Markus had his annual review at work yesterday, which went beautifully. He came home practically glowing after getting a nice raise, a sweet bonus, and an offer for additional schooling. One thing we have to look seriously at is that this will nudge us into a different tax bracket, so what we do now is very important.

RRSPs are due Monday (eek!), and so we’re going to have a meeting with a financial advisor tomorrow. We want to see what a useful contribution amount will be; whether we should re-contribute to his RRSP or start a spousal one for me (or both), since he’s the current bringer of the bacon and it will make a difference later if we withdraw it for a down payment on a house and one of us has to claim it as income.

I still want to top up my TFSA if possible, and my bank has a 1% bonus for new contributions until April, but we may need to put it into RRSPs NOW to get them in on time. We may also want to look into starting auto contributions for 2010, since that’s when we’ll cross the income border and it would be easier (and get better interest) to have a head start on next year’s contributions instead of putting in a big chunk at once.

I’m so glad we started doing this – I spent much too long mulling over investment possibilities and being overly concerned about doing the Right Thing. I think it’s much smarter to make a basic safe investment and then tweak it.

$ Goals for the immediate future: get the RRSP & TFSA contributions on track.