Best FI for........ | GIC discussions | Discussion forum

For cash, you should pick whatever FI is offering an incentive - Tangerine and sometimes Meridian for new clients. You need to ask yourself why do you need cheques? There are many ways to pay bills and transfer money without cheques.

Why do want to buy GICs - age, risk tolerance, future known expenses?

For non-registered GICs, I like Hubert and Oaken because they offer cashable GICs, the only kind of non-registered GICs that make sense to me.

For TFSA, I wouldn't buy GICs. For RRSPs and RRIFs, if you have significant dollar amounts, I would look at self directed plans where you can choose between GICs and other guaranteed products such as strip bonds. What's the point of buying a 5 year GIC if you don't need to make a withdrawal for 7 years, 10 years, etc. ? I use BMO Investorline but not because of the GIC rates.

Not living in Ontario is not a problem for Achieva or AlternaBank. Achieva is in Manitoba. Make sure you don't confuse Alterna Savings (an Ontario credit union) and AlternaBank. https://apply.alternabank.ca/

If you give me your shortlist or exclusion list for those that are unacceptable for POA, I might be able to offer further comments.

However, you might be better off to just make a list of all the financial institutions on our Comparison list, then go through them yourself to see if they meet your criteria. It's rather complicated, as you have a lot of criteria. No problem with having a lot of criteria, but it's difficult to make suggestions that will suit. You may have to make compromises.

I question whether any of them can be relied upon for POA without a struggle. I had a POA on my account at TD some years back while I was out of the country. I never removed it, but discovered some years later that, according to TD, it did not exist - even though it had been used in the past. So, if it's that bad at BigBank, what hope is there at the smaller institutions who can't give consistent answers in the first place?

It would be useful to see what you have gleaned from all these responses.

If you've got it down to four, I think you've done a good job of winnowing.
Should I assume they are Hubert, Implicity, Accelerate, and Oaken? - based on what you said in #4 above?
You might need all three (or four), for various kinds of deposits.
For the sake of diversification, if it were me, I would want at least one FI which was not a MB CU. I wouldn't want to be entirely dependent on the Manitoba CU Deposit Corp. if things went badly there. Probably nothing terrible will happen, but it would make me more comfortable personally to have some of my money with CDIC insurance.
Also, it seems like rates are a bit in flux right now, as we have seen at least 3 changes in the last few days, some up and some down. More rates could change, particularly at Oaken. I do invest at Oaken and would not be worried about doing so again, personally. I also wouldn't rule out special rates and deals, but they are more work to manage.

Aas I think I said earlier, this may be the point where some compromise is necessary. It's surprisingly difficult to get all of one's criteria met.

It depends on what kind of account you need. If it's savings, you could go with a joint account at AlternaBank perhaps. A joint account reduces issues with powers of attorney.
If you are in the GTA, perhaps a long GIC with Talka, which gs has mentioned. It's a credit union, but Ontario's credit union insurance is different from Manitoba's, so you would get that diversification. Also that Northern CU (Ontario), which was promoting itself here recently had some term specials, I think 18 months, not sure of details.

Sometimes, in the past, the Korean and Chinese banks which have operations in Canada have had good offers but I can't remember their names (not HSBC) and don't know what they offer at present. They are CDIC insured. Worth keeping an eye on perhaps.

Other than that, they're all listed. Keep an eye out for rate specials.

I don't know that i trust hubert re: power of attorney. Only when pushed did they say they'd accept poa with doctors note. You may want to email again, just to confirm and get in writing.

As for why poa is important, for me i have no spouse so i don't want a joint account. It is not so important now as i'm young but as i get older will become more important. I don't feel entirely comfortable giving out bank passwords. I don't even have them written down.

If i am in a coma suddenly i want my money managed. To me that is the whole point of the poa.