The three most complex times in a physician's career are transitioning to practice, deciding when to incorporate and retirement. Our team specializes in helping physicians with each of these finanical transitions and how to best maximize your financial well being in coordination with your tax and legal advisors.
How Can I Maximize the Benefit of Incorporation?
In your transition to practice, one of the main benefits offered to physicians in Canada is the ability to incorporate their medical practice. By incorporating, you are able to take advantage of certain tax benefits which can help reduce your tax burden and more efficiently allocate your investments. By retaining capital in your corporation, you are able to significantly reduce your tax burden by paying the small business tax rate on retained earnings compared to paying personal taxes, while paying yourself through a salary or dividend for the income you need to withdraw. With a corporation, you are able to create a metaphorical dam between your billings and the amount you need to maintain your lifestyle. By saving funds in the corporation, you are able to build your savings faster by deferring the taxes payable until you withdraw the funds.
With the ability to incorporate, physicians are given an additional tool that can help reduce income and allow for additional planning opportunities that are not available to other professions. For example, as an incorporated physician, you are able to purchase life insurance with corporate funds and pay the insurance premiums with corporate income instead of personal income.
How Much Do I Need to Retire?
This is a universal question that everyone faces when they are looking to transition to retirement. Retirement is no longer a single event and for many physicians is a transitionary period where you scale down your clinical hours over a period of time. While in practice, you will have saved funds in a variety of locations including your corporation and registered accounts and the transition to retirement requires both finanical planning and tax coordination to maximize your retirement income. Our team is specialized in helping professionals go through the transition to retirement by working with your tax professionals to create an income strategy to accomplish your retirement goals.
One of the biggest questions facing physicians that are planning for retirement is "How Much Do I Need?" By creating a holistic financial plan, we can help you determine a retirement transition plan that will allow you to live comfortably in retirement and where your sources of income will come from.
Banking Services for Physicians
Our team works closely with a team of Private Bankers from BMO Wealth Management who specialize in working with physicians and their families. With Private Banking, you will have a dedicated banker who intimately understands your personal banking situation who is able to coordinate with our team and your tax professionals to facilitate your banking needs; whether it is moving funds from your corporate bank account to a personal account, paying your CRA installments or providing specialized lending.
Additionally, if you are an incorporated phyician that is running their our practice or family health team, our private bankers can work with commerical banking to assist any commercial financing or commercial account management you require.