Episode 207: The Wealth Secret 92% of Canadian Business Owners Miss: A Joint CWS, PE Gate, Gauvreau Tax & Law Advisory Mastermind
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Are your company’s retained earnings sitting idle — or worse, being eaten away by unnecessary taxes?
For many business owners, retained earnings feel like a double-edged sword: a sign of success but also a source of frustration when the tax bill arrives. This live panel, hosted by Canadian Wealth Secrets, PE Gate, and Gauvreau Tax & Law Advisory dives deep into what’s keeping entrepreneurs up at night — from overpaying taxes and inefficient structures to missed investment opportunities. Featuring experts in accounting, private equity, and wealth strategy, the discussion breaks down how to move beyond simple compliance toward smarter, tax-efficient growth.
You’ll discover:
- How to structure your corporation (and when to use a holding company or family trust) to legally minimize taxes.
- Proven strategies to invest retained earnings through connected corporations and earn dividends tax-free.
- Ways to turn trapped corporate cash into long-term wealth — including private equity, insurance leverage, and estate optimization.
Unlock the full potential of your retained earnings — press play now to learn how top advisors are helping Canadian business owners build smarter, tax-efficient wealth.
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.
Building long-term wealth in Canada starts with understanding how to make your retained earnings work smarter through strategic corporate investing and tax-efficient planning. A strong Canadian wealth plan combines effective business structures—like holding companies and family trusts—with thoughtful investment strategies in private equity, real estate investing, and RRSP optimization. By focusing on tax efficiency, capital gains exemption, and corporate tax optimization, entrepreneurs can turn business profits into sustainable wealth that fuels financial independence and even early retirement. From succession planning and business sales to insurance strategies and legacy planning, this holistic approach empowers Canadian business owners to balance a modest lifestyle with a clear financial vision, diversified investment buckets, and a roadmap to financial freedom in Canada. Whether comparing salary vs. dividends, exploring passive income planning, or refining corporate structure optimization, mastering these wealth-building strategies helps ensure your money supports both your goals today and your legacy tomorrow.
Transcript:
All right, well, seems like everyone’s settled. So good morning, welcome everyone. Thanks so much for taking the time to be here with us today. My name is Sarman, I’m a general partner at Peagate. And at Peagate, we invest in businesses, and we provide those opportunities to both individual and corporate investors. However, we also really like to bring people together to learn from industry leaders. So in the past, we’ve brought industry experts from lawyers to deal experts to CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, accountants, entrepreneurs, etc. And today, I’m really excited, not only because it’s our 10th in-person event, but also because I can’t think of a better group of guest panelists to have an informative conversation about retained earnings. Of course, specifically how to unlock and invest those retained earnings in the most efficient, tax-efficient way possible. So thank you very much to our guest speakers, both Kyle and John of Creating Well Secrets and Bob Gavreau of Gavreau Accounting Tax Law Advisory. And lastly, thank you to all of you again for being here. It really wouldn’t be possible if you’re not here. So with that, I’ll now hand it over to John to kick us off.
Thank you very much, Sarmad. My name John Orr. am the chief operating officer of Wealth Secrets, also the podcast host, where we talk about wealth secrets and building our wealth through four stages and four phases. And we’re gonna unpack some of that here today. And this is what the panel is. And we’ve got the panel of experts. I’m gonna be somewhat of the moderator here today. But just to kick things off, we’ve got a saying on the podcast. call it, usually we kind of talk about like, what are the pebbles rattling around in our shoes? The pebbles that we wanna pluck out of our shoes. And specifically, we’re here to talk about you know, investing our retained earnings, thinking about how to unlock those retained earnings and using them in an optimized ways to make sure that we’re minimizing the tax implications that we have. What I would like you to do is like just on your own for just a moment, think about like, what is the pebble right now rattling around in your shoe when it comes to retained earnings, business, you know, decisions around your finances and saying like, what keeps us up at night? What do we want to learn? What, what am I really here for today? I want you to kind of just do a self kind of this is my pebble in my shoe right now that I’m really hoping to pluck or I’m really hoping to learn about. And then what I’d like you to do is just take two minutes on the clock. Two minutes to turn to your neighbor, introduce yourselves if you haven’t done that already. I know we’ve been doing some networking already. And then tell them what the pebble is that’s rattling around in your shoe. And after those two minutes, what we’ll do is we’ll get our expert panelists here to talk about the pebbles they’re seeing in their shoes. And then that will set the stage for today. So two minutes, pebbles in your shoes. Share with the people around you. Go ahead.
All right, I know that wasn’t long enough to really solve all your pebbles in the shoes. I’m gonna bring us all back together here just for a second so we can talk about those pebbles. Here we go. Now before we talk with these four up here, does anybody want to be brave here today and share the pebble that they just talked about at their table? Baby. I was like, no, I do not want to do that. We’re here to listen to someone else, not me. Anybody want to be brave here? Anybody else want to share? Thank you for sharing, by the way. too much money and no one wants to deal with it. I love that problem. I love that problem. This is the best problem I have. Also, it’s like we’ve got that problem. All right. Thank you. Thank you for that. So what we’re going to do is we’re going turn it over to the panel here. We’re going to start to introduce yourselves. And then what we’re going to do is keep this discussion going and talking about how to deal with our retained earnings. Go ahead. Do you want me to talk about the pebble as part of this, or we’ll come back to? Let’s do it. OK.
First and foremost, thanks for having me here today. Great to be in front of such a great group of people. My name’s Bob Gover. I’m the founder of Gover Accounting Tax Law Advisory. It’s a 200-person professional services firm that is really, it’s a CPA firm that also has a law firm involved. We do bookkeeping, CFO services, but we really focus on the entrepreneurship space and saving tax. My pebble, I would say, or the pebble that we’re seeing is very much aligned with with too much tax. And you were not placed in here to say that. I had this, I’ll tell you a quick story. I had the opportunity to work with Tony Robbins. How many people have heard of Tony Robbins, right? Of course. So Tony Robbins recruited myself and my team as his Canadian partner in his Tony Robbins Global Accounting Advisors group. And what that meant was we were his CPA firm that he was referring all of his clients to at his business mastery events. And for us, the Canadians that were there, there was about, I would say, 100 to 150 Canadians at every business mastery. And what we would do is we would review their taxes for exactly this pebble, too much tax. And at the end of the day, we put all of our data together, and 92 % of the businesses that attended were paying more tax than they legally had to. So if you’re feeling like that’s a pebble, it’s a pebble. And the challenge is that not everybody is specialized in dealing with that. There’s a lot of people who are just focused on compliance related work. So the pebble that we see for sure is paying too much tax. We don’t like to see people pay too much tax. I’ve built my company based on the fact that we prevent that. And probably the largest, if I had to say the one pebble, because I think there’s maybe a a bucket of sand in there as well, but the one major pebble is having the incorrect structure for your business. So paying tax from a business perspective or an investment perspective with the wrong entity, the wrong structure, having cash or investments in the wrong entity, not having a holding company, owning your company with like your operating company with a holding company, there’s major problems with that.
So correcting that. And then the use of family trusts a lot of professionals would say we don’t use trusts anymore And it’s a major missed opportunity as well. So structure is key. That is the biggest pebble we’re I’m Kyle Pierce from Canadian wealth secrets. So my CEO is over here John. I’m more of the the action maker I’m on calls with clients and helping them assist Too much action, I guess. But it’s interesting because I listen to Bob’s story coming out of the accounting space. And John and I have a very different story. We actually are former high school math teachers. And a lot of people are looking at us like, God, we’re going to try to make it more interesting than math class, I promise. But along the way, we began investing first in real estate. And also, we did a lot of consulting in the education space. And through that process, we actually lived the challenges that Bob’s talking about. And there was one day I remember saying it to John, if our net worth is this, and I die today, my net worth is actually that. And that was really problematic for me. We were doing some things incorrectly. And it really came down to educating ourselves and understanding. And really, when we looked around the space, while we have a great accountant, our accountant’s a great person, that accountant at that time was rear-facing. right? So he was making sure that everything was accounted for. However, we didn’t actually have a strategy. And really what it came down to is not understanding what we like to call are the wealth secrets that we can take specifically as incorporated business owners. So we’ve essentially gone down this rabbit hole and we work with clients just like you folks in order to better structure yourselves with great people and offering opportunities for you to invest where it makes sense and be able to try to put those dollars to more use. So Essentially, the biggest thing that you can do is by paying the right amount of tax. We’re not saying to avoid taxes. We’re not saying that, you know, everyone shouldn’t pay their quote unquote fair share. But making sure that we’re not overpaying on taxes is one of the best things you can do, because it also allows you to invest more conservatively with those dollars instead of always trying to make up for those dollars. So that was a big thing for us. And that’s what we focus on at Canadian Wealth Secrets.
Thanks, Calum. Aro? Yeah, I had a solution for Brahms’ tax issue. I moved to Dubai in 2000 where there’s no tax. So I didn’t pay. I had no intention of returning, by the way, in case someone from the CRA is here. So broke ties and worked in private equity there. And one of the pebbles I saw is friends who had money to invest couldn’t access private equity. So private equity is one of the best investment strategies and returns. And people couldn’t access it. So when we moved back to Canada, that’s why we set up PE Gates. That was the main reason. And we looked at it and said, what is the opportunity to invest? There’s a lot of competition on bigger deals. People are ignoring the smaller transactions where the owner’s looking to retire. So that’s the That’s the focus we made at PE Gate. Then the other Pebble people had in private equity, we had LPs, investors, their mindset was changing when I was at the big fund. They no longer wanted to commit dollars to a fund. They wanted to decide what to invest in. And the bigger players had that strength. They would say to us at the fund, when you have a deal, I’m not gonna commit 110 million to you. but come to me and I’ll co-invest with you. And that’s what triggered the thought with PEGATE, that why don’t investors have a say in what to invest in, instead of them committing to a fund, why don’t they choose what to invest in? And the other issue they have, and someone, friend from, who’s involved in funds, a fund can do well in one investment, not the other, and you don’t have liquidity. If you want to exit, mostly penalized for exiting early. Some of you are maybe in funds right now, maybe experiencing that. So the thought was and why we set up PEGATE as an exact market deal is to create a marketplace. So if you are invested in a deal, you don’t have to wait for us to decide on the exit. You could choose to exit yourself. So we thought that’s a great problem to solve. Now, bringing it back to this event here, we didn’t think We didn’t think about this opportunity with corporate investing, by the way. We were not that smart. So initially we were focusing on individual investors and the solution for them. But now that we’ve looked into the strategy, I think this is a great opportunity for corporate investors. So hoping to solve that pebble problem.
Thanks, thanks. So while I think we’re gonna be digging into the corporate structure side and strategies for ourselves to think about and reflect on, and also some of the strategies once a structure is appropriately optimized. We’ll get into those strategies, but let’s focus first on like private equity or investing in private businesses as a place to store value or invest our money. So if we have retained earnings and we’re like, I’ve got too much money, what do I do with it? Let’s learn from our, let’s learn from Simon about like, private equity or investing in private businesses. So when we hear that sometimes we’re like, I’m not sure about that. That’s not like something I may want to get into because it seems unfamiliar, but Simon, I don’t know if you want to take it or Ara wants to kind of take this as like, like why private equity or why private investing? like, Ara has given us like the why you went into it, but like why should we choose this as an asset class for our retainer specifically? Right. So for those who don’t know private equity in the simplest terms is investing in private businesses. You have different asset classes, public equities, have real estate, you have bonds, etc. And private equity has gotten a lot of interest in the last 10 to 20 years, specifically by institutional investors, family offices, endowments, which hold roughly 50 % of their portfolio in private equity. And you might ask why that is? Well, If you look at private equities returns on a risk adjusted basis relative to your traditional asset classes, private equity far outpaces those traditional asset classes. The main issue is not everyone has the 20, 30, 40 million dollars to be buying businesses. So you kind of are leaving, you’ve got the big giants investing in private equity, but not everyone has access to it. So that’s of course going back to our story where we’re trying to fill that gap Private equity also provides great diversification. That’s not correlated to public equities You know anything that Trump might say on liberation day is not going to tank a private business by 20 % So there is great returns on a risk-adjusted basis diversification in portfolio And it’s always nice to support local businesses where we focus on No, I was gonna make the last point, but yeah, it is driving the economy. So if you’re putting your money in the public markets in the US, it’s not really driving Canada’s economy. So versus we’ve made investments in a business that we actually saved, it would have been shut down. That only competitor was in the US, so we feel good about it and we’re making money doing so.
Now, I think what drew When we talk about Canadian wealth secrets on our podcast, we specifically are drawn to strategies where we didn’t think of this. And it’s like these hidden strategies that we’re not sure about or we didn’t hear about. it’s like, why have I missed this? And I think the way our structuring deals right now unlocks some of these benefits that we just didn’t know we could jump into or we could capitalize on. Like, you guys want to talk about how are you structuring businesses to specifically, if we’re using our retained earnings, limit the tax that we are paying? Yeah, so we have a tax expert here. So I’m not going to step on his toes, the way what we’re really excited is to provide investment opportunities, both to individuals and corporations. Of course, there’s pros and cons of investing in either. For example, the lifetime capital gains exemption at $1.25 million currently for individuals. But for corporations, we also are able to facilitate tax-free dividends for those investing through their corp and they receive dividends tax-free. The way we do that is we facilitate by giving the, by CRA the two definitions they’re looking for, which is value and vote. So if you hold greater than 10 % vote in another corporation and you also have greater than 10 % value in another corporation, then you’re deemed a connected corporation. So we facilitate that by when we’re fundraising, we’ll cut out 10 % equity for that corporate investor. And we also would issue them a special preferred share that would give them 10 % vote. So from CRA’s perspective, they are deemed a connected corporation if you are investing through your corporation. yeah.
So what I’m hearing is that we structure this appropriately, and we are 10 % or more than 10 % owners of this particular corporation, can pass our dividends like from a, you know, might have an operating company right now, and then you have a holding company and you can issue dividends tax-free from the operating company to the holding company. This acts the same way because you have that 10 % more than 10 % and then also the voting, correct? Correct. And it works for us because we’re not a fund. So that’s the major difference. So if you’re a fund, you’re not gonna have a control. You’re not gonna have more than 10 % because it’s gonna be a large fund. And the other point is you’re not gonna necessarily have all active businesses. So how we invest, and this is since day one, is we have a holding company for each investment, a separate one for each investment. So you choose to be in this transaction, there’s a shareholder group within that group. so therefore you could achieve your more than 10 % in terms of voting and investment. and you could trade your position within that group itself. So it’s the way we structure it. And we didn’t use an LPGP structure, so we didn’t use a partnership structure. We used a corp, so people understand how shares are issued for that reason. And that’s why it works for us.
Now, I wanna compare that to what we might be already doing with our retainer earnings in our corporations, either at old co or op co level. Bob, Kyle, do you wanna jump in here to talk about, why this is, obviously this is tax free dividends passing, but what are we doing current, what are you seeing businesses currently doing with retainer earnings and how is, how could we avoid say some of those taxes, specifically maybe passive income tax from our corporations at a corporation level? Both you wanna jump in or Bob first? Bob first. Bob first. First off. Great job on defining the connected corporation. That’s pretty impressive. Job offer later. So when we have a dividend that comes out from a corporation, typically, there’s two types of dividends. There’s eligible dividends and ineligible dividends. The difference between those two are eligible dividends means the corporation’s paid a higher tax rate. And there’s a separate pool and we track it, yada, yada, yada. The ineligible means that the company’s probably not making that much money. They’re paying the 12.2 % tax. You pull a dividend out of there, it’s 43%. The eligible is 31%. So if we take, let’s say $100,000 and we say we’re gonna take a dividend out and we’re gonna pay tax on this, so with a 43 % dividend, clearly we’ve got $57,000 left after tax. The way that they’re talking about this structure, is they’re getting $100,000 out with no tax on that dividend back into your holding company where you can reinvest that 100,000 versus 57 and make it grow. So if I’m taking 100,000 or 57,000, which one after reinvestment is gonna grow faster? Clearly the one that’s structured through the connected corporation dividend. know, avoiding those dividend tax components are gonna be incredibly important if you want your wealth to continue to be maximized. The other thing that I’ll maybe just throw in with this as well is that if you’ve got an operating company and your funds are in your operating company as an owner, please don’t invest those funds that are in your operating business into this structure. Okay? The reason is the more that this private equity group and the Well Secrets group make your money worth more money, the more danger you’re going to have in not qualifying for your lifetime capital gains exemption. So we want to make sure that the investments that you make that are going to be extremely tax efficient are not in your operating company. They’re outside of your operating company, likely in a holding company. We’ll talk about that, I’m sure, a little bit more. But those would be the two major risks that I see.
And what I’ll do is I’ll just kind of tack on the idea of if you take those retained earnings and instead you talked about taking them out. and how obviously there’s gonna be a large amount of tax on that. Let’s say we took that 100,000 and we invested it into another interest bearing, dividend generating type asset, you’re now exposing yourself to the passive income tax rate, which is gonna be about 50%, right? So what this does is it allows you to take that full 100,000 of retained earnings send it to the holding company ideally or into the trust or whatever it is that you’ve got structured and then make that investment. So now not only does 100,000 get invested, all of the money coming back are now going to be tax free coming back to the holding company, whatever entity owns that investment. So that’s a massive, massive benefit. But keeping in mind, this creates more of a problem for you, right? You were talking about, you know, what do I do with this money? Now I have more money and it’s still track in the company. So that at some point down the road, if I like to say if human hands are going to touch that money at some point, there’s going to be some tax to pay. And that’s where we layer in other strategies, other structures like higher cash value insurance and other structures that we can use for leverage so that you have more flexibility to utilize that money while you’re living. And then of course, maximize your estate when you pass. So for me, waking up in the middle of the night saying my net worth is here while I’m here living. And it’s here when I pass. Well, now it’s the opposite. My net worth is here while I’m living. And it grows when I pass. And I had full access to it at a personal level as well. So that’s some of the rabbit hole we’ll probably go down today.
Now, I think when we start to think about tax specifically and also investments, I think one thing that often comes to a business owner’s minds or just investors’ minds is capital gains tax. It’s like when I sell this, when I sell private, my equity in this private, private business, we gotta pay the capital gains tax or that capital gains tax is triggered. So, anyone here on the panel wanna address, like, are we considering this? Because I know that it’s on our minds and it’s like, could we be doing this better? Like, these are questions that we wanna be able to answer. Yeah, all right, you wanna take this? Yeah, well, the way we structure our investments as well, compared to, public equities, we don’t pay a dividend right away. So if you invest 100,000, we actually do a repayment of capital. So that’s tax free. So you won’t get a T5 or anything for that. And that goes for the corp investor as well as the individual. So that’s, again, it’s a tax deferral because eventually you’re gonna pay a tax on that. if personally, if you do correct me if I’m wrong, well, I’m a CPA as well, but I don’t practice. Your adjusted cost base reduces. So let’s say you’ve invested 100 personally and you reduce it to zero and then you sell that investment. Then you pay a capital gain on from the zero is your actual cost because you haven’t paid any tax at this point. However, then you could use your lifetime capital gains exemption if you are investing personally. And what is that right now? 1.25 million. Yeah. and there’s some additional top up to two million that they’re, I don’t know if that’s enacted yet. So individually, you get to use your lifetime capital gains exemption. And then at a corp though, there is no such exemption. You do pay a corp capital gains tax, which is no longer at the higher rate.
Can I just maybe throw in one? additional component to that. So as an individual investor, you get access to your 1.25 million. But if you structure the investment in the private equity in a different way where you incorporate a family trust, not only you have 1.25 million, but your spouse, your kids also get access to 1.25 million. So for me, I’ve got a wife and two kids, I get access to 1.25 million times four. So when I sell my business, I’m gonna get access to that much larger capital gains exemption. So there’s ways to, even with an efficient investment, to make it even more tax efficient with the right structure.
And I think what’s important to note too is that some business owners likely have operating companies already, but you may have deemed your operating company not saleable. So I’m thinking a few people were chatting consultants, know, a solo sort of, you know, entrepreneur out there. You may not be thinking about that, but now if you are going to utilize a strategy like this, where you might be reinvesting into another operating company that is saleable, obviously, then looking down the trust route might make more sense sooner, right? Some people push it off a little longer, but now it might make a little bit more sense to do a little earlier. Yeah, questions?
So interestingly enough, and I know you’re not gonna do it but often times you can change your operating company, even through a whole whole structure over here, and there’s a lot of rules to qualify for that lifetime cap, if you need an exemption. If the idea is that a lot of people that are worried about that and have to can utilize your to invest in B, is that something that could basically say, okay, fine, we don’t need to do it this way. Now I’m not worried about, not necessarily I don’t like investing in operating company, but not worried about all the rules that go along with qualifying. Do think that’s something that you could. see happening because it’s just one way of using it, It’s 100%. That’s really great point. I’ve never even thought about it that way. But yeah, if you’re looking at your operating company and you’re saying, you know what, things are a little bit complicated, although we can fix it. So it’s good to look at the entire situation. But if we’re going, yeah, we’ve got an operating company. It’s got all my life insurance that’s in there. It’s got all my investments. I’m the only shareholder. we’re looking at investing in this, well, maybe we just use the trust planning opportunity. for investing in private equity and we utilize our capital gains exemption through there. That’s what you’re saying. 100%. There’s so many proffers, like every dog or every lure, effectively they look at their NPC as just their own investing vehicle. For sure. of those would be, even if they have a practice in the world. Yeah. Okay.
And question for our truth, maybe I missed this or I’m trying to understand this. So if the idea is to be connected with that 10 % ownership, the 10 % voting, does that mean you’d like a… A particular investment, you only have 10 investors or right? Yeah, four. So we’re giving actual votes right now, so there’s no funny games behind where we could buy back your vote. So right now we’re limiting each deal to four corporate investors, because they need to have 10.1 % each. And that’s because I think you’re retaining or you’re taking a share as well on your side. Yeah, so we’re issuing a special shares. Class V we’re calling for V for vote. So we’re gonna hold the majority of those shares as PE gate, because we wanna control that investment. The 10.1 % investor will hold a real vote, but they’re not gonna have majority and we will. So that’s why we’re limiting each deal right now to four corporate investors. So that means that those corporate investors, like they have to up a higher amount. Yes, the minimum will be higher, So you could still have X number of individual investors, but you have to limit the corporate per deal to… Right, Yeah, we’re regulated, so we’re trying to keep it less than 50 investors. There’s other rules if you go above 50. We tend to have about 10 investors per transaction. Corporate and personal company. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because our minimums are usually 50 to 100 individually. Corpses are usually 200 plus. Great questions. I saw a question. We had another question. Mike?
Respect the structure of individual companies on a scalability basis. Can you manage them? As you grow, mean, you’ve got, you know, five, 10, 15 different companies. Does this structure prevent you from putting them under a single management? Will they be construed as being controlled by a single owner if you are running all of them? So, great question. So, our scaling model is to bring in operators that will help us manage that specific portfolio. And we have one of them, where’s Jack? Jack’s right here. the left. So Jack, we met over a year ago. We happened to be looking at an investment in the environmental system space, in the HVAC space. And then we happened to meet Jack at an event. here and now he’s one of our biggest investors and is the interim CEO. So he’ll be running that portfolio. And our goal is to be really the platform and attract operators such as Jack, help us operate each investment separately. And the role that we typically play for each of these deals is CFO and board level. So when we have the Jacks that are acting as CEO, you we handle the finances and board levels. So that allows us to scale further.
Now one question that came to mind specifically when we were talking about being the seller of my company to private equity or investment is, like you said, some of your clients are looking to retire and they’re looking to say, I have a saleable business and I’ve set it up so, and I’m looking to offload a portion of it or all of it or into your platform, into your system. Is there any sort of blind spots for us that we should be knowing about when we’re thinking about that. So if I have my business, ready to kind of like start to get out, like take some chips off the table. Are there blind spots specifically tax structures or pieces that we should be thinking about so that we get this right? Yeah, I think we, well, we do have a case study. So the beauty of P-Gate is we’re very flexible. We know, you know, it’s not one business that fits all. So we always look to work with business owners to understand what they’re looking for and for us to find a middle ground. Right. So succession planning is very important to us. We’re not looking to buy a business with a bow on top. We know that it takes several years to plan. And I feel our would probably be best suited to talk about some of the planning for business owners. Yeah. I think maybe I’m going to pass it on to Bob because like we face the transaction right now where we signed the LOI and then the owner told his wife and she’s ecstatic because she’s been pushing him to retire. And then he went to his accountant and he said, you can’t sell yet because you haven’t purified your holding. So so what are some things you need to do, Bob? So make sure that now as you answer this, I don’t know, is this a good time for us to like use the whiteboard? Talk about structures like this is fitting in here because I’m like. He was hinting, he’s like, I can draw, it’s really not like this guy. He was sharpening his pencils. I can make this super clear. it be beneficial to draw some of these out? Yeah. Stick fingers. Yay. I’ve been shaking over here wanting to draw. I got to tell you, my drawing is at a grade three level. So it’s not very good, but accountants like geometry. We like boxes, we like circles, and we like triangles. And that’s pretty much it.
That’s all we can handle. So this question specifically is related to the lifetime capital gains exemption and qualifying for that. I’ll come back to that in a second. But what maybe I’ll start with is just identifying some of the structures that maybe you guys have in place and maybe talk about some of the challenges that exist with those current structures. And would love some participation with show of hands if these apply to you guys. So the first. First one is anybody not incorporated? Good, okay. So the idea with incorporation, 12.2 % for the first $500,000 of active business income, 26 % on anything above that. The first 500,000, that’s where we get the ineligible dividends, but any income that the corporation earns and pays a higher tax rate, that’s where we get our eligible dividends that come out more favorable. So first structure is. corporation and shareholder. See this quality drawing, right? So this is. What’s that? arms and legs, they just get faces and we can’t tell if they’re happy or not. So we typically either have, you know, one owner or maybe spouses or maybe kids that are in that entity. How many people have a structure that looks like this? One single entity. Okay. So here’s the challenges with this entity and it’s perfectly good until you start making money. Right, and once you start making money, it’s like, shit, we gotta be careful because if we get too much cash in here, right, which is actually greater than 10 % of the value of the business, you would be disqualified for your lifetime capital gains exemption at the time of sale, right? It’s crazy. So if we’re investing in private equity or insurance products or GICs or anything like that, it’s considered non-active assets. So if more than 10 % of non-active assets are in place at the time of sale, then you don’t qualify. There’s a second test.
The second test is a two-year test. And it’s 50 % of the assets have to be actively used in your business. So a lot of times, if someone like RR’s case study were to come to us and say, damn, we’re getting ready to sell, Bob. What can we do? We can deal with this. This is at closing, okay? But if you have a lot of investments or inter-company loans, which is a major problem, right? Where you’ve had those investments or inter-company loans for more than two years, we are not gonna qualify and we have to hold on to wait until the time is right to do this. So structure one, structure, Receivables are active. Yeah, receivables are active. So what would be considered non-active business assets? Real estate that’s not needed for the operations, right? So if you’ve got Airbnbs, you’ve got rental properties or anything like that, non-essential cash, right? So if you have $300,000 of cash in your business, there’s gonna be a redundant portion of that cash that’s sitting in there where CRA is gonna say, that’s not necessary for your business operations. And so they could then deny that as well. That’s a big issue. Other ones would be insurance products, right? If there’s cash render value and it’s higher than 10%, it could be a challenge. That’s why we don’t necessarily advocate for those being in your operating company. Private equity investments, right? We wouldn’t necessarily want that in there because P.E. Gates is going to take a million dollar investment and turn it into 10, right? That’s the goal. And that’s what they do. So all of sudden you’ve got a 10 million dollar investment in there. you don’t qualify. it’s just a matter of making sure that we structure this the right way. The second structure. Sorry to clarify, Bob. when you invest in the active business, it’s not the 10 % issue you have. You’ll have the two year 50 % issue if that investment, because we are investing in active businesses. For sure. So this is more so your existing business, not your investment, right? if that clarifies it. So it’s really just your operating business. If you’ve got one and you’re looking to use the proceeds of that, just don’t invest them from here. I’ll show you the next structure. The next idea is that you’ve got a holding company. And here’s your people again. So these people are the ones that get the lifetime capital gains exemption. So those are the ones that get the 1.25 million if this is an active business. Sometimes we have a holding company that’s over here. The holding company doesn’t own the operating company. And what happens?
Well, we take all of our cash from here and we put it over here thinking we’re smart and that we’re protecting ourselves. And all the cash comes over here. But what’s sitting here is a big inner company due to from receivable. Also, no lifetime capital gains exemption, right? We’ve got to get rid of that receivable. Once again, you come to us, we can do it. But if there’s more than 50 % of the value is in that receivable, we need two years to do it. How many people have this set up? I’m gonna show you. Any professional corps out there? Medical doctors or Lawyers, So that’s common, right? Side by side, because you can’t have the holding company only professional corps? Lawyers we can. lawyer, okay, Lawyers we can, as long as you as a lawyer control directly or indirectly the act of business. So lawyers we can do it. Accountants, we have the worst, to be honest. Our guys suck. Real estate agents is great, is a really great question. How many real estate agents in here too? Okay, so we now have the PREC, which is amazing. We get access to that lower tax rate. The PREC actually says you’re not supposed to invest. So we usually set up a side by side, which is fine because we’re not gonna ever sell our PREC anyway. If you have a real estate brokerage, completely separate conversation, we will be able to sell that, but the PREC is likely not sellable. So same thing for our medical. friends as well, right? So if it’s side by side and you’re selling, it’s a professional court that you can’t actually sell, then this isn’t really a concern for you, right? So that side by side is common. You’ll see the intercompany loans. So with that, how many dentists are in here? Do we have any dentists in here? So dentists similar to a medical doc, right? And we would have the side by side. But what we would do is before you end up selling, we would end up pulling all the assets out through a restructure really quickly all on the same day, pull the assets out, purify it, and have it ready so that when you sell your dental practice, you get your exemption. So I know that nobody put their hands up as a dentist, but I just wanted to say that I’m smart. Okay, so here’s what we, yep, question. Sorry, when you talk about the 50%, is that 50 % preference to the sale price? Great question. So it’s the sale price, which is the fair market value. So if 50 % of the fair market value of the assets that are in the business are non-active, then you’re disqualified. Yeah, great question, Really great question.
OK, so here’s the, you know, if we’re looking at this, this would be a valuable one because we had some people that had this structure. Here’s the better solution, right? We have this entity, but instead, and this is where accountants get really fun and we put triangles in. This is a family trust. So why would we want to do this instead of this? Well, now we get, you know, my wife, my kids, and myself, my parents, you know, as many people as you really want. There’s some guidelines that we have to probably have a discussion about. But we can put all of these people in, which means that if we sell this and it qualifies, We get capital gains exemption times however many beneficiaries. So this would be great if we’re talking about a PEGATE investment. You have money that, and I’ll talk about how you get it in the trust in a second. You have the trust invest in PEGATE’s investment. And let’s say we’re gonna focus on the 10%. I’ll show you that in a second as well. So when we do that and we eventually sell the PEGATE investment, we get the lifetime capital gains exemption times a whole bunch of people and probably don’t pay tax at all. So like the trust gets like the commutative value? So yeah, let’s say it’s, you know, 5 million, right? All the proceeds go into the trust and the trust then is responsible for allocating those proceeds out to the individual beneficiaries, which means that we claim the lifetime capital gains exemption by all those beneficiaries. Is there a specific order that has to go in? No, so when we set up a trust, and another great question, right, we have a trustee, we usually have three of them. It’s you and two other people. Typically it’s a spouse and one other person. We write the trust agreements to be like, hey, you know what, we want to take care of you. And if someone doesn’t agree with you, we get rid of them and we bring in other trustees who do agree with you. So that ultimately, you’re in the position to say, this is how I want these proceeds to be allocated.
Beneficiaries are not entitled to anything. So we get this question a lot too, where it’s like, okay, we want to put our kids in there, but they’re going to get married, and they’re going to marry this person. We don’t really like this person. We know that there’s problems with marriages, half fail, you know, all that stuff. Not entitled to anything. So we actually put those individuals as beneficiaries as well, because they’re not entitled to anything. In fact, the trust might protect us even more, which is really great. What about parents? Parents I would put into, yep. And you can put, and you allocate it first to them? You totally can. Yeah, so you could, you know, if this was your family, you could choose your parents first because the likelihood of them not using their lifetime capital gains exemption versus your kids is probably higher, right? So we could do that first, take advantage of yours and theirs. Sometimes people say, well, what about my kids? You know, I feel really bad about taking their lifetime capital gains exemption and I say, do you know how much pain they’ve put us through? You know? But the second part is the reality of them actually getting to a point where they can use their lifetime capital gains exemption is probably not very high. You know, for all of us to be in a position where we can access that, we take advantage of it. We don’t know if it’s gonna be there in the future. They’ve toyed with this for the last 20 years. They just increased it out of nowhere when they talked about maybe eliminating it. So, you know, there’s a lot of uncertainty and the major uncertainty is whether our kids will even be able to use it. Okay. And Bob, what’s the advantage of dividend income with the trust? So let me get there. Okay. I’m to talk about that. So this is, this is part one. Okay. Let’s, let’s modify this slightly because I’m sure some of you are, we get with this. Am I good to do this guys? No, I think it’s good.
I’m going to walk you through that right now. Yeah. Do you want to just rephrase that question so the camera picks it up and other people can hear it? Yeah. So sometimes if you’re a corporate investor, or investing as a trust, would be the same for applying for a loan, for example. Sometimes getting a loan in a corporation is harder than getting it individually. So sometimes when you look at an accredited investor, which may be 100,000 plus of an investment, putting it through a trust is a little bit more challenging. There are some pains in the butt that come along with a trust as well. So it’s just a matter of working with a team that knows how to utilize them too. know, same goes to financing. You know, if you’re a shareholder and you’re taking dividends out, a lot of the banks don’t like that when you go to apply for a mortgage, right? We’ve all had that challenge, right? But if we use a broker, they’re like, absolutely, we’ll use line 150 or 15,000 or whatever that is on your tax return now, and it’s great. In fact, it’s even higher than it would be if it was a salary. We love that. So it’s a matter of making sure that the structure is right for the intent of the investment as well. So let me, I’ll give more clarity on this too.
So how many of you have a situation where your structure looks like this? You’ve got opco and then you’ve got holdco. And then on top we’ve got our people. Again, how many people have that structure? Okay, so I like that structure sort of, okay? So here’s why I sort of like it when Aura was talking about the 10 % connection or being connected between two, or sorry it was Sarman, who, so. well describe this. So when this company, essentially what happens, we have 100 % ownership here, because they’re connected, more than 10 % votes in value like we’ve been talking about, dividends can come from Opco up to Holdco, and we pull all the cash out, it’s protected, there’s no tax on that dividend, right? So that seems to work really great. Here’s where the problem lies, okay? And we can fix it, but here’s where the problem lies. To qualify for the lifetime capital gains exemption, It has to be you individually selling shares of your corporation. Okay? So in this case, if we want to sell OpCo, who’s selling it? HoldCo is. So does that qualify for the lifetime capital gains exemption? No. So what would we have to do? Well, we would have to sell the shares of HoldCo, but what’s in HoldCo? All of our cash, all of our investments, probably our real estate, our insurance policies. So we are disqualified. Okay? And so as much as I like this, it’s protecting it, it’s getting cash out tax free, it doesn’t serve our overall purpose. Here’s my modified version.
This is what I call the ultimate tax structure. We’ve got Opco here. It is owned by a family trust. We’ve got all our people. I’ll put four because that’s mine. And then this is what we do. We put Holdco up here. And what this is, is this is OPCO owned by a family trust, which means that if we want to sell this, family trust sells those shares, we not only get our one time lifetime capital gains exemption, we multiply it. Okay? Second part is some really weird rules with trusts. Any beneficiary of a trust is deemed to own 100 % of the value of those investments. So if this is me, I’m deemed to own 100%. My wife is deemed to own 100%. My two kids, deemed to own 100%. If I add a corporate beneficiary, which I call this RJJS Investments for me, that’s Robert Jennifer Jack Sophia, that’s my little owner manager pension fund that we have, because it’s a corporate beneficiary, which we’re allowed to do, it is deemed to own 100 % of Opco. Because it owns 100 % of Opco, that means we can issue dividends up here and up to here tax free. So I’m getting the benefit of getting the cash out and protecting it, but I’m also getting the benefit of the lifetime capital gains exemption. That right there is going to save everyone millions of dollars from getting that in place. Okay? So this is really great. And then this is the second part, right? So let’s come back to why we’re here today. We get all of this cash out of OpCo. It’s up in RJJS. This is where we invest back into PEGATE, into the entity that they have. We got our 10 % votes in value. All the dividends come back up to RJJS anyway. This is our pension fund. No tax on that, completely protected. And we pay minimal to no tax while we’re also keeping our op co-purified so that when we want to exit we can. Sorry, is the op co-op also investing in PE? No, no, I would not. So what I would do is take your investment money, dividend it up through the trust up to RJJS or your Invesco and Invesco then does that or right we issue this dividend and then we push the cash back and the trust can own that as well. The main idea is that we just want it out of here. if we push all the dividends up here right we pay tax and then we’re loaning money back there’s no tax on the loan back through here. So we can invest that through the trust and not pay tax on it. Yeah, again if the trust is owning the investment in PE gate and we’re saying it’s ten point one percent Right, they could flow up through here and because our JJS is deemed to own a hundred percent of that They flow right back into here tax-free Yeah, yeah Just is the idea with all the P and E businesses to sell them as a service or if it’s a good business you can keep them and what’s the, can you still get some type of an exit? Good question. So on each transaction we state our goals on that investment and typically we do look for an exit but we’re not bound to that commitment. and some investments are very clear. It’s gonna be a growth investment. and we’re gonna exit in X number of years and some it’s a dividend play. And a lot of our invest, that’s why we have our secondary market. So we don’t have to exit, we will if we get a great valuation. We have our first investment, we had an offer on it. We did proceed with the LOI, our partner, the founder of the business changed his mind, so we kept it. So it’s open because we’re not a fund, so we don’t have to exit.
Kyle, do you like? Like you brought up something specific earlier. You said like, even if we build this structure and we move the investments here and we transfer dividends here, it’s still inside the corporate structure. Ultimately, you do want to get it in people’s hands outside. So do you want to kind of unpack some strategies around that part now that we unpack the structures that Bob’s saying, like this is the ultimate tax structure for our corporation. So do you want to talk about those strategies Talk, know, how do I get it in my hands now? Text Yeah, and actually I’m gonna hang out with you, Bob, over here. yeah? But you stay, you stay. okay. The finance guys are just at the table now. So John and I kind of fall in this land where most of our opcos, we have multiple, we don’t plan to sell. But if that does become something that happens over time, we build them bigger, we do something and build a big large team that we are gonna sell, we’ll need to transition over here so we can take care of that. lifetime capital gains exemption. So this is ultimate when you have things you might sell, be it your own business, be it a business you’re investing in. But there’s still this challenge that there’s still tax to be paid to get money out, right? So let’s pretend that we sold something, utilized all of our lifetime capital gains exemption over here, or we just wound the business up here, stopped running the business, but we have all kinds of assets here. There’s lots of money trapped in here. This is where we utilize high early cash value insurance strategies. And ultimately we look at it kind of two different ways. First off, we use it as our sort of business reserve fund. So we use it like a fixed income product, except there’s no taxation on it. So we can take any of these tax free dividends that are kind of floating around in either structure. If it’s over here, we’re gonna do it in here. If it’s over here, we’re likely gonna do it over here. And we’re gonna. take any of the extra capital sitting around while we’re waiting for the next PE gate investment, real estate deal, whatever it is you’re looking to do. We’re gonna fund these policies.
They’re gonna maintain high cash value. So they’re gonna be on the balance sheet. And down the road, it’s the only asset class in the known universe, not just Canada, but everywhere that actually is worth more when we pass than when we’re alive. So when you think about when we wind everything up and down the road, we eventually move on. or we eventually want to take money out, having something like that in your structure is going to be really helpful so that you can use leverage while we’re living. We can use leverage at a corporate level. We can also use leverage at a personal level in order to essentially utilize some of these dollars, knowing that it’s the only asset that won’t go upside down on you. So I could borrow against 100 % of my cash value and know that the death benefit is going to be higher. So when I go, there’s gonna be more money there to wipe out any type of loan. So now we’re not saying you wanna live off of loans for the rest of your life, but having that optionality there can be really helpful. So for myself, I don’t leverage against my insurance policies, they’re there if I need them, but I leverage against my primary residence, because it’s super easy. So I have all this equity in my home, and in your mind, you have to get past the mindset that I have this mortgage, my mom and dad told me not to do that, first thing you pay off is your primary mortgage. It’s the opposite now because I know I have assets in here that are gonna grow when I pass and I have tax-free cash flow at a personal level so I don’t have to take out dividends eligible or ineligible from year to year so I can do more of this work inside to maximize net worth throughout my lifetime. when you think about, like you’re saying, you can supercharge if, let’s say, the structure in Bob’s design has, you know, now you own high cash value life insurance, and then you leverage that or leverage your private, whether you’re investing personally or whether you’re investing corporately, you could be using that to purchase or get into a PE gate. A hundred percent. So now you’ve got to use this, this cash value is increasing day to day to day by contract. But then also you’ve also bought this other asset that also is going to theoretically increase. Now, now the same dollars are working to. That’s exactly it.
So if we use this structure as an example, if I’m taking money and money is flowing up from my business that I own and operate, it’s fun funneling up here. And I start funding policies each year. What I’m doing is I’m building that cash value that when the next deal comes, I use leverage might go to a third party lender, for example, borrow at prime policy is going to grow like a GIC, you’re going to borrow at rates like GIC ish, maybe a little higher, right? Prime. and then I can reinvest here. So I’ve got an asset that’s worth more down the road when I pass, plus I still get to make the investment that I was planning to make. So essentially, if you utilize all your cash value through leverage, you’re basically getting free insurance, if you think of it that way, right? So you make the same investment, little opportunity costs. There are lenders that’ll do 100 % on the premium you put in. I don’t recommend it. I would rather see people only leverage the cash value, because that money exists. So now you’re never upside down and you can essentially start growing that policy and it’ll eventually, every dollar you put in will be worth more than a dollar for leveraging into investments. And some of your clients have leveraged on the personal side, even though the corporation owns that policy. exactly. So you could set that up. If you’re doing personal leverage, be sure to use a legal or a tax lawyer to get a legal opinion independent. Just make sure you’re protecting yourself, right? If the CRA doesn’t like something down the road, we know how things happen. might not be clear in the Income Tax Act, you don’t want to be that example. And if you are that example, you’ve got a legal opinion so that they can go to war with the CRA on your behalf. But it’s a structure that many people utilize as well.
Quick, quick, So PEG investment looks a lot like op-goal. I know how to set these up to act like an op-goal to be benefit of the luncheon capital gains. So in theory, I guess the family trust should own them. Does the money to buy them, can it really come from our GGS or does it have to come personally into the family trust as a loan in order to buy that investment? That’s a good question. I’m actually curious what Bob’s thoughts are. I like this better owning from here, which in my world would mean insurance here, Lend or, you know. sending a loan back here so that they can make that investment. But I’m curious what your thoughts are. Yeah, no, I like that. And I think it goes back to your question earlier to say, you know, maybe we can’t maybe this is too complicated, or we don’t want to wait two years for the holding period. But what if we really just started focusing focusing on getting the lifetime capital gains exemption here? It would mean that the trust is owning that investment. Not RJJS. Right. Yep, can, so this is actually really interesting when we start talking about the insurance, right? So the insurance investments or other investments here, we can actually borrow, which is sort of what’s been talked about, is that we can borrow against the assets that are in here. And it doesn’t mean that the trust couldn’t borrow. There might be some tax benefits that we have to claim personally related to it. There’s gonna be some sort of tax component of it. But we would be able to get it out without paying dividend tax, like that full 43%. There’s a lot of discussion. We would probably talk for about four hours on insurance. A hundred percent. And just how we leverage the policy values. and it’s not, so for example, we have a corporate policy. It’s got a hundred thousand dollars of cash surrender value that’s in there. We can borrow up to a hundred percent of that cash surrender value and get a policy loan. So that policy loan can be in your personal name. It could be in your family trust name. But there is some form of taxable benefit to you getting access to that that you didn’t currently have. So we would charge some form of fee, depending on the situation, like everybody’s situation is slightly different, or we would charge the prescribed rate of interest on getting access to that loan and claim that as income as a shareholder. It’s not gonna be the full 100,000. There might be a portion of the interest that we would have to claim annually, but it’s way better than paying 43 % to get that money into the trust to invest here. But I really do like the corporate-owned policy as well, where we’re able to get any of those dividends back up tax-free. So I think ultimately, both of those could be extremely beneficial for everybody. You would want to sit down and say, OK, here’s our situation. Which one works best for us?
Gordon? In this picture here, who are the owners on the hold code? I assume it’s principal plus the spouse. And there’d be only one trust, or is there some case where you might have multiple trusts? And I’m assuming under the trust, you could have potential multiple operating courts and also multiple PE gate investments? Yeah. And then what happens at time of death in that overall structure of the rule? Damn, those are all good questions. We’re till three, right? Let me try and sort of tackle them one by one and then let me know if I missed anything. This structure, sorry I’m kind of blocking this area of the room. This structure, very scalable. We could have op-co too, we could have real estate. We can continue to create that over and over and over. Once this structure is in place, then it’s more of the investment to get it in place. This is very scalable. So if you’re buying more investments, this could be PE gate two, right? It can continue to scale very easily. All we need is a new entity set up. That part is good. This, you’re correct, we would have individual shareholders that are in there. We used to, no, no, we can have as many. Yeah, we can have as many. So what we would do is probably put, all of these individuals in here with some form of preferred share value that allows us to income split to a certain extent. We used to do this. I liked it. Our tax guys were like, we think it’s a little too aggressive. I used to have this where ultimately the trust was owning our JJS and it was a big circular pattern. There’s been some court cases where it’s like, probably shouldn’t be that overly aggressive. CRA doesn’t like circles. No, they don’t. Yeah, they don’t. Yeah, they like these circles because they get all their money from there. But they don’t like that circular type structure, which is OK. Right. Like we can we can work with that. We can also there’s so much we can do with tax guys where it’s like if any of these areas you’re like, man, one of these I’m getting hit in one of these areas. We can fix it. Right, so if we didn’t like this and we wanted to introduce a new trust in the future, we can freeze the value of these shares and introduce a trust so that it almost looks like this. Like we can do a lot of different things.
The other question you had is sometimes are there multiple trusts? Yes, and I will show you one more thing. sorry. It’ll be a, Janesh will have it. We’ll send it out. Yeah. So the other thing that happens is what we call the small business deduction. Husband, wife. So sometimes we have two businesses in the family, right? Where we’re spouses and one’s got one company, one’s got the other. Well, there’s this thing called association, which many of you have probably heard of and you go, Damn, association, cost me money. What happens is that’s when there’s cross ownership within multiple entities, typically it’s 25%. If you have a spouse and they have another business, we wanna make sure that this is eliminated. Why? Because your first, like I said before, your first $500,000 is taxed at 12%, anything else is higher. If you each own your corporation, you each get access to that $500,000. But if husband and wife own both of these corporations together, it’s a shared 500,000. So we lose access to small business deduction. So in something like this, we sometimes say, well, if we’re going to set up trusts and do trust planning, we’re going to have to set up two trusts. And the reason is husband can’t be in one and wife can’t be in the other. Because every beneficiary is deemed to own 100%, right? So if I have husband and wife on here, wife is deemed to own 100 % and if husband and wife are here, wife is deemed to own 100 % associated. It’s a problem. So sometimes what we do is we just put husband or wife on one and we split the kids and put them in different trusts because as soon as we have the same beneficiaries in two trusts, we have some association challenges. So that’s where we would maybe have some more trust. And believe me, my little ultimate structure can go well beyond that. So like we could end up having multiple entities and have different beneficiaries as part of it as it continues to expand. But the framework, the simple framework with one trust, one sort of Invesco is really the great setup. Good question. Sometimes we’ve done this where we’ve sort of had related party shared investments. We sometimes use a partnership in there. We could definitely have two. We could have both spouses in here and not deal with association. We would just have to make an election. So there’s a bunch of different ways that we can sort of set that up beyond, but yeah. It probably goes without saying, but you can see here that there’s ways to get around different situations, right? And ultimately at the end of the day, every single one of you has a different situation and that’s why it’s so important to be thinking these things through. And these four are gonna be here after, we want the lunches ready here. And I know that there’s some discussion that wants to happen after this.
Bob, as we wrap up here, any last thoughts, last comment to the group before we kind of part and then have individual conversations? Yeah, for me, 92 % of this room is probably paying more tax than they legally have to. Let’s make sure that that’s not happening, right? So happy to do a free review of everybody’s structure and to talk about how we could get that family trust or the ultimate tax structure in place. That’s step one of maybe a 10-step checklist to ensure you’re not paying those taxes.
Ara, last thoughts, big takeaways today. No, thank you all for coming. This was great. And thank you everyone for the great questions.
Kyle? Same thing. If there’s anyone who’s wanting to see if and when an insurance strategy might make sense, I usually say it’s not if, but when. At some point, the more successful your business, your structure is, the more important a strategy like that becomes. When you wait until you’re 82, it’s hard. We had someone last week get on a call, 82, and wanted to start doing tax planning. And I said, this is going to be hard because you’re now at a place where there’s not a whole lot of time for any strategy to be really helpful. So the sooner the better to better understand it. But then also get your kind of head wrapped around when and where it might make the most sense along the journey.
I’ve never seen such a dialed in crowd for this long on taxes is very impressive and I think that’s a testament to the panel and going back to what I was saying, I can’t think of a better panel to guest panels, I’m not talking about myself, about retained earnings and how to unlock and invest that. So thank you again, I’ll hand it off to you, anything? Yeah, thanks everyone. Any notes about what’s next? Yeah, so in terms of what’s next, we do have slides here in terms of how to contact. Kyle and John from Canadian Well Secrets and of course Bob and you know how to reach us and if you do not please come and Speak to both our and I or Mahima or Kevin here And again lastly thanks again for all your time We do have deals coming up to invest in either of those shapes that were discussed here So we’re happy to book a call with with anyone. So again, thanks for your time today and enjoyed lunch and again, thank you Hopefully my drawing wasn’t offensive.
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