Episode 221: The Biggest Wealth Lessons for 2026

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Are you sitting on piles of retained earnings but still unsure how to actually put your money to work as a business owner?

So many incorporated business owners believe they’re “well invested,” only to discover most of their wealth is sitting idle in corporate accounts — untouched because of uncertainty, fear of volatility, or analysis paralysis. This episode unpacks the real reason business owners think they’re invested when they’re not, why this misunderstanding creates missed opportunities year after year, and how over-focusing on finding the “perfect” investment stalls real progress. You’ll hear what 400+ conversations with business owners revealed about risk, liquidity, and the mental blocks that keep money on the sidelines instead of building long-term freedom.

You’ll learn:

• Why your perceived investment risk profile often doesn’t match your actual asset allocation — and how to fix it
• A simple framework for deciding how much cash to keep liquid versus how much to put into diversified, productive assets
• The small, consistent steps that reliably move retained earnings into growth without overwhelming complexity or added stress

Press play to learn the most important wealth-building lesson business owners need before stepping into 2026.

Resources:

• Ready to take a deep dive and learn how to generate personal tax free cash flow from your corporation? Enroll in our FREE masterclass here. 
• Book a Discovery Call with Kyle to review your corporate (or personal) wealth strategy to help you overcome your current struggle and take the next step in your Canadian Wealth Building Journey!
• Discover which phase of wealth creation you are in. Take our quick assessment and you’ll receive a custom wealth-building pathway that matches your phase and learn our CRA compliant tax optimized strategies. Take that assessment here.
• Dig into our Ultimate Investment Book List
• Follow/Connect with us on social media for daily posts and conversations about business, finance, and investment on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook [Kyle’s Profile, Our Business Page], TikTok and TwitterX.  

Calling All Canadian Incorporated Business Owners & Investors:

Consider reaching out to Kyle if you’ve been…

• …taking a salary with a goal of stuffing RRSPs;
• …investing inside your corporation without a passive income tax minimization strategy;
• …letting a large sum of liquid assets sit in low interest earning savings accounts;
• …investing corporate dollars into GICs, dividend stocks/funds, or other investments attracting cordporate passive income taxes at greater than 50%; or,
• …wondering whether your current corporate wealth management strategy is optimal for your specific situation.

Canadian business owners looking to build long-term wealth in 2025 face unique financial planning challenges, from managing cash flow and overcoming analysis paralysis to balancing investment strategies across multiple financial buckets. A strong Canadian wealth plan brings together diversification, risk management, and tax-efficient investing to support financial freedom in Canada—whether through real estate investing, RRSP optimization, or choosing the right salary vs. dividends approach. By aligning personal vs. corporate tax planning, capital gains strategies, and corporate structure optimization, entrepreneurs can accelerate their path to financial independence Canada while supporting early retirement goals and a modest-lifestyle wealth vision. With the right corporation investment strategies, retirement planning tools, and estate planning considerations, Canadian entrepreneur finance becomes a system—not guesswork—helping business owners create passive income, optimize RRSP room, leverage real estate vs. renting decisions, and design a legacy planning approach that strengthens wealth building for decades to come.

Transcript:

In this episode, we’re gonna talk about the most important lesson that we’ve been pulling from business owners, investors in 2025. We’ve been on, I don’t know how many client calls this year. It’s gotta be 400. I’m gonna guess, Kyle. I could pull that number up since I’m the numbers guy. we, you know.

This is what we do most of the time when we’re not recording our podcast is that we’re talking with business owners, we’re talking with investors and we’re helping them on their financial plans and their financial planning and making appropriate decisions. And this episode we want to unpack the one, the one most important lesson that I, that we’ve been sharing with business owners over the course of 2025. And so that you don’t, you know, so that you also can hear that lesson. but also make sure that you’re avoiding any of the missed opportunities going into 2026.

I love it. I love it. Yeah. And you know, on these calls, what we find very, very quickly is there’s only a small handful, specifically when it comes to incorporated business owners where like they’ve got like a good chunk of their net worth into investments into, you know, the proper amount of investments in different buckets.

for the most part, when you’re an incorporated business owner, you are dependent on your own growth engine, which is the business itself. And with that comes a lot of uncertainty, right? So you’ve got a lot of weight on your shoulders, you know, if the business doesn’t perform, what if there’s a cashflow crunch? What if, what if, what if all of these things are going on and that causes people to do a whole lot of nothing with the money that is coming in, right? You’ve got the money that’s flowing out as a dividend or a salary.

Sometimes even at a personal level, what I find really interesting is business owners will take money out as a salary. And because it’s now going to a different account and then they’ve got some extra money at the end of the month, they start taking those dollars and putting it into an RSP or tax free savings accounts. These are all good things. These are all positive things, right? If there’s money left over amazing, but what we’re not seeing happen automatically is doing something with those dollars that are in the corporate accounts and

As we’ve recently mentioned on a recent episode, we talked about the idea of knowing our numbers. And when we know our numbers, we can actually start doing something with those dollars. So what we want to see people doing is taking those first steps in order to actually get themselves invested. And when we say invested,

It doesn’t mean any one specific investment and it also doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a long term or an illiquid or a volatile investment as well. But we do need to get those dollars working and doing something. ultimately at the end of the day, what we’re seeing is a lot of business owners that are kind of flying by the seat of their pants. And oftentimes they might think that they’re actually more invested in the markets or into other types of investments or allocations. than they really are. And that’s something that we can work towards optimizing as we look to 2026.

Well, I think I’m glad you brought that up because that is the of the crux of this is because a lot of the calls end up, we end up talking about that retained earnings portion and then also going like, also tell me about your investment strategy, right? And then this is the part where like, we’ve been flying by the seat of our pants with no, I guess some strategy but no real strategy and what we’re learning is that there are,

they’re often, they think they’re more invested than they actually are. So why don’t you unpack that statement first? Because it’s tied to the, you know, we’re gonna have a couple of kind of different lessons that really are really tied to this in this episode, but let’s unpack that first about like, why are business owners that we’re talking with mostly think they’re more invested than they, like they’re not more invested than they think they are.

Yeah, well, I think one of the pieces is, specifically when we’re talking about the investments they think they’re in, oftentimes they think that they are a more risk on investor than maybe they really are. And really, the proof is in the pudding. If you actually look at their entire net worth and you actually look at where those dollars are, many have a primary residence. Some might have some rental real estate. And then they might have some investments in the markets.

But when we actually include the dollars that are sitting idle for just in case for cashflow crunches inside of their business or in their personal life, oftentimes the ratio doesn’t align with what they’re perceiving they have in their mind. So we might have someone who believes that their investments, their 90 % equity. And I’m like, that’s amazing that you’re 90 % equity for investments. But the problem is they’re only looking at that one bucket.

And that one bucket might actually be the same size as their corporate bank account. And that’s a problem because what that means is you’re actually more 50-50 or less in terms of equities. And therefore, there’s a lot of opportunities sitting on the table inside your business that we can start thinking around and really trying to essentially create a plan that’s going to put you in a much better financial position both now and into the future without necessarily adding a significant amount of risk to your investment profile.

Right. So tell me this then. So why do you feel like this is, it’s like if we think that we’re more invested than we are and we’re having this in the sidelines, we’ve got this reserve, I think I’m invested in that, I wanna make sure I’m being somewhat risky but not too risky with this bucket, but I’ve got this bucket over here. What do you think is the root cause here? that’s preventing us from making use of the buckets in a better way.

Yeah, I think the most obvious and the easiest ⁓ sort of culprit here is, of course, the concern about the unknown in the future, right? It’s like, if I put dollars into this bucket or that bucket or this asset or that asset, is it going to be volatile? Is it going to be liquid enough if the business has an issue? Now,

Again, if we zoom out for a second, that’s assuming you take all of those dollars and you put them all into this one bucket. So it’s really sort of like almost like a made up barrier that we have standing in front of us because we certainly don’t want to see people taking all of their money and putting it into any one bucket anyway, right? We want to make sure that we’re doing this strategically and over time. So really what we have is we have people that are essentially, you know, getting stuck in analysis paralysis where they’re like,

I could like take all the money and I could put it in a one year GIC, right? Or I could take all the money and I could put it into the S and P 500, but what if it goes down? I could take all the money and I could put it into Bitcoin because my neighbor said, you know, Bitcoin is, going to be the world’s money. And in five years, you could do all of those things, but it’s now you’re really just comparing and you’re essentially doing the opposite of diversification.

in terms of analyzing as if you’re going to find the thing that’s going to find you the answer that you need when in reality, it’s more or less having money and really thinking about which buckets can I contribute some of those additional cash dollars? I do need to keep some liquid. So like, what is that number go all the way back to that conversation in one of our recent episodes where we talked about knowing your numbers, like how much money do you need to have on hand?

in order to make sure that everything balances out over the next two or three months, even if we have a cash shortfall. How much money do I need to have into liquid assets, whether it’s GICs or cashable GICs or money markets or high cash value insurance policies that we can leverage. How much of that do we wanna have over there being safe, secure, and hopefully not attracting too much in taxation?

But then what about the other dollars that are sitting there? There’s an opportunity there for you to diversify into other assets and to just get started so that you can ensure that as your wealth grows through our growth engine known as the business, as we continue to produce cashflow that we’re putting it into assets that

aren’t going to be too volatile that they’re going to keep us up at night. But we’re also not going to be too concentrated in any one bucket where that’s a possibility anyway. So rather than trying to analyze what’s going to be the best move, it’s better to actually be looking at multiple possibilities and taking small moves in multiple possibilities so that you’re well diversified. You don’t have too much volatility risk or correlation risk and you’ve got the liquidity that you need because you know your numbers in order to be able to take those steps in the right direction.

Right, right, like I think you nailed it when you, in the summary of what we’re hearing from clients and business owners and investors is that everyone’s on the quest for the one thing for me to focus on in terms of my investment strategy or my portfolio strategy instead of having the open mindedness and also the strategies to say there’s gonna be a Perfection.

multitude of things and I have to then be okay with putting them in the different buckets and a different multitude of things and that strategy is actually the winning strategy.

100 % 100 % and and being okay with the fact that one bucket at one period in time may be performing better than another. Right. And that’s going to likely change over time, right. So like, if we look at the one equity bucket, and it’s performing really, really well, it’s going to make you feel like you made a mistake when you look at a different bucket. Right. If I look at that money market fund that I wanted to keep, you know, that cash liquid, and you look at you, oh, man, that barely earned anything and I earned

you know, I earned the right to pay 50 % passive income tax inside my corporation. Like that might feel like a loss. And it’s like, and there’s ways that we can address those things, but getting started is going to be the key piece and not letting those dollars sit idle for too long, doing nothing simply because we haven’t found the key or we haven’t found the right asset or because we actually didn’t fully understand our numbers to know.

How liquid do I need to actually be in order to do what I wanna do with my wealth building journey?

Right, Cal, if there is one big takeaway you would want folks to think about from all the conversations you had and I had and this year from clients, business owners, investors, what’s that one takeaway from 2025? 

My one takeaway would be is get started, even if it means getting started small and doing something, you know, so if we get back here a year from now and we haven’t taken those small little steps in order to do something small. So if you’re thinking that you want to be investing and you think, you know, that you do want to grow a large enough financial freedom bucket, start small.

investing in the asset classes that seem easiest to you. And when I say easiest, oftentimes that means they’re accessible. So public markets, it would be an easy one, picking something like an ETF and not overthinking the ETFs that you’re looking at. you can go all the way down the rabbit hole and be like, I’ve got 20 different ETFs that represent the S and P 500. Amazing.

This one’s got an MER of this. This one’s got an MER of that. This one had a slightly better return because it does that. This one has a covered call strategy. And you start to go and essentially you get stopped in your tracks because now we’re trying to, again, find the best of that asset class when in reality we need to get started. And remember, where optimizing makes the most sense is once the buckets get large enough for it to be consequential.

So if you’re starting small, even as a business owner, you got $60,000 of retained earnings. In your mind, you might think, I should take $60,000, chuck it in the S &P 500. And guess what? 20 years from now, I promise you, you won’t regret that. A year from now, though, if it does go down, you might feel regret. You might feel some remorse because it’s too short of a timeline.

So rather than thinking, I got to get all 60,000 right into the S and P or right into the next rental property or into Bitcoin or in gold or silver or whatever it is that you’re thinking, you want to just get yourself started to get some of that money moving and do it on a regular basis. So start small. If you want to do $3,000 a month, right? We think, and we do the math on that. That’s $36,000 a year. That puts you at

over half of your retained earnings have gone into essentially a ETF strategy going into a brokerage account, whether it’s wealth simple, whether it’s someone that manages it for you, whether it’s the bank, allow that bucket to grow and allow the impact of all of the different research and nuance that you’re going to make in terms of shifting from one ETF to another one fund to another one manager to another. Allow that

to actually be consequential because the bucket is large enough where making that shift is going to make a material difference in terms of your overall return, not only from year to year, but then of course, over your entire lifetime. These are the things that we need to get out of the way first is get started. We can always pivot as we go. You’re not going to regret having gotten started instead of.

the feeling of regret when you look a year or two years or five years down the road and you go, I’ve got this huge pile, but I haven’t done anything with it. So if you need that support, if you need a little bit of guidance in terms of like what that could look like or sound like for you, if you need help identifying, what is your risk tolerance? How much should be going into the market? How much should be going into other safe assets? You should definitely reach out for a discovery call over at Canadian wealth secrets.com.

forward slash discovery and we can help you get on that journey so that a year from now you can look back and say, I have started and now I’m ready to make small pivots along the way.

Canadian Wealth Secrets is an informative podcast that digs into the intricacies of building a robust portfolio, maximizing dividend returns, the nuances of real estate investment, and the complexities of business finance, while offering expert advice on wealth management, navigating capital gains tax, and understanding the role of financial institutions in personal finance.

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