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Getting Set Up With TD e-Series Funds The Easy Way!

In this article, I will teach you how to set up a TD e-Series Funds account the quick and easy way.  Whether you are opening an RRSP, TFSA, RESP or a non-registered account, I’ve found a very simple way to get started with TD’s e-Series Funds.  So I thought I’d walk you through the process that I followed to quickly get set up.

What are TD e-Series Funds?

TD e-Series Funds are low-cost mutual funds that are available to its customers through online banking only.  The key thing about TD e-Series Funds is that you manage them online, either through EasyWeb or email.  You cannot go into a branch and either open an e-Series Funds account or get help with one.  In fact, their consent form states that you cannot call TD Investment Services (TDIS) about e-Series Funds unless EasyWeb is unavailable.

Why all the fuss about TD e-Series Funds?

What makes TD e-Series Funds so appealing is their low cost.  With management expense ratios (MERs) ranging from 0.33% to 0.52%, they are certainly among the lowest in the industry.  In fact, the MERs are so low that e-Series Funds are able to compete with exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Why it’s so hard to open a TD e-Series Funds Account

With a popular, low-cost mutual fund product that is all the rage in the blogosphere and among personal finance gurus, you’d think that TD would be peddling the e-Series Funds everywhere.  Surprisingly, this is not the case.  In fact, even though TD e-Series Funds are becoming more and more popular, TD for its part, hasn’t made it very easy for people to access these low-cost mutual funds.

I mean if you’ve ever looked at the TD e-Series Funds account application online, it can be a bit overwhelming.  It is about 14 pages long and requires lots of documentation, filling out an investor profile, etc., etc.  It can be a real nightmare to fill out and if you forget an initial here or a signature there, the application gets returned to you and you have to correct it and re-submit it.  Believe me, it happened to me when I first opened my e-Series Funds RRSP account back in 2007.  It took about a month to get the account opened.

Opening a TD e-Series Funds account

The easiest way to avoid the hassles of applying directly for a TD e-Series Funds account is to go into your local TD bank branch and open a mutual funds account.  It can be an RRSP, RESP or a TFSA account – it really doesn’t matter, this method works for them all.  Just don’t mention anything about e-Series Funds because the financial planner may not know about them or, if they do, they cannot speak to you about them because they are for online customers only.

When you open a mutual fund account at the branch, you will be required to fill out a Customer Investor Profile document.  To avoid any issues down the road, when I fill out the investor profile I answer all of the questions so that I achieve the “aggressive growth” profile.  I do this because if you select too conservative of profile, then you may not have the option to purchase certain funds  and, in fact, a TDIS representative may refuse to complete a purchase transaction if it does not align with your investor profile.

Once the investor profile is finished, you can either make an initial deposit into a money market fund or wait until you can purchase e-Series Funds.  Personally, I just made the initial deposit into the TD Money Market Fund (TDB 164) because you can always just “switch” the money from that fund to an e-Series fund later.  With the account opened, it’s now just a matter of applying for the e-Series Funds.

TD e-Series Funds Account Application

The great thing about my method is that because you already opened the mutual fund account in-branch, all you need to do now is fill out and mail off an Application To Convert To A TD e-Series Funds Account form.  The form is only 2 pages long and is very simple to fill out.  All you need to do is:

  1. Fill out your mutual fund account number,
  2. Fill out your TD Canada Trust Access Card number, and
  3. Sign and date the form!

That’s it!  There you have it – how to open a TD e-Series Funds account.  Within a week or two, you will notice that when you log into EasyWeb and go to purchase mutual funds, you will have access to purchase e-Series Funds in addition to the regular menu of TD mutual funds.  This is also the time that you can set up a Pre-authorized Purchase Plan (PPP) to make regular, automatic contributions to your new TD e-Series Funds account!

For more information on the benefits of automatic contributions to investment plans see my article on how to Grow Your Net Worth Automatically!