Episode 220: Three Mistakes Business Owners & Investors Make During December – While Striving For Financial Freedom

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Are you heading into the end of December wondering why your financial progress keeps stalling—despite having strong income or a successful business?

This episode dives into the hidden traps business owners and investors fall into at year-end, especially when life feels busy, messy, and full of competing priorities. December should be a time to refine your financial direction, yet most people unintentionally delay key decisions, avoid their numbers, or chase new investment ideas without strategy. If you’ve ever pushed off meaningful financial steps “until the new year” or felt unsure where your real growth should come from, this conversation will feel uncomfortably familiar—in a good way.

 You’ll discover:

• • Why delaying important financial actions—even small ones—quietly erodes your long-term wealth, and how to reverse that pattern with simple, doable steps.
  
• Which numbers actually matter at year-end, so you can make confident decisions instead of operating in the dark or waiting for your accountant to tell you what happened months later.
• How to identify your true growth engine—the source that reliably expands your wealth—so you stop chasing distracting asset classes and start doubling down on what really moves your net worth.

Press play now to get clear on your year-end priorities and start the new year with momentum instead of missed opportunities.

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 requires more than avoiding common financial mistakes—it demands a clear financial vision, smart financial planning systems, and tax-efficient investment strategies that work across both personal finance and corporate finance. For business owners and investors aiming for financial freedom in Canada or an early retirement strategy built on a modest lifestyle, understanding cash flow, corporate wealth planning, and personal vs. corporate tax planning is essential. Whether you’re exploring real estate investing in Canada, optimizing RRSP room, weighing salary vs. dividends in Canada, or structuring financial buckets to support passive income planning, intentional decisions today unlock major growth opportunities tomorrow. With the right blend of Canadian tax strategies, corporation investment strategies, capital gains strategy, and retirement planning tools, you can accelerate your wealth building, strengthen your Canadian wealth plan, and create a legacy plan that supports your family for generations—all while ensuring your investment bucket strategy and financial diversification in Canada align with your long-term goal.

Transcript:

In this episode, we want to unpack the three mistakes business owners and investors make during the month of December. Well, you know, on this pathway of striving for a solid financial wealth plan. And December is always that time of year where everyone starts to do a little reflection. Everyone starts to think about the new coming year and start to make some goals. So

We want to unpack the mistakes that we’re seeing for many business owners and investors and what they can be doing to avoid those mistakes.

You’re exactly right. you know, with our incorporated business owner friends, oftentimes their year end for their businesses are either going to be in line with our personal year end of December 31st, but you do see a lot of November 30th and some October 31st. And oftentimes that’s accountants sort of like trying to give a little bit of buffer so that it’s not a massive tax time on all fronts.

But for most, you’re dealing with a fairly similar year end. something that we want to dig into here is really starting to look at the things that we could or should be doing at this time of year that is really easy to avoid. And really, we’re going to start with the first one. And I’ve hinted at it. And it’s really pushing off different priorities. And in particular, when we’re talking about wealth building, it’s really easy at this time of year to go like,

in the new year, I’m going to let the dust settle. I’m going to see where everything landed. I’m going to see what kind of, you know, tax refunds I’ve, I’ve received, what kind of revenues have come in at the end of the year, you know, did that final invoice land in the last week of December before we close the books. And then we’re going to see where we go from here. But in reality, what we really should be doing at this time of year is we should already be reflecting on what’s gone well over this year.

what could or should we be doing in order to help us get closer to those wealth building goals. And when we go the other way around, when we sort of pause and wait and, know, there’s lots of expenses around Christmas time and around the new year, and maybe we’re even gonna go on a little holiday with the family, it’s really easy for us to like say, I’m just gonna let the dust settle and then pick up the pieces after and do what I can.

when in reality what we should be doing is the other way around. We should actually be using these numbers and really thinking about what are we supposed to be doing to help us reach those goals and what do we need to adjust to make sure that we hit them instead of allowing another year to go by without actually doing the quote unquote work.

So I think you’re saying is that we’re pushing typically, and this is our business owners, investors, entrepreneurs, wealthy individuals that get to this time of year. think what you’re saying is they’re pushing off these priorities and what we should be doing is taking this time to go, what are the rocks I wanna put in the jar? And right now I’m pushing rock, like this is what we’re seeing from clients, right? Is they’re pushing rocks to the next.

Hey, I’ll deal with that in January or I know this is really important for the foundation for my wealth plan or I know that, you know, I need to make sure I check this off my to do list, but it’s like, it’s the time of year I’m gonna push it to January. I’ll push it to February next quarter. And that is the mistake, right? Like that is like, don’t, and I think this is like, even though we’re saying it’s a December issue, like when you realize a rock.

Should go in the jar and what I mean by that if you haven’t heard that analogy, right? Like your your time your priorities your your your world is this jar and you put things in the jar and it fills your jar up and the jar is like you put rocks and you put sand and you put water and and what happens in is as life happens as business happens little things go in your jar and They take up your time. It’s like I got to get that I got to do that. I got to do that I got to take the kids here. I got it all these little little things

fill your jar up and you can’t like sand or water, the pebbles, they fill it up so much that when you go to put the rock in, most important things, the things that move your financial goals forward, move your business forward, you can’t put them in anymore. And what you’re saying is like, I’ll make sure they go in in January, which means I’ll empty my jar and I’ll start over again. But what happens is, you know, the fires are still there.

and we don’t put those things in the jar. we’re saying that what I was getting to is when you know what your where your rocks are, put you got to put the other goal. That’s when it has to go in the jar now. So this time of year, if you have decided or know that there are things you’ve been pushing off that you know are important for business, personal life, financial goals, that these are called your rocks. These are the most important things. Get them in the jar now.

Like, like schedule it, get it done. Like if it’s meeting with your lawyer because you got to go, you got to get your will in place, go get it done. If it’s, if it’s making sure like we’ve got clients, like you were going to talk about a ⁓ scenario where it’s been a year where this, this, this client was like, I know this is really important for my wealth reservoir, but I keep putting it or I put it off, but it’s like, get it, get it done. Put it, put that rock in the jar so that you can start, you know, you can start living the life. that you’re dreaming of because you got all these, ducks in a row.

Right, right. And I think what you’re getting at too, I, know, while those rocks are so incredibly important, I also want you to think though about you can create those rocks over doing small things. So even though it’s really important for us to be doing this type of planning and for us to, you know, think about our personal and our corporate wealth journey here, the rock is the idea of getting that work done, but it can start small.

And I think what holds a lot of people back is they think the action, because it’s a rock, because it’s so important that it has to be something big and impactful all at once. And that’s actually not the case at all. It actually is quite the opposite. It’s like starting with whatever you can do on a routine is going to make such a massive difference. So for example, if we rewind to this time last year and you know, this is 2025 December, we go back to last December.

had you done something small, which could be as simple as saying inside of my corporate structure, I typically have a retained earnings each year. Usually it’s a range, right? So people have a range, whether that’s 50 to 100,000 for you, whether it’s 200 to 400,000, these are like fairly large ranges, right? Like we’re talking about taking one number and possibly doubling it, right? These are large ranges and people think that they’ve got to have the plan for every single dollar.

and they need to put that into place. And that’s why they say, I gotta wait to see where things settle. I gotta see where the dust falls before I act. When in reality, it’s quite the opposite. You can start small and you should start small so that you can get yourself in the habit of paying yourself first. And you know, Michael McCalliwitz, great, you know, great books on, business owners to be looking at about paying yourself first and…

making sure that you take care of those little pieces, because it could be something as small as starting with $1,000 a month in your business into S &P index funds. Why do people not do that right away? They’re like, well, I asked them straight up on the phone. It’s like, is $1,000 a month in your business, is that going to put you in a cash flow crunch when you usually have $200,000 of retained earnings at the end of every year? And they’re like, well, no. They think that that won’t actually

do anything because it’s such a small amount. It’s only $12,000 a year. But had they done that since last December, you’re now a year later. You now have an investment growing inside your corporate brokerage account. It’s $12,000. Maybe it’s $14,000 due to the growth of the market over this past year. Who knows? But the point is, is that now you get to go, could $3,000 a month work?

you know, like is that that meaningful to me if my retained earnings at the end of every year typically is between 100 and $200,000. Like now we’re talking about 36,000 in the entire year. And if we are getting ourselves into a cashflow crunch throughout the year, we can always turn off that monthly transaction, right? Like we can always stop the process if we were quote unquote wrong or too aggressive. But the problem is, is that we have to just start

And it doesn’t mean that you have to have the perfect plan for every single dollar and cent that you have going on inside of your world.

Yeah, no, that’s a great example. I like how you’re saying starts, starts small. might be, it might be something small. Like, like I was just reflecting with a, with a person on the Smith maneuver and then it’s like, ⁓ like, think it makes sense. Like the numbers make sense. I’m like, well, have you started yet? No, I haven’t started yet. You know, like, well, what, what, like, like these things of holding it back because the same is true here. It’s like, if I started

to make that say extra payment on my mortgage and then I say have my re-advanceable mortgage and all of a sudden I’ve taken the money out of the HELOC and investing all of a sudden I have this a year, if I did it a year ago, I’ve now got this tax credit that it kind of goes towards the income that I was making off those investments and why didn’t you start? Well, I’m not sure. It’s like the priorities you’re pushing off. So our recommendation is what are those priorities you have been pushing off?

This is the time of year to go like, let’s get it done or let’s schedule it to get done. All right. Let’s move on to the second mistake. We’re seeing business owners, investors, entrepreneurs make during the month of December. And, and, this one is, is more, I think about this because I’m the numbers guy. and I, and I always look at numbers and therefore what we’re, when I, we’re on calls with people and they don’t know their numbers. That that’s like.

This is the time of year to know your numbers. Like if you don’t, if you haven’t been following your numbers all year, you better know your numbers at the end of the year because the numbers help you make those types of decisions. It’ll help you make the rock decision that we were just talking about. So, so for example, it’s like, this is me on the, personal side is that there’s a two numbers that I look at at the end of the year. I look at them through the year, but these are the numbers that helped me go like, I on track? Am I on track with my financial goals? Am I on track with my family’s financial goals? Like,

Is my liquid net worth like this is like if I had to cash stuff in other than my primary residence other than some of these, you know, real estate that I don’t want to sell like if I took all my investments that are somewhat liquid. So you think about like your investments in the stock market or your investments, you know in in say other other private equity like these investments that it’s like I look at that and go is that aligned with the projection that I had at the last year?

And is it in line with my next 10 years of projections? Because yes, I’m a numbers guy and I look at that and I can see all those numbers on my spreadsheet so that I can go that, yep, I’m on pace because that helps me hit my financial freedom numbers. And that helps me go like, yes, hey, this felt really good this year. Or, ⁓ do I need to adjust going into next year? So that’s one number. It’s like I look at the liquid number, am I on pace?

The second number is in relation to that number, which is like the change, which is a percent change. Well, like how much did it change from last year to this year? Did I have like growth? Am I consistent? Like, are we making sure that that number is in line with my projections as well? And these are just two numbers I look at. And this is just an example of because you’ve got business numbers to look at, have maybe your personal numbers to look at, but know your numbers is important because it helps you make decisions.

I love that. And I think too, not only does it help you make decisions, but it gives you confidence that what you’re doing is working, right? If you’re going through the entire year and you’re guessing and you’re not sure that uncertainty holds you back from taking even that small step we were talking about earlier, right? So having to commit some time.

whether it’s weekly or monthly or quarterly, I think quarterly might be a little bit too long for a lot of people so that you can know that things are working as planned. Now, the hard part about doing that, and I think why some people avoid it is that if things are slow during a month or during a quarter, that might get a little bit of your fight or flight going. You’re getting a little concerned, a little worried, like, ⁓ what if the business doesn’t keep coming in? What if this? What if that?

but by at least knowing it and addressing it, you can be planning ahead so that those smaller moves that you made, you can see what sort of impact they’re having throughout the year and to determine whether you need to make changes either during the year or at the end of the year as we’re talking about here in December. So I think knowing your numbers is so critical, so important, and it’s also important for those people who aren’t the numbers person. So you might be working in the business

and you might have a bookkeeper or you might have a CFO or you might have someone on your team that handles the numbers. You guys need to book some time to come together so that you are informed and you’re up to date on what that looks like. And for you and I, John, in all of our businesses, we come together. It’s not a formal meeting where we do this, this type of discussion, but when we are meeting, we very often will take a look at numbers. Where are we? We have projected here.

Are we on track? Are there any things that we need to modify? And then we also look ahead. Knowing your numbers also helps to know how much do I need over the next two or three months, right? So we usually say two months to three months or a quarter. We wanna make sure that we have cashflow available so that we don’t find ourselves in a cashflow crunch. And that can give us the confidence to know, you know what? We’re ready to actually scale up.

the dollars that are going into this investment or the dollars that are going into this particular insurance policy or wherever those dollars are being allocated for because they have a different job and a different purpose. But if I don’t know what that purpose is, or I don’t understand the numbers, or I don’t know what’s going on in the business until I get my financials in the spring, that’s a lot of unknown going on. And then by the time you now know what happened last year, you already don’t know what’s happening this year.

And that’s the most important information that you need to have so that you can actually take a step in the right direction.

Right, right. All right, so first, you know, the first kind of mistake we were seeing is like, people are pushing up their priority. So we want to make sure that we’re scheduling your priorities, but know what those priorities are. The second mistake is not knowing the numbers and then knowing the numbers is the recommendation that can actually help you, you know, actually achieve the first mistake or avoid that first mistake. All right, last, the last one here for today doesn’t mean it’s the last mistake that everyone’s making.

is the one that we’re, we’re seeing from clients in, in, the individuals we’re talking to, which is basically saying like, you haven’t been clear on your growth engine. Talk to us about this cow growth engines.

I love this.

And I hope everyone, regardless of whether you’re a T4 employee or an incorporated business owner, at the end of the day, all of these ideas today can be applied in your world, okay? So when we talk about the growth engine, if you’re a T4 employee, this is like the money that’s coming in. Like, are there opportunities for you to earn more money some way, somehow? Of course, when it comes to the incorporated business owner, you actually have like a cheat code available to you to level up.

your growth engine, but it becomes really difficult to do so. So our business itself is the growth engine. And if I don’t know the numbers, if I’ve been pushing off planning and prioritizing, like what the big goal is here, what the ideas are, it’s very difficult for me to make sure that we’re optimizing and maximizing the use of our growth engine. So for us as business owners, we want to be looking and going, if I know the numbers,

I can then try to identify where the bottlenecks in my business, whether it’s an investment, right? So you’re a rental property owner, like that’s a business right there. Like where is the bottleneck there? Is it that every time we turn over a tenant, takes way too long to get a tenant back in? How can we fix that? What can we do to make more money in this world over here by fixing things? I’ve got to be able to do that. If it’s an active business,

I want to be looking at the business like where is the revenue being generated? Like where is the greatest use of our time? And are we maximizing that time? And then where are we not seeing the same results? And is it because like we actually should be maybe pivoting away from that channel or that approach? Or is it something that I can actually address something I can actually fix so that we can actually grow our income grow the volume

of the money coming in, which in turn makes it easier for us to hit the other goals on the wealth building side.

Right. So like we get questions like, should I, you know, learn about this new asset class or should I invest in Bitcoin or should I, you know, maybe, maybe I haven’t tried real estate yet. And in terms of an investment side of maybe your business, but also maybe just like your asset asset portfolio, your portfolio. And, and sometimes that this is where the clarity is that that has to come in. It’s because like, yeah, you, you, you could go like if you haven’t

ventured into real estate yet. You could go down that road. Like you could, you could take time. You could learn about it. You could, you know, buy your first property. could, you know, manager or hire a manager. It’s like, there’s a lot to learn over there. ⁓ but then for what gate, like for what purpose, like you have to be clear there. Like you have to go like, is that in what gain am I going to get? Because I think what we’re looking at is

What we’re looking at is, that folks are making decisions on like maybe what they’re feeling like they’re missing out on instead of going like, wait a minute. I could spend time over there to get some gain maybe, but it’s a new learning, but I could just take that same time and spend it on what I know is working. And I know that I’m good at, which is like, maybe my business is my growth engine and I can just spend more time generating more revenue over there.

And then funneling that into safe assets or stuff that’s going to be more passive. And then I now know that my growth engine isn’t the return I get in these asset classes on say the investment side, like real estate or, or like I’m, I’m obsessed with getting 15 % return because I’m trading all day long, but I could learn how to do option trading and trading all day long, or I could just generate more sales in my business. But maybe.

Your growth engine is trading all day long. And the other part is taking you away from that. And that’s why the clarity there is, has to be important. Where is your growth engine and should you make sure, like, are you just making sure you’re spending time generating that? Like for us, we’re very clear on our growth engine is that our businesses, we spend as much time as we can in our businesses to generate that so that we can take it out of that flywheel and put it into this flywheel over here, which we’re not so concerned about.

the rate of return because we can just spend more time over here to generate more money and then put it over here. And when that pot’s big enough, it doesn’t matter so much about the rate of return because it’s going to satisfy our goals because we were knowing when you are numbers. So like that’s the clarity part you want to get at this time of the year is like, we’re not going into next year. Where do I allocate that time to make sure that I’m spending time on the growth engine part of my portfolio, my financial plan.

Mm-hmm.

I love it. I love it. And really what this also means like for you when you’re listening to this on the other end of, you know, on the other end of the earbuds on the podcast here is really recognizing that your approach is likely going to look and sound different than the next person. And it doesn’t make it necessarily better or worse. It might be perfect for you and it might be a horrible idea for them. So it’s a really important aspect here to, you know, not get caught up.

Perfect.

in trying to do and be all things to all people or to know all things about all investments, for example, right? I mean, hey, don’t get me wrong. When I, you know, pull money out of Bitcoin because, hey, you know, it’s it’s bearish trend now and then you see it go on a rip. It’s like it’s hard not to get some FOMO, right? Where you look at and you go like, could have been a part of that. But ultimately, at the end of the day, we go, you know, where I was spending my time and energy was in a spot.

where I know that I have certain predictable income that could come in and I’m putting it in asset classes that actually help me to be less emotionally charged when it comes to my investment style. So right here, we’ve got three big, we’re gonna call them business owner and investor mistakes, but really what it is, it’s just oversight, right? And ultimately it comes down to making sure that you’re prioritizing, knowing,

Mm-hmm.

how your cash flow is working, whether this is at a personal level or at a corporate level. It’s so easy for us to just see, well, let’s see what comes out in the wash. Making sure you know the numbers, making sure you’re recognizing, are we on track to do what I anticipated for this year? If I’m not on track, instead of beating yourself up over it or getting emotional about it, it’s thinking about like, why didn’t I hit that goal? And then finally getting clear on.

What is your true growth engine in your world? And for most of us in our working years anyway, it’s going to be the thing you do day in and day out for income. That’s your growth engine. How do I optimize that growth engine? And maybe I need to spend more time thinking about my growth engine instead of thinking about all the random asset classes that I’m dying to get into, or I’m worried about missing out on. And if we can get those three things going over time,

Right here.

You can add in some asset classes. You can add in knowledge and understanding in some of these places. But we want to make sure that we at least get started so that we’re not sitting here a year from now and going, know, my net worth, I love your net worth numbers, by the way there, John, it’s like, if you’re looking and you know your net worth number now and specifically your liquid net worth number, thinking about that number and then revisiting next year.

If that number is the same or lower, that’s a problem. And that’s something that we need to address and fix. If it’s higher, how much higher? Was that the goal you had set for yourself? Is that sustainable for you so that you can get yourself to your financial freedom number as soon as possible? And is that a great trajectory? If so, keep on going and keep on doing that. But if not, what do I need to adjust? What do I need to change in order to make that happen? And most often,

It’s not shifting your investments from one thing that gets this return into that thing over here that gets a slightly higher return, or I’m hoping will get me a slightly higher return. It’s about changing our actions throughout the year. And this is the time of the year to make sure that you grab hold of it and take that next step.

Love it, love it. Thank you for listening today and thinking about reflecting on end of year missed opportunities or opportunities that are to come. And if you are an incorporated business owner and you are ready to take the next step and strategize specifically in the area of your wealth reservoir, this is your opportunity fund and you need some suggestions and some tools to make use of that tool to.

help you hit those goals, then reach out to us at CanadianWellSecrets.com forward slash discovery. We can help you set up that structure.

And if you have not yet incorporated business owners want to definitely hop into our free masterclass over at canadianwealthsecrets.com forward slash masterclass. You can get into that self paced video course and have a peek to see some of the common structures that incorporated business owners, just like you with retained earnings are using in order to maximize both their personal and corporate wealth plan.

Just reminder, the content you heard here today is for informational purposes only. not consume any such information or other materials, legal tax, investment, or financial advice. And one more reminder, Kyle Pierce is a licensed life and accident and sickness insurance agent and the president of corporate wealth management here at Canadian Wealth Secrets.

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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