Sébastien & Lise

The Situation

Sébastien retired at 62 after a 35-year career in operations management. Lise followed 18 months later. They had done most things right — maxed their RRSPs for nearly three decades, paid off their house in Oakville, avoided lifestyle inflation when Sébastien’s salary climbed in his forties, and quietly built a combined registered and non-registered portfolio in the low seven figures.

On paper, they had enough.

But nobody had ever told them that definitively. Their bank advisor had spent twenty-five years helping them accumulate. When Sébastien retired, that same advisor’s answer to “how much can we spend each year?” was a range so wide it was functionally useless — something between sixty and one hundred thousand dollars, depending on assumptions he never explained.

So Sébastien and Lise did what most Canadians in their position do when they cannot get a clear answer: they underperformed their own retirement. They did not take the trip to Portugal they had been planning for a decade. They did not start the cottage renovation. They watched their portfolio continue to grow on paper while the energy they had saved for doing things with that money gradually declined.

The fear was not irrational. It was just uninformed.

What They Were Trying to Figure Out

Three questions drove the planning engagement:

1. How much can we actually spend each year without running out of money?
2. When should we each take CPP and OAS — and in what order?
3. How do we draw down from our accounts in a sequence that minimizes tax over a thirty-year retirement?

Underneath those three questions was a quieter one: were they going to look back at their seventies and realize they had spent the best years of retirement being afraid of numbers they could have asked someone to verify.

What We Did

The Life-First Blueprint™ process started with the life, not the money. We mapped what Sébastien and Lise actually wanted their first fifteen years of retirement to look like — the travel, the time with grandchildren, the cottage, the car they had been putting off replacing. Then we costed it. In today’s dollars their planned lifestyle required roughly $95,000 per year after tax, indexed for inflation.

Only then did we model the income.

We tested their sustainable withdrawal rate across three scenarios: a base case using historical Canadian balanced-portfolio returns, a market-stress case assuming a meaningful equity decline in the first three years of retirement, and a longevity case running both of them to age 95. The numbers in all three scenarios were more comfortable than Sébastien and Lise had feared.

The CPP and OAS decision required careful sequencing. With Sébastien’s workplace DB pension already covering most of their fixed expenses, taking CPP at 62 would have cost them significantly across a long retirement. Deferring both CPP entitlements to age 68 — bridging the gap with RRSP withdrawals in the early years — produced meaningfully better lifetime income. It also reduced the eventual RRIF conversion tax hit because the RRSP was being drawn down before it became a forced-withdrawal asset at age 71.

The drawdown sequence became three-layered:

• Years 1 through 6: Primary draw from Sébastien’s RRSP, plus a modest top-up from non-registered investments. This kept their taxable income in a manageable bracket while CPP and OAS were deferred.
• Years 7 through 10: CPP and OAS layer in at age 68 and 65 respectively. RRSP draws reduce to keep them under the OAS clawback threshold. Non-registered accounts are drawn as needed for lumpy expenses.
• Years 11 and beyond: RRIF minimum withdrawals for both, CPP/OAS, and TFSA as the tax-free reserve for large expenses like travel, vehicle replacement, and the eventual downsizing renovation.

We also built a two-year cash buffer outside the investment portfolio — roughly $190,000 held in a high-interest savings account and a short-term GIC ladder — so that a market downturn in the early years would not force them to sell equities at a loss.

“We came in thinking we might not have enough. We left with a written plan and permission to actually live the retirement we’d saved for.”

The Outcome

Sébastien and Lise’s plan confirmed $112,000 per year in sustainable income — more than they had been spending, and materially more than they had believed was safe. Deferring CPP to 68 for both is projected to add approximately $84,000 in additional lifetime income compared to taking it at 62.

More importantly, the plan gave them a document they could actually refer to. When Lise asked in year two whether they could afford a three-week trip to Portugal instead of the ten days they had been cautiously planning, the answer was not a guess. It was in the model.

They booked Portugal the following month. The cottage renovation is scheduled for next summer. The portfolio is still growing — but they have stopped treating that growth as the purpose. The purpose is the life the portfolio was built to fund.

Why This Story Probably Applies to You

If you are in the first five years of retirement, or close enough that you are starting to model the transition, here is the pattern we see most often:

• You have accumulated enough. The actual math, when properly done, works.
• Nobody has ever walked you through the math.
• Without that walkthrough, the default behaviour is to spend conservatively out of caution.
• Conservative spending in the early years, when energy and health are highest, is the single most common regret expressed by retirees in their late seventies and eighties.

A written drawdown plan is not about proving you can spend more. It is about giving you the information to make every spending decision intentionally rather than defensively. That is what changed for Sébastien and Lise. It is what changes for most people who do this work properly.