Life licensed in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario · Quebec pending

Three people built your financial structure. Nobody has ever seen the whole of it.

Your accountant files the return and your advisor watches the funds, and the two of them have probably never spoken. This is a life-licensed practice with thirty-plus years of tax work behind it, so the coverage question and the corporate return get read on the same file.

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No pitch on the first call.
36
Years of tax work, since 1990
18
Years life licensed, since 2008

The blind spots

Which one of them is reading the whole file?

The bank sold you the RRSP, and their job was the contribution. Your accountant claimed the deduction, and their job was that year's return. Your advisor picked what sits inside it, and their job was the growth rate. Nobody's job was the withdrawal, because the withdrawal is thirty years away and it lands on somebody else's desk.

Deduct at fifteen percent and you deferred about $52,500 of tax across thirty-five years. Deduct at BC's top combined rate and you deferred $187,250. Handing it back takes four and a half years of retirement income either way, at every rung on the ladder.

Corporate structure

There are four ways out of your corporation. Were you shown one?

There is cash in there. More than there needs to be. It has been building for a few years and taking it out feels expensive, so it sits and the decision keeps getting deferred. Deferred decisions get made for you eventually, usually by a sale or a death, at the worst rate available on the day.

53.50% / 0%

Salary or bonus at the top combined rate, against a capital dividend paid from a funded capital dividend account. Same money, same company. British Columbia 2026.

Estate

Canada has no estate tax. So why do families lose three quarters of it?

You die owning shares in your private corporation. You are deemed to have sold them that day, although nothing was sold and nobody received anything, and the accrued gain lands on your final return. Then the company still has to get the money to your family, and that creates a second tax in the estate. Neither one is called an estate tax, which is exactly why nobody plans for it.

$1,215,000

What reaches the family from $5,000,000 of retained earnings with no plan in place. About $3.79 million of it goes to tax. From our own advanced planning material, illustrative, assuming a nominal cost base on the shares.

Protection

You insured the house and the car. What about the likely one?

Something major happening to your house this year runs at roughly one in twelve hundred. A serious car accident, about one in two hundred and seventy. Dying before sixty-five, around one in ninety-eight if you are forty now. You almost certainly carry cover for the first two, and quite likely the third.

1 in 3

A critical illness before sixty-five. This is a widely used planning figure, our own material flags it for verification against current data, and the flag stays on it here. The one in ninety-eight carries the same flag.

Retirement

Why does your RRSP shelter less of your income every year you succeed?

RRSP room is eighteen percent of last year's earned income, capped at a dollar limit that does not move with you. At $150,000 of T4 income you are sheltering the full eighteen percent. At $350,000 that same cap is 9.7 percent of what you earned. Nothing went wrong. The ceiling just stayed where it was while you did not.

$33,810

The RRSP dollar limit for 2026. Federal, so it is the same figure in every province.

The long version of each

The shape of it

Who drew the plan for yours?

Picture building a house where the plumber never speaks to the electrician. The painter has never met the flooring guy. And not one of them has seen what the architect drew.

Every trade does good work. Every invoice is fair. Nobody cut a corner and nobody overcharged you.

You still end up with a house nobody would choose to live in. That is most people's financial life, and nobody planned it that way.

Run your own number

British Columbia 2026 combined top rates. Alberta and Ontario brackets differ and we will run yours. Your actual marginal rate is almost certainly below the top one.

Which door is your corporate cash coming out of?

You know the retained earnings figure on the last T2. What you have probably never seen is that same figure walked out four different ways, side by side, with the tax on each one. Move the slider to your number. The spread between the widest door and the narrowest is the whole of it.

$1,500,000
$100,000$6,000,000
Salary or bonus — 53.50% in your hands
Non-eligible dividend — 48.89% at the top rate
Eligible dividend — 36.54%, if there is GRIP to pay it
Capital dividend — Nil, where there is a credit to pay it from
The spread, widest door to narrowest —

Illustrative arithmetic, not tax advice and not a projection. A capital dividend needs a credit sitting in the capital dividend account to pay it from, and the election has to be filed properly and on time. An eligible dividend needs general rate income pool the company may not have. Rates and thresholds index every year. Talk to your own accountant about your own return.

Have yours run properlyFifteen minutes. Nothing to send in advance.

The method

What actually happens if you call?

01

Fifteen minutes

You describe the structure. Incorporated or not, what is in it, who else has a claim on it, what is already covered. We ask questions and we present nothing. Most of these calls end with two or three things worth pulling out of a drawer.

02

What you send

The last two T2s, your notice of assessment, the shareholders agreement if there is one, and whatever policies you already hold. Nothing new gets bought to do this. If you would rather not send anything yet, we can work from what you can tell us on the phone.

03

The read

This is the part that takes the time. It gets read the way an accountant reads a file rather than the way a salesperson reads a lead. What comes back is an honest list of what is already set up correctly, because usually some of it is, and a short list of what looks worth a second look.

04

Your call, in writing

If something is worth doing you get the arithmetic and where each number came from, so your own accountant can check it. Insurance is one of the tools and we are paid when a policy is placed. You should know that going in.

Would this survive your accountant reading it?

Every figure on this site comes out of our own seminar decks, our own simulation, or a named public source, and the assumptions sit underneath it rather than in a footnote nobody publishes. Where a source deck flags a number as needing verification, the flag is still on it here. The exhibits sit on one page with the arithmetic showing.

See the exhibits

The seminar, online

When did you last hear the whole argument in one sitting?

Most of what is on this site started life in a room with a projector at the back of it. This is that presentation. It opens inside this window after a short wait, we tell you exactly how long that wait is and why, and there is nothing to download.

  • The four doors out of a corporation, and what each one costs at British Columbia 2026 combined rates.
  • Why an RRSP deduction is a loan rather than a saving, and the four and a half years of retirement income it takes to hand back.
  • What actually lands on the final return the day an incorporated professional dies, given that Canada has no estate tax.
Open the presentation Name, email and phone, because the viewer runs off them. Your details are stored on this site, they are not sold or passed to anyone, and you are not added to anything you did not ask for.

Where does this leave your accountant and your lawyer?

Exactly where they are now. They keep the file. We do not file your return, we do not draft your agreement, and we would not be much use if we tried. What we can do is read both of them without either professional having to translate anything first.

Your accountant

  • The returns, the elections, the year end and the CRA correspondence.
  • The capital dividend account balance, the adjusted cost base, and whether a structure is right for this file at all.

Your lawyer

  • The shareholders agreement, the will, the trust deed and the freeze.
  • Independent advice for every party who signs one of them.

This practice

  • The coverage and the funding. What the policy actually says, how it is sized, who owns it, and which pocket writes the cheque.
  • The liquidity that has to be there on the day the plan gets used.

Thirty-plus years of tax work means we can read your accountant's file and follow your lawyer's drafting without either of them having to translate. That is the whole benefit. It is not a licence to do their job, and we don't.

If you are the accountant or the lawyer reading this

What would fifteen minutes cost you?

You do not have to send a document to book it, and nothing is sent to you afterwards. Plenty of these calls end with us saying the structure is already doing what it should and the sensible move is to leave it alone. That happens more often than people expect, and we would rather say so in fifteen minutes than take six meetings to get there.

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No pitch on the first call. If there is nothing worth fixing, we will tell you that.
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