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Whether it’s owning your own home, funding your children’s education, or creating a stress-free retirement, a financial plan is considered vital in working towards your goals. A well-grounded and effective plan goes beyond the realm of saving, budgeting, and investing. It also considers other elements of your financial picture, including insurance planning, tax planning, retirement planning, estate planning, and much more.

By understanding the role of financial planning in meeting your short, intermediate, and long-term financial aspirations, you'll be better equipped to control your financial future.

Our Approach to Financial Planning

• Discovering You: Our process begins with a consultative discovery meeting designed to learn more about you and your goals. This is also an opportunity for you to learn more about what we do, and see if we’re a good fit for your needs.
   
• Strategy Planning: Once we learn who you are, we'll start developing your personalized plan. Through our strategy-building process, we’ll create a set of personalized plans – for the short, intermediate, and long-term – that aim to fulfill your overall financial strategy. We use a consultative and iterative approach, so each session brings us closer to the financial objectives we set together.
   
• Implementation: Whether it’s making the right investment decisions, choosing the right insurance plan for you and your family, saving to reach your retirement goals, or creating an estate plan that preserves your legacy; our financial professionals will be right there by your side as you take each step. Through foresight, encouragement, and professionalism, we’ll make sure each step of your plan is implemented.
   
• Review and Support: We’ll laud you at every successful implementation of your financial plan, and help you stay on track to meet your objectives. Through plan reviews, we’ll consult with you and make modifications to your strategies and plans as needed.

Book an initial consultation with one of our financial professionals to create your personalized financial plan.

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It’s said that only two things are certain in life: Death…and Taxes! And while there’s not much you can do to avoid the former, with prudent planning and foresight, there’s a lot you can do to minimize the latter. However, similar to planning that goes into living a happy and fruitful life, a well-planned tax strategy can yield great benefits – but only if it’s done professionally, and earlier on during your wealth accumulation cycle.

Our Tax Planning philosophy is not centered on tax avoidance, but rather on helping you structure your finances, so you and your family aren’t overburdened by undue tax liability.

Why Tax Planning Is Important

Consider this fact: If you managed to shave off just $250 from your tax bill each year, through prudent Tax Planning, and invested it at a 5% rate of return annually, you could have a tidy sum of over $15,250 waiting for you by the time you retire in 30 years!

Delayed tax planning is tantamount to leaving potentially saveable dollars, of your hard-earned money, on the tax table for others to benefit from. The longer you defer tax planning, the more money you’ll end up owing and paying in taxes. That money could potentially have been saved, through a reduced tax bill, invested, and grown, through the magic of compounding, over many years.

What We Can Do for You

We help our clients through long-term Tax Planning strategies – and that’s exactly how we’ll help you. Tax planning does not commence on the date of filing your tax returns. Prudent tax planning often starts long before – sometimes even before you make investment decisions that trigger a tax liability. We can help devise tax planning strategies that minimize taxes, maximize tax refunds and guide you to optimize your tax-friendly investment returns.

Here’s what we can do for you through our Tax Planning service:

• While the best advice you can get is: Save. Save. Save…as much as you can. The next best advice is: Be careful how you invest those savings. Our Tax Planning advice will include considerations on whether you should invest with pre-tax dollars, or post-tax income. How you invest, and in what types of vehicles, can make a significant difference to the taxes you pay. Our Tax specialists can help you navigate through the various advantages and disadvantages of choosing one strategy over another.

• When planning for tax impact on your income, we’ll also plan for the types of income that you might receive: Dividends, Interest, Annuity payments, Capital Gains, Inheritances, Employer or Government benefits. While all of these are potential income streams in retirement and before, each has different tax planning implications.

• Our tax specialists will help you foresee impacts to your future net wealth. If left unplanned, your net wealth could be diminished due to likely claw-backs to benefits, and the possibility of erosion to your estate through substantial taxes.

• We’ll help you mitigate possible tax impacts when it comes to your estate. A good tax plan will ensure that future generations do not bear the burden of taxes due to the legacy you leave them. But to ensure a tax-advantage inheritance to your beneficiaries, you need to put appropriate plans in place NOW – and that’s where our Tax Planning specialists can help.

Contact us today to learn more about tax planning.

When entrepreneurs start a business, the last thing on their minds is succession planning. Most business owners spend a lot of time – as they should – on Operations Plans, Marketing Plans, Capital-spending Plans, Maintenance Planning, Staffing Plans…and more. But what about Succession Planning? Wouldn’t you like an orderly “exit” from the business, once it’s time for you to take a back seat?

Why Business Succession Planning Is Important

You’ve built your business through sweat, toil and tireless effort. For most entrepreneurs, their business operations represent a legacy that they’d like to leave to the next generation. And what would happen to the business in the event that you are suddenly incapacitated – is there someone reliable that can step into your shoes? Have you thought about the customers/clients that depend on the goods/services your company provides – who would service their needs if you are not around?

More importantly, given that many loyal employees count on working for the business long after the owner has passed, it makes sense to ensure someone with the proper vision for the business succeeds you.

Without a proper succession plan in place, family strife and internal (company) politics would threaten the future of the firm as a going concern. In some cases, companies without sound succession plans find themselves being pushed into bankruptcy or receivership.

There are far reaching repercussions for not having a well-thought-out succession plan. Unfortunately, all of them are not too pleasant for the business, the business owner, his/her beneficiaries and the employees working for the company!

What We Can Do for You

Simply put, our Business Succession Planning service provides business owners peace of mind – the kind that comes from knowing you are well-prepared to relinquish control of the business on your own terms. And we do that by ensuring that the stewardship of the business passes into hands that are designated and approved by you - the business owner.

But succession planning is not just about designating a particular individual or group to step in after you’re gone. Our Business Succession Planning team lays out a comprehensive process for identifying, screening, grooming, and ultimately transitioning ownership to your designated successor/s when the time comes.

Here’s a preview of what our Business Succession Planning service covers:

• Strategizing succession: Helping you identify the ideal succession strategy based upon any number of “end game” objectives that you have in mind: Maximize sales proceeds. Minimize tax implications. Create a lasting legacy. Assure a comfortable retirement.

• Building succession plans: We’ll consult with you about possible succession strategies: Pass the business on to your next generation? Hand it over to designated/trusted employees? Have professional management teams from outside step in and take over? Sell the business to a competitor and pass the proceeds to your heirs? Go public, leaving it up to the Board of Directors to deal with the company’s future?

• Understanding the impacts: Together, our Succession Planning experts will walk you through all of the legal, financial and tax implications for each of the various succession scenarios proposed. This impact analysis will help you determine which of the succession approaches makes best sense for you and the business.

• Identifying successors: Depending upon which strategy you choose, we’ll work with you to identify a list of skills and qualities needed in your successor. This phase of our Succession Planning often results in recommendations for training or mentorship well in advance of your exiting the company.

• Multi-disciplined advice: In the event that the plan involves selling all or part of the business, our experts will work with a team of advisors, including Financial experts, Accountants, Insurance Agents, Realtors and Estate Planners to determine a fair and equitable valuation for the business.

• Relationship-building: Finally, we’ll work with you to establish a comprehensive timeline for key milestones within the plan. And because our service is based on a long-term relationship, we’ll continually monitor and consult with you as your succession objectives evolve or change.

Contact us today to learn more about succession planning as a business owner.

Business transactions are becoming more complex each year. And with that, the world of taxation grows in complexity as well. As the rules of doing business, within a single jurisdiction or across multiple jurisdictions, change, so does the need for assessing their tax impacts on specific transactions. As a business owner, you have other critical things to worry about – like running your business. Why not trust experts with the tax planning aspects of your business, while you focus on the rest?

Why Tax Planning Is Important for Business Owners

As a business owner, it’s hard for you to be an expert in all matters - Finance, Human Resources, Marketing, Accounting, Sales, Shipping, Procurement – and that’s why you hire the best talent to staff those roles. But many of those disparate functions have one thing in common: They have some form of tax element to them.

Business taxes can sometimes be a barrier to growth and profitability of your business. However, if planned correctly, the tax codes offer a number of valid opportunities that business owners can leverage to their advantage. Without savvy tax planning, you could literally be losing thousands of dollars a year in unclaimed rebates, benefits, charge-backs and deductions,

Whether it’s Income Tax, Employment Taxes, Estimated Taxes, Self-Employment Tax, Excise Tax, Provincial Sales Taxes or Goods and Services Taxes – the legislative environment for each of them is too complex for any single individual to master and navigate. So, when it comes to assessing and planning your business taxes, you need an experienced team of Tax Planning professionals to guide you.

What We Can Do for You

The objective of our Tax Planning service isn’t about avoiding taxes, but focused on the most effective interpretation and application of tax laws and statutes to defer, eliminate or reduce business taxes for our clients.

Our Tax Planning specialists provide invaluable advice and services to a range of business entities, including Sole Proprietorships, Partnerships, Limited Liability Companies (LLPs), Business Corporations/Incorporated Companies, Co-operative structures and Not-for-profit entities.

More specifically, we provide advice and services that include, but is not limited to:

• Reviewing and advising clients on long-term impact to their business, of tax legislation and proposed amendments.
• Strategic tax planning advice to help you manage your effective tax rate.
• Planning and advice on Alternate Minimum Tax, including supporting you on all paperwork and other formalities to determine amounts owing – if any.
• Consultations on the tax impact on specific transactions (Sale of assets, M&A activity, Import/Export transactions).
• Providing advise on the most effective tax structures for a specific type of business.
• Considerations on the most effective ways to minimize your tax burden.
• Preparation of Individual, Corporate, Trust, Partnership and Sole-Owner tax returns.
• Multi-state/inter-provincial tax planning advice, including compliance reviews.
• Electronic tax filing so you receive your rebates, refunds and deductions quickly.
• Providing tax advice to clients when dealing with Federal, State/Provincial tax authorities.
• Tax planning strategies and advice around Succession and Estate planning, to ensure that your exit from the company doesn’t trigger massive tax liabilities, or that your beneficiaries aren’t saddled with undue tax burdens from their inheritance from the disposal of business assets

Contact us today to learn more about tax planning as a business owner.