Should I do dividends or Salaries as an Owner of my Company. I often get the question of “should I do dividends or salaries” and I strongly believe that salaries are better than dividends, which is contrary to what everyone else says. When I advise clients that they should do salaries they will often ignore my advise on the matter and go with dividends regardless. Today’s posting I will address every argument ever conceived for the “dividend” camp and debunk the myths. Then through a combination of addressing these arguments and providing you with the advantages of doing salaries I hope to be able to convince you that salaries are…
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Unintended Financial Market Consequences from Liberal’s Tax Proposal
Dear Finance Minister Morneau, The general discussion thus far has been the impact on small businesses and retired professionals with corporate funds. In an effort to change many of my clients’ tax planning on how to deal with these proposed changes I had encountered what I believe to be an unintended consequence that will affect capital markets in Canada. Is it really 73% taxes on portfolios First lets discuss the proposed mechanism in how the 73% tax on corporate stock portfolios is supposed to work. Currently the tax rate on passive investments is approximately 48% inside corporations if we include the 38% Part IV refundable tax. This amount is…
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What should you be asking your accountant?
It’s your company’s year end, you’ve submitted everything to the accountant and they’ve done all the work to prepare your financial statements and tax returns for the year. You sit down for a meeting and they’ve run through the numbers with you, sometimes they give you some small advice and sometimes they give you tax suggestions but you really don’t know what you should be asking them at this meeting. This sit down meeting should be one of the most productive tools you as a client have with your accountant. I’m an accountant operating out of Calgary and here are some questions to ask…
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Proposed Liberal Tax Changes: Anticipated Results & Strategies for Small Business
To start with, I’ve read through the monster of a discussion paper that the Finance Minister had issued earlier this summer. I’ve also been keeping up to date on what other professionals have been saying about this topic. It has taken me a couple months to write this post because I’ve been too busy working with our clients to come up with tailored strategies. Businesses are a very interesting living entity, it is a collection of people, processes, assets and liabilities. It does not have emotions and its only true moral responsibility is to remain profitable. While a business can certainly decide to have more moral responsibilities, but remaining profitable…
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Married Couples tax consideration
Getting married is a really big event in life. Strangely enough it has big impacts on your taxes. Even if you’re not married and you’re in a common law relationship this article will affect you. In Canada all individuals file separate tax returns, but if you’re married there are effects on both of your individual tax returns. You may choose to file “separately” with your own accountants or maybe one of you use Quicktax and the other uses a Chartered Accountant like myself but in the end the Accountant will be wise enough to tell you there are details that I will need from the other spouse’s tax return even…
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Where to put my money? RRSP? RESP? TSFA?
I am presenting this article because a lot of people don’t really understand the tax implication of each of RRSP, RESP, and TSFA contributions. If you truly understand the short term and long term tax implications for all these instruments then you can truly understand and make an informed decision on where to put your money if you had to choose one. Therefore I am first explaining the tax implications in the most basic and short term first: RRSP (registered retirement savings plans) contributions made by you into your account are deducted from your income in the tax year you made the contribution. Ok that’s not entirely true, you can…
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RRSP Pitfalls that CRA does not tell you
If you are like most Canadians then you are banking a portion of your retirement plan with your Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP). Before I get into the details of this article, I want to first qualify that I think everyone should have some RRSP regardless of what I have to say about them herein. We all will retire one day and the RRSP should be factored into all our equations. The features of the RRSP is that when you are young(er) you will make a deposit to your RRSP and in turn you get to deduct that amount off the top of your net income that is used for…