Thanks both for the replies!
grmagne, I'm not sure I agree with that approach; essentially the purpose of index fund investing is long-term growth. You never have to face a loss, because if you see a temporary decrease in value in your stocks, all you have to do is wait and ultimately the value will increase again. An investor in the long-term never has to worry about short-term risks, and to invest in something with high volatility for the short-term is to gamble. I can't be confident about the long-term benefit of the investment because I may be forced to withdraw the money at an inopportune time, and have no benefit or a loss instead.
Arrow, I actually have it in RRSP already. My partner will have no income in a year and I will have no income in the following year while we're building a house, so we'll withdraw it then and pay very little tax.
I agree stock values seem too volatile, but I wasn't sure if maybe a heavily bond-weighted portfolio would be fairly safe over an 18-month term?
We are really talking about 18 months for at least a portion of the money. We hope to have about $90K and use a max of $60 to buy property - that portion may be spent early if we happen to find a perfect property - and the remainder to build the workshop & live on for the time we're building. I don't really know what our chances are of finding a property early. It's possible we won't find something within that timeframe and it will be longer, but I couldn't really guess either way.
I've already factored upcoming costs for renovating my house into my savings for the next two years, so don't expect to need any of the money for that.
The specific size is unknown - we plan to buy property outright, so it will be 100% of the purchase price, whatever that is - under $60K. Anything we're short on the property price would come out of the workshop price, which might mean we have to do some other work to generate more income and delay our house-building plans. Good point though about the importance of losses vs. gains. At this point I'm interested in maximizing gains without risking principal. My other option is to put the money into my mortgage, which is a guaranteed 2.5%, but would mean we would have to hold a loan to buy the property until I sold my house.
I'll look into the People's Trust thing - thanks!