Do you double up?

Posted by admin on February 5, 2008 in Misc.

To follow up on last week’s post on dividend yields, I have been tracking TransCanada Corp. as a stock with a recent history of increasing dividend yields. Middle Class Millionaire has a good summary on the stock; as usual, please do not take this as a recommendation to buy. Please do your own due diligence. Here’s the issue though- I already own this stock in my retirement account. This raises the larger question of whether I would own the same stock in both my non-retirement and retirement account. To be honest, this is a head-scratcher. I have no answers.

I wanted your opinions. Without addressing any particular stock, do you double up and buy the same stock in both retirement and non-retirement account? Do you feel this is too much risk exposure (my portfolio never has more than 10% in any one stock)? Let me know your opinions. Thanks.

Just a remainder to enter for a chance to win a copy of Retire Rich from Real Estate. Good luck.

2 Comments on Do you double up?

By CanadianRetiredGuy on February 5, 2008 at 12:04 pm

I treat our family investments as one giant pot. We have an investment account and three RSP accounts. They are all recorded in Quicken and so I can see the entire portfolio as if it were one account.

I can then set limits as to my holdings based on one “account” and so have some investments spread across multiple individual accounts and some held just in one account.

It is more important to me to have limits or targets on the entire portfolios asset allocation. I was driving my self crazy when I tried to asset allocate each account individually. This also allows me to have all the high tax attraction (fixed income) items in tax sheltered accounts and all the low tax attraction items in non-sheltered accounts.

By Middle Class Millionaire on February 5, 2008 at 2:41 pm

Personally, I treat both our sheltered and non-sheltered accounts as one large portfolio. In my opinion if you want to allocate X% of your portfolio to TRP then it doesn’t really matter if it’s split between 2 accounts. As was mentioned above you’d probably be better to allocate assets to your sheltered account based on tax efficiencies.

P.S-Thanks for the mention in your post.

MCM