Thank you for the great article! All parents should read it to study how to withdraw wise and smart.

Joseph,

Jim Yih has a great post explaining your options when it comes to Withdrawals – https://retirehappy.ca/resp-withdrawal-rules/

I have a question about withdrawal from RESP account. As there are 3 portions in the account, can I select which portion to be used first? For example, first I want to use up money from the government, and then income portion, and lastly principal I can take out without any taxes. So, I dont’ have to worry about the refund to government once I use all the grants.

I appreciate your advice.

Hello Barry,

Thank you for your response. I thought I would get a notification once you responded, which was not the case. Missed your response until now.
Thanks for looking into this and confirming, I will surely escalate this, now that I have a confirmation that I was right all along. I guess it makes a lot of sense, after all.

Much appreciated.

Hi Eugene,

I looked into this a little bit and all my sources say that your financial institution should have the breakdown. They all agree that the government website would not have the detailed breakdown you’re looking for. If the person you’re dealing with insists that you need to get it from the government, you may want to escalate things with them.

Could you please advise how we can find out how much of the government contributions is left in an RESP account, at any point in time? Same question for the other two components that you have indicated (principal and gains)? We still have a large leftover amount past our son’s graduation.

We have our RESP for our two kids (shared). Our daughter has graduated college and our son is about to start his last uni year. We really have to know where we stand, breakdown wise.
The RESP is with HSBC and we have tried quite a few times to get this info and they say that it is impossible for them to get this data for us and that we should refer to the government.
This makes absolutely no sense to us.

All statements have been missing such breakdown, so we don’t know how much is left.
We surely don’t want to have to return any of the government part.

Lastly, we thought that the remaining amount was our kids’ to use, for any purpose they wish (minus any taxes or government returns, if applicable). Isn’t that the case?

TIA,
Eugen

Victor,

Justwealth is what I recommend to people who want a hands-off approach since they’re a robo-advisor. I find their RESP portfolio slightly better than other robo-advisors. Since I know a bit more about inviting that the average person, I use E-series funds as the MER is lower than robo-advisors.