, so we knew we had to build our own pension fund.

I started investing through my professional association. They have a fund management company, so that’s where my investment adventure began.

I’d taken some economics classes in high school, so I had a basic understanding of how the economy works, but nothing beyond that.

At first, I just followed the advice of the financial advisor from that management company. I maxed out my RRSP and put it all into mutual funds, without thinking too much about it.

I began hearing mutual funds weren’t great

At Christmas a few years later, my brother mentioned there was a better way to invest - something that wouldn’t take as much of our money as mutual funds.

He said I could get better results by cutting out the middleman, and it would give me more control over my money.

At the time, it didn’t really click… until my closest friend brought it up too.

I made the leap to self-investing

A knowledgeable friend of mine sent me a few articles about ETFs, and that’s when I decided to take the leap.

I started investing in ETFs and managing my own portfolio based on advice from the internet and friends.

It’s actually so easy, and I’m so excited about my investments now!

I have so much more control over my money, feel part of the process, and I know where my money is going.

The best advice you ever got about investing was…

It is not as complicated as the bank makes it look!

There are lots of good resources and tools out there now that make self-investing totally doable.

Trust yourself, know yourself, read a lot - and you can do it!

What resources did you use to learn about self-investing?

My family and friends were the first introduction to self-investing.

I then turned to the internet to learn more about it.

The Motley Fool was a good starting point.

The Passiv article that explains what an ETF is made so much sense to me, and I used the post about model portfolios to build my own.

What’s your investing process and strategy?

I’m still decades away from retirement, so for my RRSP I’m following the “Growth portfolio”.

Going for growth means I take on a bit more risk, but it’s worth it since there’s lots of time before I need this money.

This follows the same kind of percentages as in XGRO, but instead of the all-in-one I did it myself using mainly BMO ETFs.

This way I have more control and can adjust the percentages if needed, plus it costs less.

I went with BMO because it’s Canadian, unlike lots of other ETF providers!

I started using Passiv because…

It automatically tells me what to buy!

Without a pension, my investments are everything I have in retirement.

My plan is to invest regularly, and Passiv makes it easy to do that since I don’t have to calculate anything or use a spreadsheet to manage my investments.