REMEMBER YOU NEED $500,000 FOR YOUR RETIREMENT, TO BE ABLE TO INVEST AND LIVE OFF THE INTEREST AND DIVIDENDS.   WHETHER IT IS A DEFINED BENEFITS PENSION PLAN, RRSP'S OR DC PLAN OR EVEN THE NEW FEDERAL PRIVATE PENSION PLANE, 

Create Your Own Pension Plan With These 3 Monthly Dividend Payers

These days, less and less of us have the luxury of an employer-sponsored pension plan. As costs escalated out of control, many companies chose to discontinue offering the plans altogether, opting for a RRSP match instead. As the first wave of baby boomers starts to retire, we’re starting to see the consequences of the first generation largely responsible for their own retirement planning.

But it doesn’t have to be so hard. All retirees need to do is invest in high quality dividend stocks that pay them each month, and just sit back and collect dividend cheques. It really is that easy to create your own pension plan. Here are three stocks that fit the bill.

Build Your TFSA With The Bank of Nova Scotia and Shaw Communications Inc.

The TFSA is, without a doubt, the greatest financial tool available to Canadian investors.

Unlike RRSPs, which only defer tax, TFSAs allow in investor to contribute $5,500 each year into a true tax avoidance plan. It doesn’t matter if you double your money each year, you’re not paying any tax on it. Plus, the money in a TFSA is flexible. Investors can withdraw their cash whenever they’d like and not have to worry about paying the tax man.

Even though the TFSA is the perfect account for investors to use for holding stocks, there are way too many Canadians that are using the account to hold more conservative assets, like cash or GICs. According to a bank survey in 2013, 80% of Canadians were holding either cash or GICs in their TFSAs. Just 14% of Canadians were using their TFSA to hold individual stocks, while 5% invested in ETFs.

Most Canadians cannot afford to have money sitting in a savings account or a GIC, earning less than 1% interest. We just don’t have the savings rate for that. Plenty of us aren’t saving enough for retirement as it is, a sin that is doubly compounded when money set aside for investing loses out on returns it could be earning invested in some of Canada’s biggest companies. Opportunity costs are very real.

If an investor starts early enough and is smart enough to let their TFSA compound over 35 years, they could see a TFSA worth over a million dollars. Here’s how.