I DON’T SELL STOCKS ... I GO RIGHT UNTIL THE BITTER END.

hand over to the CRA $8,162.

But because you invested within your TFSA, you owe the government precisely nothing. Of course, had Google gone the other way, selling within a TFSA could have been a disadvantage — a loss is just a loss; it can’t be offset.

Still, this is unlikely to deter someone like Feferman. have more gains than losses.”

Besides, selling low goes against one of the main, good-sense long-term investing rules.

“Investors are their No. 1 enemy.” Bridge says. “Don’t touch it. It doesn’t matter if Donald Trump gets elected. It doesn’t matter.”

That’s a piece of advice Feferman abides by religiously.

“I don’t sell stocks,” he says. “I’m extremely loyal to my holdings and I never abandon ship. I go right until the bitter end.”

Even if you choose to follow the market passively with ETFs, you’ll still end up ahead of the game with a sum large enough to fund your golf membership and travels.

Continuing our Google example, let’s say you’re now 32 with a wife, a baby on the way, and your risk tolerance has gone way down so you decide to invest that $45,809 into four different ETFs to create a balanced and diversified portfolio. Over the next 30 years, you average a rate of return of four per cent. Nothing spectacular, but it’s consistent. By the time you’re 62 and itching to retire, your nest egg has grown to $148,576.80.

That’s $26,000 more than the $122,104.19 you would have ended up with had you reinvested the after-tax gain in the same fashion.

And that’s entirely yours to keep, which is where the TFSA veers off from an RRSP or a non-registered account, where you would end up giving the CRA a significant portion of your fortune.

With the accumulated contribution room at $52,000 for those who were at least 18 when the TFSA was introduced, the vehicle has become “an important part of long-term wealth accumulation,” Bridge says.

“The TFSA is the best gift the government has given us in a long time.”