ATA Members

ATA Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP)

Your Retirement. The fun that you’ll be having after you retire from teaching.

If you started teaching soon after graduation, chances are you will hit your "magic number" (when your pension kicks in) at around age 55. Are you going to travel? Start a business? Take up hobbies you never had time for when you were teaching?

What are you dreaming of doing in your retirement years?

Whatever you end up doing, it's probably going to cost some money. And yes, you have a great pension, but it will still be a drop compared to what you're used to making. Until CPP and Old Age Security kick in, the ballpark amount will be about half of what you made while you were teaching. So how do you pay for all the things you'll finally get to do? With the ATA Group RRSP!

The Alberta Teachers Association Group RRSP gives teachers access to one of the best investment plans on the market today.

How is it better?

1. The ATA Group RRSP is available via Payroll Deduction (PRD) in virtually every School Board in Alberta. This means that they deduct your RRSP Contribution from pre-tax income and you get your tax savings back on every paycheque! See the Payroll Deduction chart below for how this works!

2. It has none of the transaction fees you'd normally see at the bank or other financial services institutions. This means that there are no front-end, annual service, or set-up fees. Or put another way, there is no cost to start investing or make changes. You get all the benefits of a self-directed plan without any of the usual costs!

3. Unlike the Deferred Sales Charges (DSC) that you'd commonly see through the bank, your money is not locked in and you can make changes with no cost or penalty.

4. You get access to some incredible investment options, including the investment arms of every major bank, wholesale money managers and private fund managers who you would never be able to access on your own. (It's only through the power of having 40,000 members of the Alberta Teachers Association that we've been able to negotiate this.)

5. Capital Estate Planning has been working with the Alberta Teachers Association for over 40 years, and we report back to the Benefits, Insurance and Pension Committee of the ATA.

How to invest in the Alberta Teachers Association Group RRSP

Investing is not always the simplest concept. For some folks it comes easy and for others it may feel a little overwhelming. Or you may fall somewhere in between!

Over the years we have worked with world class investment managers and with that we have brought a fund into our ATA Group RRSP that makes investing easy and approachable. This is the fund for the investors who feel like they want to leave the big investment decisions up to the professionals.

We consider the Fidelity ClearPath fund our “default fund”, this is a portfolio of investments that you invest in and sit back and let your money grow and ride the markets.

Sounds pretty good? Here’s how it works.

Fidelity Clearpath have complex investment vehicles in the back end that are incredibly simple to access for you as an investor with the ATA Group RRSP. They simply look at your age and the year you plan to retire and build a plan around that. When you have a lot of time before retirement, they create a product mix that's more aggressive so that you can grow as the markets shift. But every five years, they automatically become a little more conservative, so that by the time you get closer to retirement, they're more focused on protection.

- Early in your career = focused on growth with more aggressive funds (higher risk investments)

- Later in your career = focused on protection with more conservative funds (lower risk investments)

These adjustments will automatically happen behind the scenes. You could think of it as the slow cooker of investing. Set it up and let it go!

This portfolio is made up of a mix of investments that provide balance, ex: short term investments, bonds, and equities. The chart below is a sample of the investment mix that your RRSP would have throughout your career.

Having diversification in your investments is something that we talk to many of our clients about.

You can achieve diversification with the Fidelity ClearPath fund. Investments at every stage are made up of a mix of different categories, in order to capitalize on the upside of growing markets, but also to protect you when one kind of investment goes down as part of its normal cycles – essentially “spreading out the risk”. The pie chart below shows an example of this mix of different categories.

Do you consider yourself a savvy investor?

We get that there are many different types of investors out there and the default fund may be not quite right for some. If you are interested in hand picking some or all of your funds – we can do that with you. As an investor looking to make the decisions you have the choice of 44 different investments inside the ATA Group RRSP, selecting them in whatever percentage you choose. We have financial advisors here to work with you to build your portfolio.

Feel like you fall somewhere in between these two types of investors?

Yes, we are happy to work with you to make a few key decisions but with a bit more guidance. The Portfolio Fund is a Balanced Fund that gives you the choice of 16 different investments and to help you determine which funds to choose there is the Investment Personality Questionaire. This is a resource available to you that can help determine your investment risk level, you can find it here.