We’re planning to move from Kitchener-Waterloo to Victoria. Victoria’s real estate market is pricier: if you believe CMHC, the average KW house is $750k while the average Victoria house is $1M. So we’re looking at an extra $250k of housing cost. Having actually looked at MLS, I think it’ll be more like $400k, though.

The received wisdom is that money you expect to use in the next 1-2 years shouldn’t be invested in the stock market, so we looked for places to deposit cash while we wait to buy. There are a lot of options!

CASH.TO or similar (~2%)

The no-brainer recommendation on r/PersonalFinanceCanada is to invest in CASH.TO.

It’s easy and safe…but the yield is only 2% or so.

Wealthsimple’s money market accounts (2.5%)

We recently started banking with Wealthsimple. They offer an account that pays 2.5%, no minimum balance to qualify, no fees, no minimum term.

The interest rate isn’t great, and since we’re participating in the (Un)real Deal promotion, we ironically have a strong disincentive towards depositing new money into Wealthsimple. The promotion penalizes you for withdrawing from the account, regardless of whether you’re withdrawing new money or old money.

GICs (3.2-3.7%)

A non-cashable 6-month GIC pays 3.2%, a 1-year non-cashable GIC pays 3.7%.

Pro: set-and-forget. Con: the money would be locked up, with no liquidity.

Box spreads (~4%)

A box spread is an options strategy that delivers close to the risk-free rate of a government bond.

The practical way to do box spreads is in USD, exposing you to currency exchange risk or requiring you to pay to hedge that risk, which we didn’t like.

Target date bond ETFs (3.3%)

ZXCO is a BMO target-date corporate bond ETF that will wrap up in November 2027, and has a yield to maturity of 3.32%. Being an ETF, there’s the option for liquidity if needed earlier. Still, 3.3% isn’t that great.

High-interest savings account (HISA) promos

Some banks run promotional interest rates to attract new clients. Generally you get 4-5% for about three months, and then the rate plummets to close to 0%. You have to hop from bank to bank chasing promos, a process known as “churning”.

What the heck, we’re only doing this for a year or so, let’s give it a try.

May 2026: Tangerine (3.75%)

We already had a relationship with Tangerine, so we started with them.

Their offer was 3.75% for 3 months. We used it until it expired, at which point the rate dropped to 0.3%.

One minor complaint with them: you can only move money out of Tangerine in batches of $25,000 per day, unless you call their back office and get them to override some limits.

August 2026: Bank of Nova Scotia / Scotiabank (4.55%)

Once the Tangerine offer expired, Scotia looked like a good candidate. They’re a Big Five bank, how bad could it be?

Yeesh.

Their offer was complicated! There was a tiered rate of up to 2% (depending on your account balance) and then a promo rate of 2.8%. We ended up getting 1.75% + 2.8% = 4.55%.

They were a bit of a nightmare to deal with, though. The day I opened the account, they had a multi-hour outage.

Funding the account took several days, during which time the clock on the promotional rate was ticking down.

As a final insult, Scotia charges $5/transaction to move money out of the account. Or, you can open a chequing account for $4/month and get 15 “free” transactions. So I tried to do that, but kept running into issues saying I couldn’t open a chequing account online.

Luckily, a better solution presented itself before we needed to get the money out of the account.

October 2026: Tangerine (4.65%)

Tangerine offered a new promo rate of 4.65%. We switched back from Scotia. This also meant that we could exit Scotia for free, as Tangerine could do an EFT with no fees.

Is it worth it?

Well, I dunno. Churning is about $2,300 per $100k better than CASH.TO on a pre-tax basis, despite the minor bookkeeping headaches every few months.

In the bigger picture, there is a chance that the stock market will continue to rage, in which case we’ll look like idiots for having accepted both a lower rate of return (the TSX returned 32% in 2025) and worse tax treatment (interest income is included at 100% vs 50% for capital gains).

At any rate (chuckle, chuckle), it does make it easier to sleep at night knowing that the plan will work regardless of what the market does.