If your now mortgage free in five years, I suspect your TFSA limit will quickly fill up. If you intent to sit on cash, I'd keep it in a saving account, not TFSA. That way you can max out TFSA with the balanced growth for you long term savings. TFSA is best for tax free growth, not stagnation.
Its going to take me 4-6 years to probably get even close to the max like you thought. So for now i'm not too worried about having my EF in it because i'm no where near the limit. If my investments did well, i would definitely move my EF outside the TFSA umbrella to make room for a better interest investment. I'm not needing huge wads of cash, but i need more than i have now anyways.
Heckler I will definitely start reading the CCC website!
Thanks for the recommendation PharmaStache! nice to hear from someone who uses them
Do you have an ER goal? If so, at what age? When will you be eligible to draw your pension? What is your marginal tax bracket? How much money can you save and invest per year?
I dont have an early retirement goal date set yet. I will receive a good pension from my work but only if i hit a magic 80 while working for them. That's 22 years from now. It takes a drastic hit if you dont finish the magic 80. working for them at .8eft or a .5eft would seem like a fantastic option for me, and would fund other things i'd like to continue doing like travel more and keep giving me time for my savings to accumulate without having to use any of it. It may not be entirely early retirement, but would be fun for me and i do enjoy my job so far and for now what i have in mind as a semi-retired goal.
Right now with my mortgage money i can now reinvest i will be able to do about 18% of my income from that alone. I focused on my mortgage over my major savings so now time to get back on track. And i'm slowly working on trying to trim things in life and budget and see what else i can wrangle up.
Current tax rates for me at my income are federal 22% and provincial 17%(manitoba)