Last week, I finally transferred my one CIBC RRSP account to Sunlife where I have 99% of my registered accounts. I opened my CIBC RRSP account a few years ago and I was dumb and did not do my research. CIBC will charge you an annual fee of $100 if your account is worth less than $25,000. I didn’t realize this and my account was significantly less than $25K. When I found this out, I didn’t want to dump a total of $25K into that one account, just to avoid a $100 annual fee. I also didn’t want to transfer out right away and incur a transfer fee.
Perhaps it was a stupid strategy but my goal was to sit on the account and hopefully my RRSP investments would appreciate enough that I could recoup any annual fees, plus the transfer fee and then I’d transfer out to a more customer friendly investment account. Unfortunately, that never really happened. At best, I made $100 a year so which just went to the annual fee. The investments just stagnated and last week, I felt like I had enough and decided to transfer out. I’ll have to eat the transfer fee, which I think CIBC charges you $150 for.
The lesson to be learned here is to be sure of every single fee a bank charges you, which I was not aware of.