Advice for my parents in Canada

[doneby35]

My parents live in Canada and they have a little bit of money in their account to survive on, and I was wanting to see if anyone could give me advice on how that money can be increased (if at all possible).

Dad is 70, mom is 65, with a whole bunch of medical needs (dad has lung cancer and mom has colon cancer, thank goodness for canada's free healthcare). They have 110,000 US dollars (which is approx. 150,000 canadian dollars) + 10,000 in canadian dollars.
Their monthly expenses ~ 1500 canadian dollars... so the 10,000 canadian could be used for their expenses next year.

I don't know anything about Canada's financial system, but any ideas on what they could do with the US dollars that they have in the bank to possibly increase it with very low risk?

[lostamonkey]

Do your parents have CPP/OAS/GIS income? Is that income enough to cover their living expenses? Do they still have a mortgage? Do they have any other debt?

[doneby35]

No, they only moved to canada 4 years ago (from a very crappy 3rd world country) and they are not citizens yet (I think you're only eligible for citizenship after 5 years under the new law). They don't/can't work and they don't have any income coming from anywhere. All they have is the amount mentioned which came from a sale of a property they owned.

The CPP i'm guessing is only for people who have worked in canada at some point.
The OAS i looked into, and one of the requirements is that someone needs to be in canada for 10 years in order to qualify.
The GIS, not quite sure what that is, but my quick research shows that it's a tax benefit to low income OAS recipients.

[lostamonkey]

The first thing I would do is convert all the US dollars to Canadian dollars. They do not want to deal with currency fluctuations.

They will likely qualify for OAS and GIS in 6 years (you want to confirm this with Service Canada). Their OAS and GIS payments should cover their monthly expenses. Their $160K  (Canadian) will last 8.88 years (assuming $18K annual spend, no inflationary increases in spending, and no return of investment). They should just keep this in a high interest savings account and get maybe 1% interest and spend it down while waiting to receive OAS and GIS.

[doneby35]

The first thing I would do is convert all the US dollars to Canadian dollars. They do not want to deal with currency fluctuations.

They will likely qualify for OAS and GIS in 6 years (you want to confirm this with Service Canada). Their OAS and GIS payments should cover their monthly expenses. Their $160K  (Canadian) will last 8.88 years (assuming $18K annual spend, no inflationary increases in spending, and no return of investment). They should just keep this in a high interest savings account and get maybe 1% interest and spend it down while waiting to receive OAS and GIS.

That's exactly what I was thinking, I'm guessing that is the only way.