Who this is for
Does any of this sound like your week?
Four kinds of file come through this office more than any other. The details differ and the pressure is oddly similar: a corporation somebody else set up, an income that arrives in a shape nobody explained, and a policy bought in good faith years ago that has never been read since.
Pick the one that is closest. Nothing below says your existing arrangement is wrong. It says it is worth finding out, which is a different sentence and a much cheaper one to act on.
You spent a decade learning one body. Who taught you this one?
Nobody put a course on money in the curriculum, and there was no room for one anyway. Then residency ended, the corporation arrived, the billings started landing, and somewhere in the first eighteen months a person you had met twice sold you a product. It was probably a reasonable product. It answered the question they were there to answer.
What most physicians actually need first is a picture of where the money goes between the billing and the bank account. Then a decision about the corporation, which is where nearly all of it now lives. Coverage comes third, not first, and a lot of people met it the other way round.
Three from your week
- The billings land in the corporation and the balance has stopped meaning anything to you, because you have never been shown which door it comes out of or at what rate.
- Somebody sold you own-occupation disability cover during residency. You have not opened the contract since, and the definition inside it is the only wording in your professional life you have never interrogated.
- Locum work, a second site, a clinic day that bills differently from the hospital one. Three income streams, one T1, and an accountant who sees all of it in April and none of it in October.
What the RRSP cap actually shelters at $350,000 of T4 income. At $150,000 it shelters the full 18%. The ceiling does not move with you.
You know your patients' bodies. We know the financial one.
The practice is the asset. Does your plan know that?
A dental practice is a business with equipment debt, a lease, staff on payroll and a real sale value, sitting on top of being your income. Those are two different things and they need two different answers. Plenty of dentists are doing a careful job on the first one and have never been asked about the second.
The other question nobody asks early enough is what this is worth on the day you want to stop. Not a figure from a conversation at a study club. The number, tested, with the tax on it worked out, and the exemption checked against what you actually own.
Three from your week
- Equipment debt, a lease with years left to run, staff whose pay does not pause, and a chair that has to be filled to carry all of it.
- You have cover that replaces your income if you cannot work. The overhead carries on regardless, and that is a separate policy answering a separate question.
- You have a number in your head for what the practice is worth. It is the largest number in your life and nobody has ever tested it.
The lifetime capital gains exemption for 2026, available only on qualifying small business corporation shares. Whether yours qualify is a test they meet or fail on the day of the sale, not on the day you ask.
You would never start drilling without the x-ray. Nobody has ever x-rayed the practice.
Your firm agreement says what happens if you cannot work. When did you last read that clause?
Almost all of the value in this work sits in the wording, and wording is what you read for a living. So the conversation is short, and it does not need anybody to explain what a clause does. It needs somebody to have read the one governing you.
The awkward part is the same one every time. The documents governing your own position are the ones you signed quickly, years ago, on somebody else's draft, in a week when four other files were louder.
Three from your week
- Income arrives in lumps. A strong year sets one bracket and a slow one sets another, and the RRSP deduction you claimed was priced against whichever year it happened to land in.
- There is a clause in the partnership or shareholders agreement about incapacity and about departure. You signed it. You have not read it since, and the firm has roughly doubled since you did.
- The definition of disability in your own policy is the only piece of drafting in your life you have never argued with.
How long it takes to hand back what an RRSP deferred, in retirement income, at every bracket from 15% to 53.50%. The amount deferred swings from $52,500 to $187,250. The payback period does not move.
You read contracts all day. When did you last read your own policy?
Your business does not have to be the whole plan. Is it?
Most owners we sit with have everything riding on one asset that they also work at full time. The building, the retained earnings, the pension and the income are all the same bet, and it is a bet they are good at, which is exactly why nobody has ever suggested spreading it.
The work is separating the two. Making sure the business survives losing a key person, and making sure there is something outside it that does not depend on next year being a good year. Those are two jobs and most files are only doing one.
Three from your week
- Retained earnings have been climbing for three years. Taking the money out feels expensive, so it sits, and the decision keeps getting deferred until a sale or a death makes it for you.
- There is a shareholders agreement. It was drafted when the business was a third of this size, and if there is a funding line in it, nobody has looked at what stands behind that line.
- If your co-owner died tonight, their shares go to their estate, and their estate is usually a spouse who has never run this and does not want to start now.
What reaches the family out of $5,000,000 of retained earnings when nothing was written down. About $3.79 million goes in tax, on a nominal cost base, across two taxable events on the same dollar.
You know what every line of the business costs. Nobody has ever costed the way you get paid.
And if none of the four is quite you?
Then say so on the call and we will work from your file rather than from a profile. The fifteen minutes is the same either way. If there is nothing worth fixing we will tell you that, which is a short call and an honest one.