Insights

According to a recent study by Ipsos Reid, 57% of pre-retirees surveyed and 37% of retirees surveyed indicated that running out of money in retirement was among their top financial concerns. Far and away, the greatest fear that I hear from people getting ready for retirement is the fear of running out of money. In this video I am going to walk you through 4 steps you can take if you are worried about running out of money in retirement.

I was recently asked for my thoughts on reverse mortgages. The topic can bring up strong feelings and troubling stories of family members who took out a reverse mortgage and had a bad financial outcome. But, like many financial products, reverse mortgages are a tool. They can do a lot of damage in situations where they are used incorrectly. And they can be a great solution for a retiree who meets a number of important criteria.

A viewer asks "How does retiring early affect CPP calculations? If you retire at 55, are all of the years following 55 to 65 counted as 0 income for the purpose of determining your average CPP contributions and therefore your payout in retirement? If so, and you start collecting CPP at 60, would that remove 5 years of 0 contributions, or would 60-65 still be counted as 0 CPP contributions for the average?"

I recently posted a video discussing the Question “Is there an inheritance Tax in Canada?” and it got a lot of interest and generated a ton of great questions and feedback. So, today is a longer “Part 2” video discussing the answers to some of the most common probate and estate planning questions including the benefits of probate, when probate is mandatory, dealing with estates without going through probate, different probate rules by province, and some examples of both good and bad estate planning.

So in this video, I'm going to talk about the probate process, how it works in the event of somebody passing away who owns a home that wants their child to inherit that property, what the difference is between probate and capital gains taxes and other forms of tax that might be payable when someone passes away. And hopefully some of this will relieve any concerns you might have about inheritance taxes and maybe help you avoid make. Planning mistakes as you try to avoid this inheritance tax that doesn't exist.

Many Canadians have children who are nearing the end of their post secondary education, and they may be holding onto RESP account balances and wondering what they should be doing with them?   For example, their child’s education costs may have been less than they anticipated, their student may have saved through part time work while they were in school, or they may have received scholarships and bursaries that more than covered their education costs.  In this video I’m going to walk through some of the options to effectively use up leftover RESP account balances.

n this video, I am going to talk about the risks of selling assets to your kids at a discount - specifically, the potential for double taxation. I will begin with introducing a hypothetical situation. Then I talk about how double-taxation occurs then give you 3 alternatives that may make the transfer of that asset to your children more smooth and tax efficient.

In this video, I am going to walk through the exact process that I step through with clients who are considering hiring me as their financial planner. I will step through the documents that I review, the discussions that we have, and the deliverable that every client gets before they make any decisions. I will outline the main components of a retirement financial plan, the criteria that you should use to measure how good or bad a retirement plan is, and to give you an idea of what it might look like to get started working with me.

In today's episode, I answer your questions, including answers to the following: 1) CPP vs OAS deferral 2) Income investment strategies 3) Inflation 4) RRSP or TFSA for children - which one is better? 5) TFSA's in Retirement 6) RRSP Meltdowns

A couple that I spoke to last week are considering selling their country home that sits on a large property. They understand that the gain on principal residences is sheltered by the principal residence exemption. But because of the size of their lot, they are concerned that there may be taxes owing when they go to sell the property. In this video, we will dig into a fictionalized situation based on this tax scenario and determine if, in fact, our sample couple Jack and Jill have a tax bill owing when they decide to sell their country home