Getting started investing your money can seem like a daunting task. As I’ve written in a previous article, the Tangerine Investment Funds are a great option for those new to investing in index funds, and want a low-maintenance option for their investments (i.e. after you purchase, you can forget about them and they’ll do their thing).Today I’m going to go through the exact steps involved in purchasing Tangerine Investment Funds, and help take away some of the guess work.
Related link: Tangerine investment funds – what are they, where do I buy them, and how much do they cost?
Step 1: Create a free Tangerine chequing account
This is also information that I’ve covered in a previous post series. You can see the posts here:
Those guides cover a more detailed process on switching your day-to-day banking from another bank to Tangerine, but you can focus more on Part 2 to show you how to open a free chequing account.
If you are planning to open a chequing account and use it for your day-to-day banking, you can use my Orange code (46415105S1) to get a bonus $50 if you hold at least $100 in the account.
Sign up for a Tangerine account
Step 2: Login to your Tangerine account and add an account
Now that you’ve opened a free Tangerine account, you can login and on your “Overview” page click on the “Open an investing account” button.
Step 3: Choose the type of investment accounts (TFSA, RRSP, unregistered)
Now select the type of investment account that you would like to open. This can be a registered RRSP or TFSA investment account, or an unregistered account. I would highly suggest taking advantage of your TFSA or RRSP if you have contribution room.
Press the “Add” button on the type of account you want to open:
Then press the “Next” button:
Step 4: Confirm your personal information
Most of your personal information will have been filled in from when you originally signed up with Tangerine, but you can confirm this info and add any additional details that might be missing:
Step 5: Opening an investment account
You’ll now move on to the section on how you will plan to fund your account. This is an important step. As these following steps can take 10 minutes or so to complete, make sure you’ve set aside enough time to get through the whole process.
Click “Next” if you’re ready to proceed.
If you have setup a registered account, you’ll need to confirm that you have checked your contribution room, and that you are sure you have room to contribute to a TFSA or RRSP. You’ll need to answer the questions and click all of the boxes to move to the next step.
Different ways to fund your Tangerine Investment account
As you can see in the screen shot above, there are 3 different ways you can fund your investment account:
- A Tangerine chequing or savings account
- An external bank account
- Or a TFSA transfer
We’ll look at these in more detail in a step coming up.
Step 7: Creating an investor profile
The investor profile is an important step of the sign-up process, and will determine the type of fund that you should purchase based on the level of risk that you indicate that you’re comfortable with. See the Tangerine Investment Funds overview post I created to better understand the different funds and the level of risk that each provides.
Fill in your personal information here:
Read over the options carefully. If you already know which type of fund you would like to invest in, as covered in the Tangerine Investment Funds post, then make sure to answer the questions that reflect the level of risk associated with the fund:
Again, answer the next question based off of the risk level of the type of Tangerine Investment Fund that you are interested in. Reading the descriptions will help give a better understanding of the risk involved in each fund:
Once you’ve completed all of the investor profile questions, Tangerine will present the fund that it believes matches up to your investor profile. If this isn’t the fund that you want to be invested in, you’ll need to go back and re-answer questions to better match the fund you want. Remember to read the Tangerine Investment Funds info page if you are having a problem matching your investor profile to the fund that you want.
Step 8: Setting up your Tangerine Investment Funds portfolio
Now that you’ve provided your personal information, and determined what fund you want to purchase by completing your investor profile, it’s time to complete the process and set up your account.
Answer whether a third party will benefit from this account, as well as what your intended use is:
Continue to fill out the form. It will ask for more personal information about you, some of it that it might have already asked about (which is annoying), but required.
Step 9: Funding your account
One of the most important steps in this process is determining how you actually plan to fund this investment account. As I said before there are 3 options:
- A Tangerine chequing or savings account;
- A linked chequing/savings account from another bank;
- A transfer from an external registered account.
As you can see below, I have a chequing account and 2 savings accounts from Tangerine that I’m able to fund from. I also have 2 external accounts – 1 from TD Bank and 1 from EQ Bank, that I can also fund from. I had linked these accounts earlier (find instructions in my Tangerine guides: part 1 and part 2). You can also see the 3rd option “Transfer an External Account to Tangerine).
This is important if you want to directly transfer funds from a registered account without actually withdrawing them (and thereby temporarily losing contribution room). So if you are moving funds from a TFSA at another institution, make sure you select this option:
Provide the account information for your external TFSA. Make sure you double check your numbers and that everything is accurate:
If, instead, you are funding from a chequing or savings account, now confirm how much you would like to include in your first purchase. You have to make an initial purchase to be able to open the account:
Step 9: Finalizing your Tangerine Investment Fund setup and purchase
You’re now close to the end of the whole process. Make sure that you review all of your information, and that it is all correct. Double check the Portfolio that you are purchasing, and the account that the money is coming out of. Pressing the submit button on this step will submit the order.
Success! You have now opened a Tangerine Investment account and made your first purchase. The opening of the account and purchase won’t happen immediately. You’ll have to wait for the account to go through, at which point it will take another day or two for your initial purchase to be processed.
Tangerine Investment Funds – Round Up
There it is, a walk through of how to open a Tangerine Investment account and purchase assets in the index portfolio that you want. The whole process may seem like, but it only took 10 to 15 minutes from start to finish. Do you find these kind of guides helpful? Let me know in the comments below.