Episode 272: A Business Owners Guide to Salary, Dividends, RRSP, and Investments to Reaching Financial Freedom in 2026

Listen here on our website:

Or jump to this episode on your favourite platform:

Watch Now!

Are your investments, corporate cash, and registered accounts working together—or are hidden gaps costing you money and time to reach financial freedom?

Successful incorporated professionals can build significant wealth and still feel unsure whether their financial structure is truly optimized. When accountants, insurance advisors, and investment professionals each focus on only one piece, opportunities involving salary, retained earnings, taxes, and family savings can easily be overlooked.

This episode examines a Canadian professional couple’s financial setup and reveals the practical adjustments that could help them use their money more intentionally.

You’ll discover:

• How to balance salary, retained earnings, and RRSP contributions without withdrawing unnecessary personal income.
• Why TFSAs, RESPs, and available government grants should be considered before more complex wealth strategies.
• How idle corporate cash and high-fee investment products can limit long-term growth—and what to evaluate before choosing a better approach.

Press play now to uncover the financial blind spots that may be hiding inside an otherwise successful wealth plan.

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.

Effective wealth management for high-net-worth Canadians requires more than isolated advice—it calls for coordinated tax planning, financial planning, and asset optimization across personal and corporate accounts. For incorporated professionals and business owners, a strong Canadian wealth plan may include RRSP optimization, maximizing RESP grants, evaluating salary vs. dividends in Canada, and building tax-efficient corporate investments with the right balance of growth, safety, and liquidity. The episode explores how corporate wealth planning, personal vs. corporate tax planning, optimizing RRSP room, passive income planning, and corporate structure optimization can support financial freedom in Canada while reducing missed opportunities. It also highlights the value of financial buckets, an investment bucket strategy, capital gains planning, real estate investing in Canada, financial diversification, and business owner tax savings. Whether the goal is financial independence, an early retirement strategy, legacy planning in Canada, or building long-term wealth, Canadian entrepreneurs need financial systems that align retained earnings, registered accounts, insurance, real estate, and corporation investment strategies. With clear financial vision setting and the right retirement planning tools, entrepreneurs can create a more resilient plan for tax-efficient investing, estate planning, and sustainable wealth building in Canada.

Transcript:

Jon Orr: All right, we just got off a call with a couple Canadian business owners and specifically like business owners, but they were doctors who own their own practice and they’ve built up assets, they’ve built up you know a good chunk of wealth and net worth, as you might expect, two doctors to do that and for their family. And they came to us not to try to figure out whether they’re reaching financial freedom or not. Like there’s no question that they’re on the right pathway. The question and the worry, I think, and this is true for many people who reach out to us, is they have some worries about, am I missing something? You know, like I’ve got assets, I’ve got money, I’ve got like this, I got too much money to know what to do with in a way, which means I don’t have any worry about like my family expenses. Like we’re not in that world. We’ve got these assets around us, but it’s like, but what am I missing about those assets?

Jon Orr: And I don’t wanna misstep down the line. And it’s like, can you just have a look at what I’m doing and where I could be missing the boat? And what is some low-hanging fruit that I could make some maneuvers here so that 10 years from now, five years from now, I’m like, that was a great decision. And I’ve either eliminated some tax that I was paying, or I’ve built up more wealth because of that small move. And that’s what we do in our calls, to be honest. And so this person was like, I don’t want regrets that I could have made earlier, but I don’t know who does this. You know, like there’s certain advisors that look for this and there’s like they all have like the but no one looks holistically. And that’s what we did here. Let’s unpack it. We want to share these big takeaways, this low hanging fruit, specifically around missed opportunity for people who have assets.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah. Well, and it’s funny too, because the conversation, John, at the very beginning, what they described what was their biggest, I’ll call it wealth pebble with working with different advisors was it seems that every advisor sort of does one thing and they do that thing well, right? Like they probably do that thing well, but they felt like it was like unless they knew the entire plan going into that particular advisor’s office or into that Zoom call with that advisor, they weren’t sure if they were actually getting a real holistic view. So that’s really what we try to do. And, you know, as we go through here, we’ve redrawn this scenario so that this scenario is unique. It’s not actually the exact numbers and so forth and the exact details, but it addresses all of the same low-hanging fruit that we were talking about on that call.

Kyle Pearce: So, one of the biggest things that you’re not going to get if you, you know, go into let’s say the bank and you’re talking about where should I invest or how should I invest, you know, one thing you’ll probably get is the opportunity to invest in whatever it is that they are licensed or whatever they’re paid to sell. So if it’s at the bank, it might be the mutual funds offered by the bank. You might have to do some digging to get maybe some ETFs or to get some diversification outside of what the bank is offering. Or you go into the insurance office and you know, they’ve got insurance. And what kind of insurance do you need? Is it term? Is it permanent? And they can help you do that. But what they’ll often miss is when we’re putting the wrong dollars into the wrong things. And in this particular case, we’re gonna kind of paint you a picture. For those on YouTube, we’re kind of drawing this out, but I’ll do my best to describe it for everyone else. This Canadian couple, they’re a younger couple, they are both incorporated professionals. They actually have MPCs because they are medical professionals and they’re doing quite well. So they both have their own professional corporations opened. And up on the screen now, you can sort of see the very beginnings of this drawing. We also have a holding company sort of sitting in the middle. And when I say in the middle, you know, we have to keep in mind that if it’s a professional corporation, many professional corporations cannot be owned by anyone other than the incorporated professional. So realtors with PRECs, for example, this is another example. So your PREC must be owned by the licensed realtor. The same’s true here with these MPCs. So you’ll see we’ve got sort of a side-by-side corporate structure. We have two operating companies and a holding company that sort of sits there in the middle.

Kyle Pearce: And ultimately at the end of the day, they’ve got a significant amount of income coming into the professional corps. We’ve got about, you know, $350,000 per year being retained in the first medical corp. And we’ve got about two hundred thousand per year in the other. So as we paint a little picture here, these two individuals have some retained earnings that have been growing along the way here. They’ve been paying themselves a reasonable salary. Right now, it’s about $120,000 each. And they aren’t actually piercing beyond the $500,000 small business tax rate. So that’s a really important thing for us to sort of consider here. So, all things equal, we look around and we say, you know, there’s a really good thing going on here. They do own a clinic, and that clinic is actually being leased. So they don’t actually own the actual investment, but in that holding company, they do have a little bit of real estate investments. And their plan is to start growing a corporate wealth management strategy. So that’s what we’re going to be discussing in this particular conversation. But as we move along, the big goal is what is this gonna look like over time? And it really comes down to us looking at all of the other assets that they have going on. So as we sort of zoom out here on this picture, we’re going to be talking about the different assets that they own personally, as well as the different assets that they own inside the corporation for us to start making some decisions as to whether, you know, it’s steady Freddy, keep doing what we’re doing, or are there little pieces, little nuances that we can adjust along the way here?

Jon Orr: Right. Well like what do you like like this is not — in a way this is what you do every single day as you’re on calls with business owners and trying to figure out where the loop — you know, where their low hanging fruit is and their structures and you get them to share some of the you know the rough numbers, the structures that they currently have. But if you think about these people and say others as well, it’s like what is the first thing you’re really looking for. That’s like — cause you unpacked kind of like the structure, but now it’s like, where do you gonna dig and where did you dig with these people first off?

Kyle Pearce: Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. And actually where we typically look at is first we want to see like what’s coming into the operating companies. And in this case, that’s going to be these professional corporations that we see here. And what’s flowing out. So the first thing I want to identify is again, we’ve sort of heard it — are we actually paying at the low corporate rate on all active income? Or is there actual income being paid at the high rate? So if they’re in Ontario, these individuals may or may not be in Ontario. We don’t want to specify. We want this to be anonymous for you know for anyone. We don’t want anyone to be identified through some of what we’re discussing here today. But if they’re in Ontario, you know, there’s a massive difference between paying 12.2% on the first 500,000 and paying 26.5% on anything above 500,000. So as I had mentioned, they’ve been collecting retained earnings in the corporation. And they had told us that they’re earning about $350,000 of retained earnings per year in MPC one. And MPC two is earning an additional 200,000 in retained earnings. So that tells me right away that they are paying in the low tax rate. So that means that we want to be more strategic about how much money we take out to a personal level.

Kyle Pearce: When I see that they’re taking 120 each out, the first question I want to ask the business owners are, do you need that income? Like, is that what’s needed or necessary for lifestyle? Because sometimes people just pick a number and they take that money out and they’re like, actually, I don’t really need that money. Well, in this case, if we could pay a lower tax rate, unless all of that extra money is going straight into an RSP, we might want to reconsider that. But in this case, they have multiple children, three in total, and therefore lifestyle, you know, expenses are there. And they do need this $120,000 each. So there’s really not any wiggle room there in order for them to say keep or retain more. And to be honest, with you know, a total of around, we’ll call it combined, $500,000 of retained earnings each year, you know, as we plan out, if that’s what we’re projecting each and every year in the corporation, I might even suggest to them that they take a little extra out each year in order to create more RSP room so that they can actually fill up more of that bucket. Because again, in your corporation, there is no limit on how much you can retain in the corporation. But there is a limit on the RRSP. And over time, as they age and as they get a little older, we can even explore some tools like the IPP, which is an individual pension plan or a personal pension plan, both to be held within the corporate structure. So there’s some moves that can be made, but I would argue until we, you know, run into some difficulty filling up the RRSP, especially when we’re younger, then I would say we hold off on any IPP or PPP discussion at this point and we circle back to it in our late 40s, maybe as we get closer to 50, especially if there’s still a nice long runway to be had in terms of, you know, earning income and taking a salary into the, you know, into their sixties and seventies.

Jon Orr: Okay. So they need the salary that they’re currently sending to themselves. They’re creating RRSP room from that salary, but the the wonder here is because I think what you’re saying is like they could pay themselves a little more because there’s room sitting in the retained earnings. And I think the the you know the threshold to like get yourself and salary up to be trying to get to the break-even point between the max RSP room and how much your salary is. There is that kind of break-even point or the maximum kind of I guess you can call it like inflection point. In a way there’s that math term, you know, a math term coming out from your old calculus days. But I mean, when you think about that, like my wonder, I guess, for this group or this couple was like, was there room there and or did they already or were they already contributing to the RRSP? Because that is one of those quick, you know, quick low-hanging fruit moves is like, let’s try to optimize the salary to start plugging the RRSP and maybe the tax-free savings account so that we can optimize that tax rate at the corporate level and into the personal level.

Kyle Pearce: Right. Yeah. And you’re 100% correct. So when we went and talked about their personal assets, we looked at about a combined $350,000 of total RRSPs and tax-free savings account. Okay. So when I look at that, I go, okay, that’s good. So there’s a healthy start here. However, like you had said, when we take $120 per year individually, we are essentially creating 18% for each individual, for each salary earner, more room in the RSP each and every year. And when we looked at the numbers and sort of back mapped, basically, while they could up their salary all the way to say 185 each in order to get the full 18% all the way up to the maximum of about 33,000, 34,000 of RSP room, that would leave such a big gap of unnecessary income at a personal level that I would much rather see it be somewhere in between, like taking an extra twenty, maybe twenty-five thousand each and then contributing all of it to the RSP, especially since they did have a little bit of RSP room from prior years that they hadn’t used yet. So I would say the answer usually lies somewhere in the middle. The lower your spending, the less likely it is that we’re going to suggest pushing up the salary too aggressively just to create the RSP room. Because then you’re not going to be able to get all of that difference in. You know, if let’s say I increase my salary by fifty thousand dollars in order to get — in their case, we’re talking about fifty, sixty-five thousand dollars that they would have to each individually increase their salary, pay tax on, only to try to stuff $33,000 into the RSP. So we’re losing on the other chunk of that salary, which is not really an ideal or an optimal move. So I’d much rather see them continue to use the RSP, but we’re not going to really crank it up unnecessarily. But I do want to see it move up just a tad.

Jon Orr: Sure. Now you said they’re young. So my wonder also is like the balance of going like we could just up the salaries to pad the RSPs, but like is there anything else on the personal side before we kind of look into the corporate side that this couple needed to kind of consider that they hadn’t been considering before because like that’s like I said, that’s the worry most people are coming to us from with going like, look at my situation. What am I missing out based off who I am, what do I do, my structures, what personally were they missing out on, did you believe in this case?

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, well, I think there’s a couple ones. So personally, they own a home. It’s worth, you know, about six hundred thousand or so. They owe about three seventy on this home. So a decent amount of equity has been built up over time. It’s not fully paid off by any means. So again, I had mentioned hey, listen, continue to pay it off slowly. We don’t want to get too aggressive. We could, they mentioned the Smith maneuver as an option. The problem with Smith maneuver is that if I have to take more money out of my corporation in order to perform the Smith maneuver on my own home, my primary residence, I might end up paying more tax to get the money out than I’m actually going to save in terms of the interest write-off that I’m going to create in doing that arbitrage. So we just have to be careful there. We are going to explore that. That’s a lesser hanging fruit, in my opinion, in their case. But I did want to see them open up an optional home equity line of credit for a little bit of liquidity option, not to use for anything. One thing I did consider or I did mention to them that they could consider is that because they have each of them has about half of the available room in their TFSAs, that could be a good strategy for them to fill up that tax-free savings account bucket faster and slowly pay down the HELOC or next time they refinance, they could wrap it into their mortgage so that we could actually fill up this really helpful bucket now, let it grow compound tax-free, and slowly drain from the corporation to pay down the money borrowed on the primary home.

Jon Orr: Got it. So you’re specifically saying open up a home equity line of credit with the equity in their current primary residence to borrow from the HELOC to send to the tax-free savings account, invest it. They’re young. They’ve got a good long journey ahead of them to to say, hey, we’re okay with the long like if I I’m not gonna be like saying borrow from the tax-free savings or borrow to invest in the tax-free savings account for money I need next year or two years from now, we’re talking we’re retirement, use your tax free savings account like a retirement account in that case. That’s what you’re saying specifically.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, you’re absolutely right, John. And the one thing I want to just remind people is if we’re going to use a strategy, a lot of clients are a bit surprised when I say, hey, listen, if you have an opportunity to fill up the tax-free savings account bucket at refinance time, that to me is a really easy move to increase the amount I owe on my home, use that money, put it in the tax free savings account. A lot of people are like, why wouldn’t you do it on a home equity line of credit and write off the interest doing Smith maneuver? The problem is that these are registered accounts and registered accounts, we cannot write off the interest on a registered account on borrowed funds. So if it’s refinance time, that’s easier, but unfortunately, most people are in a term and they don’t want to refinance in the middle of a term. So a HELOC can be a way to implement that strategy sooner. I wouldn’t use the entire HELOC. If I have access to 100,000, I wouldn’t put 100,000 there. Why? Because markets are volatile and things like that. We don’t want to get ourselves caught in a pinch if the HELOC is going to be a useful wealth reservoir tool as we’re building our net worth as we go.

Jon Orr: Got it. Got it. Okay. So do we wanna talk about — they were young. Do we wanna talk about say RESPs and kids and like because some people have like I already got that set up. Sometimes you see that, sometimes you’re like, that was a missing bucket.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah. It is such an easy bucket to miss because when we do our net worth statements with clients, like typically we ignore what’s in the RESP. Why? Because we know that there’s a plan for it, right? It’s going to go to education purposes. So we don’t necessarily want to factor it in to any sort of wealth planning and so forth, but it is an important move. And with these individuals, we had three children. Each of them has a universal life policy on them. We’re not huge fans of universal life. We figure if you’re going to be in the market, be in the market. If you’re going to be in insurance, be in insurance, like something more guaranteed, more predictable, like a whole life, high early cash value. However, they’ve already set up universal life policies. They’re small on their children, not the end of the world. It’s not going to, you know, throw them off track. We’re not disappointed in them. But we probably, when I found out that they hadn’t been using the RESPs yet — in my mind, that should be happening well before we consider doing any sort of insurance strategy on our children. The reality is that that insurance, even though over time you get all the benefits of insurance, again, not huge fans of the UL for the insurance strategy. I think that’s like one of the last moves that we’re gonna make because we wanna make sure that we have enough insurance in our corporation for ourselves instead of for our children. So basically what we’re doing is we’re putting something on our children that’s actually gonna help probably their children, which is like a really long time from now. Now, there is cash value we can leverage. There is some advantages, but like we’re not a huge fan of starting there. They’re leaving such an easy, low-hanging fruit. They’ve got three children, they get $500 per year free if they put in $2,500 per kid. So it’s not a massive amount of money when we look at the you know, entire picture here. However, this might also justify those salaries going up a little more. We put money in the RSP first. We take any RRSP refunds and we plan to use those refunds to help fill up the RESPs and the tax-free savings account bucket so that we can utilize these are gifts that the government is essentially giving us. We don’t want to ignore them, even though $500 might not seem like a ton. It’s $1,500 per year for three children. And that does compound, you know, up to I think it’s around age 14 when you’ll max out on that on that opportunity. And you can do catch up. So catching up is really important as well. So easy, low-hanging fruit for these individuals.

Jon Orr: Okay, let’s turn our attention into what you said earlier, the middle. So let’s look at corporate side of things. And when we have significant retained earnings, we often want to know, I don’t want to miss the boat or regret something down the road that I could have been doing with these retained earnings now because they’re my retirement. They’re — I’m building this up. I don’t need the money to live now, but I should be investing it. I should be putting it here. I should be buying income producing assets. What did you see with what they were doing with their corporate investments and then where did you see some of that low hanging fruit in that in that arena?

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, absolutely. So we usually start inside the corporate structure. We usually start our conversation around some sort of mix between growth and safety of around 50-50. And the reason why we start there with incorporated business owners is because liquidity is usually a big issue for a lot of people. Now, the younger we are, and I would say the more predictable the income is. So as medical professionals, we might not need to be 50-50. It might be more suitable to move, you know, from like 70-30, for example, in the, you know, in these individuals’ cases. But even with medical professionals, what I find is that there’s way too much cash sitting doing nothing. So that 50-50 starting point can be a really helpful place. Now, what I was pleased to find is that even though I’m not a huge fan of maybe the kid UL policy, specifically the type of policy and the fact that they were on the kids before doing RESPs, what I did like was that they were held and owned inside of the corporate structure. Now they are in the MPCs instead of in the holding company. I’d rather see them in the holding company. We can, you know, move the ownership over to the holding company. It’s not the end of the world there. However, I was happy that at least they were using the low tax rate after tax dollars in the corporations. So they were spending 88 cent dollars on these policies instead of personal dollars, which may have been more like 70 cent dollars or 73 cent dollars, depending on their tax rate. So big win there. That was great. And I was also pleased to see that they had already set up high early cash value life insurance policies in the corporation as well, owned by the MPCs, not the holding company. Easy move. And that $50,000 of premium per year, if we do some quick math, that’s $100,000 per year going in versus another $400,000 of retained earnings that are there. So right now their split could be an 80-20 when we do the math. 500,000 of retained, 100,000 of those is going into this safe bucket. But the reality is that they’ve got a lot more cash on the sidelines doing nothing. So one of two things either has to give — either we need to actually invest them, if that’s the goal, get them invested long term. Or we need to maybe consider actually adding a little bit in terms of new policies. We’re not canceling policies. You might consider adding an additional policy. Maybe it’s a joint first to die policy or maybe a joint last to die policy, depending on what needs they would like to achieve with those policies. So I’m actually really happy about that structure. But then when we looked at the growth bucket, remember, too much cash sitting. We’ve got about, you know, 1.1, 1.2 million dollars there. And only about half of that was invested in the corporation. The other half was sitting in cash. Not a good move, just cash, not even in GICs. But their challenge has been that so far, all of their investments, their RSP at a personal level, tax-free savings account, and their corporate accounts, they are now working with an advisor that is only mutual fund licensed. And those mutual funds have high fees. And they’re really just index type mutual funds. So essentially what they’re doing is they’re paying a significant fee, more so than what our wealth management team would charge to manage funds and be active managers of those funds. And they’re, you know, essentially just getting sort of an indexing strategy. So that’s a massive, you know, to me, big red flashing light is like one of two things either has to happen. In my opinion, you either want a DIY and you want to go index funds. I’m not a fan of paying a management fee if the strategy is just indexing. Or if you want something more, if you want access to an alternative asset class, if you want access to private equity as a part of this portfolio, and if you want access to an insurance strategy in case the market crashes.

Jon Orr: Right.

Kyle Pearce: This is where true wealth management really shines. So you could be looking at for us, it’s going to be 1.5% assets, fee for assets under management. This is an easy shift where they’re actually going to save fees and get a more actively managed portfolio that introduces other assets so that we actually don’t have to hang around and just the S&P 500 index fund, a bond fund or whatever it might be. This is actually going to be actively managed to try to get a higher risk adjusted return while protecting downside to protect the pile. And really, that really lit them up that they were like, wow, you’ve considered the entire picture here. And that to them is like the lowest, easiest hanging fruit to start with. I corrected them and said, getting your RESPs filled. That’s the easiest one. Like you could literally do it today, right? And you could do that. You could self-manage it if you want to through your bank. Or if you’d like, say, our wealth management arm to manage it, we also can manage those funds, you know, through all of these different accounts. So that’s the next step for this crew. But overall, when I back up and I look at it, I always like to remind people that they’re doing great. They’re not overspending. The reality is volume and they have volume. You see the retained earnings every year accumulating. Now the question is, is how optimized do we want to become? And everyone’s going to land somewhere differently on that sort of spectrum between simplicity and complexity and optimization and, you know, inefficiency, let’s say. Right. So we want to make sure that it fits for them. They’re busy. They don’t want to manage. They are, you know, incorporated business owners as medical doctors. And the next step is, you know, we’re gonna have a call with our wealth management arm so that they can actually start pursuing some, you know, we’ll call it better use of that capital because they’ve been hesitating to put more money into mutual funds because they know it’s not where they wanna be.

Jon Orr: Right, right. And then basically, especially if you’re saying, look, we like the idea that we’re being actively managed, but we’re saying we’re gonna — you know, the next low hanging fruit here is continue with that. You’re just gonna put more money in your pocket just because you’re eliminating some of the fees. And you’re going to get a better strategy overall, even though it’s actively managed, because they’re saying it’s actively managed, but like you’re saying, it’s not really the strategy that they’re using is something you could be doing as a do-it-yourselfer. But if I don’t feel comfortable as a do-it-yourselfer, I like the peace of mind that there is an active manager. And that’s kind of what you buy when you are with say a mutual fund advisor who’s just using a kind of an index strategy is like you’re just you’re saying I’m okay with this. Sure.

Kyle Pearce: Right. Yeah. They’re just rebalancing for you. They’re whatever. And you know, you’re paying a cost for it. And at the end of the day, too, I usually encourage clients. I say, listen, if you’ve got that itch, like you’re like, I know that the cheapest fees is me self-managing my own portfolio. I always say, like, well, start with something that you feel comfortable so that you can make some mistakes along the way. You’re gonna make mistakes. So you don’t have to go all actively managed, right? Like it could be half the portfolio’s actively managed and half the portfolio you’re doing. And over time, maybe you take the entire portfolio. The opposite’s also true, and I think is really important to know is you might start managing this yourself. And after you make enough bonehead moves, like I’ve done in my past, maybe you start recognizing like this isn’t really like where my strengths lie. Especially as an incorporated business owner, or if you’re a T4 employee earning a high salary, it’s likely that you’re busy. And if you can’t spend more than 15 minutes a day looking at it, you’ve got to start questioning like, is this worth it? And I always come back to the property manager situation. We pay property management to do things that we know how to do. We just don’t want to do them, you know? And it doesn’t make it right or wrong. So be very — I guess open in your mind to like what kind of investor are you and which kind of investor do you want to be? And you can always change that. You know, once you decide, you’re not stuck there forever. So doing something is better than doing nothing. And I’m just so happy that this couple did reach out because they recognized they had too much cash sitting on the sideline and they weren’t taking the next step because they knew that what the next step was available to them right now was not the right one. So they went and solved it. They reached out to us and they got a full overview.

Jon Orr: Right. Yeah. Big takeaways here for them is thinking about like let’s first looked at our optimizing our salary. We looked at optimizing whether we’re contributing enough to the RRSP or tax-free savings account. We can play around with some of the numbers because you have the flexibility if you’re paying yourself from your corporation to take advantage of some of those break-even points, to make sure that you’re tax optimized between corporate and personal and get those registered accounts built up. So that you can take advantage down the line. Another recommendation, big move for them was to think about those RESPs and how are we funding those. We talked about HELOCs and looking at the HELOC situation to go, can we set up some flexibility for ourselves to also layer into the tax-free savings again on the personal side? On the corporate side, they were using say not as an optimal strategy in terms of investment corporately investing. Keep in mind that anytime you’re investing inside the corporation and it is considered a passive source of investment, you are going to pay fifty percent on the passive, any sort of passive income you generate inside the corporation. There are capital gains to consider, but we recommend, you know, taking some sort of investment approach inside that corporation. A fifty fifty percentage allocation between growth and safety is one of our biggest recommendations. They were saying, look, I’ve got my 50% growth over here, so that was great. But there’s the low-hanging fruit. We could have been optimizing in terms of the choices we are making in terms of who is managing or how we’re managing that side of the portfolio. On the — we didn’t specifically get into what they were doing specifically for their safety side of that portfolio. I think what we heard was they were in cash. We in the past we have recommended that GIC like returns can be used in a whole life or a high cash value participating whole life policy that can act as a safety, safety growth portion of that portfolio. So those are some options we didn’t specifically talk about here. We did talk about recommending that down the line for them as well. Hopefully you got some takeaways. That’s what we do on our call. So you may have heard, or if you listen to the podcast, we say, hey, book a call with us.

Jon Orr: That’s what we’re doing in 45 minutes on our call is unpacking the situation that you currently have because a lot of these people that we talk with have good money. They got assets all over the place, but they have this nagging feeling that they’re leaving money on the table somewhere and they’re carrying blind spots around with them. And then what we try to do on that 45-minute call is to unpack where are those blind spots and let’s call to attention the blind spots so that you can walk away with that 45 minute call no matter what making moves down the line, whether you’re using our services in terms of insurance or private equity or wealth management side, you still can walk away and feel good about that call going, I know what I could do next to save either money or save tax or build my wealth. That’s what we’re trying to do for all of the people that we’re talking about, all of the community that’s listening to the podcast or watching over on YouTube. So if you would like us to take a look at your situation, just like we took a look at this person’s situation, you can book a call with us. There’s links in the description below. Click that link to book a call with us. We can only meet with so many people. We work with a lot, a lot of high net worth individuals here in Canada. So we only have so much time. So there’s a few questions in that link to decide, you know, decide if you’re the right fit for us to help you. So go ahead, click that link below in the description to book a call with us and we can be unpacking your situation so that you’re not wondering if you’ve got some blind spots. Then we have some other goodies down there in the links below specifically about a master class for corporate investing or a corporate cash flow and optimizing that. We also have some links around pathways and optimizing the four big areas of wealth, a healthy wealth plan. Thanks again for listening. We’ll talk soon.

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.

OPTIMIZE YOUR FINANCIAL FUTURE