Saving for my baby’s future?

Following because I have had the same questions!

We opened an account with RBC for my daughter. All her birthday and Christmas money goes in and every once in awhile when we have extras we toss it in there. There is no interest earned but we liked it better then doing an RESP

You can open an in trust for account with one of your banks. You can earn basic account interest or open term deposits for longer term savings. For the very long term stuff I would look into mutual funds as the longer time frame will mitigate the risk. A financial advisor at your bank should be happy to discuss your options with you.

I've opened a student account for my daughter with TD. There is a very small interest earned. I also didn't want to risk RESP. My sister opened an account with simple wealth. I think they have higher earning interest and lower risk for RESP

Did you max our your own TFSA? I would earmark some of those funds and then invest in ETFs over mutual funds.

I opened an Resp for my daughter and then we just save her bday and Christmas money as a cash

I have and RESP for her cause you get the government grants. I also opened a TFSA under my name but for her. So I put some money in there as a long term investment. I was going to open her own savings account but I want the interest earned. Also when you contribute to anything like and resp or tfsa make sure your funds are not sitting in cash as it doesn't earn anything. Also if you have more than one kid I would recommend a family resp which means if one kid doesn't use it the money is available for the other. You also don't lose any money except for the grants I think you are just able to transfer it to your own rrsp. Also if you make two separate payments a month instead of just one you can earn more interest for it. Same amount of money per month but say biweekly. So if you want to save 100 a month if you do two payments of 50 you earn more interest and spread the risk.

My husband works in finance and his major role is to provide education to parents on how to secure their children’s financial future
Posting his contact details so anyone can contact him directly and he can guide you through all that is available for children’s today
Yatin Gulati
+1(514)8952958

Hey we are set up with a financial advisor. She has access to ALL banks info along with other companies. Depending where in Canada you are I can try and set the 2 of you up if your interested. PM me if you have questions.
Im in Ontario, so I would believe she can only do Ontario based.

So we opened an RESP (one that is not a group RESP) with questrade, but BMO, RBC etc all works.
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- you get money from the government up to a max per year for RESP contributions - so basically free money
- if your child doesn't go to university and you chose the family plan, your other child can use the funds
- if no child goes to post secondary education (college or university or trade school etc), you get the money back. The money the government gives you will need to be returned. The money you earned on top of your contributions and government grants can be put to your RRSP if you have contribution room

I'm not sure what the risks are that people are talking about. Since we're putting the money in for long over 10+ years, you put it in the market and it will increase in value along with the market. I buy a low cost ETF called VEQT (there's other ones like XEQT and others) that follows the market. Once my child reaches like ..10 years old or so, then I might change it to be more like 80% VEQT and 20% bonds, then slowly increase that ratio to close to 100% bonds by the time she graduates high school, so that mitigates the risk of market downfall

If you're absolutely set on not buying an resp and putting it in something that will grow with time, I would talk to your bank in opening a low fee trading account - or questrade as it's free to buy ETFs there - on how to open something for your child. Usually it's an in trust account or so. Then I would do the same, just buy VEQT. I wouldn't even bother with balancing with the bonds then until closer to graduation if they knows what they want to do with college.
Personally I don't like mutual funds because between ETFs and mutual funds, the short quick summary is that it's kind of the same, except mutual funds have a higher % charge. It's like 10x the charge - it might sound small like 2% or 1%, but over time it costs tens of thousands of dollars. Compared to ETFs, they're 0.2% or something like that.

Personally I'm not a financial advisor or anyone in the financial industry but I do read up a lot on personal finance and have an interest in this. Warren Buffett has also mentioned that if he's not around, he's told his family to just invest in low cost ETFs.

There's a lot of blogs that can help educate better than what I've written. I read this one https://www.tawcan.com/
Search up RESP
Or this guy
https://www.buildwealthcanada.ca/back-to-basics-resps-how-to-maximizing-your-childs-grant-and-minimize-your-fees/

Or others too. Hope this helped. Putting it in a savings account sounds safe but actually in the long scheme of things, your baby has loads of TIME and that's what helps compound interest the most. You'd actually be losing money basically in a savings account compared to what inflation rates are like now. I personally say, invest in low cost ETFs. Good luck!

I opened an account under my name for her. She basically can’t touch that money unless I sign for it. I’m gonna put her bday money in there and I’ve been also putting the money I get for her from the government each month as I don’t really need it.

I have a TFSA for my son. His baptism, baby shower and birthday money has gone in and I put in $50 every paycheck.

how were you open a TSA for your son? I was told they had to be 18 to open their own account

sorry, its under my name, I just named it after him.

gotcha, thanks for clarifying

Primerica, my moms a rep and I opened my accounts for my son with her