Tax Planning

Knowing how tax rules affect your investments is essential to maximize your after-tax return.
Being informed of changes to tax rules is also important because they may open up new
opportunities that could affect the way your financial affairs are structured.

Tax Tips For Investors

How Investment Income is Taxed
When it comes to investment income, all is not equal after tax. Knowing how tax rules affect your investments is essential in order to maximize your after tax return.

Pension Income Splitting
Being able to split pension income provides an opportunity for couples to reduce
their overall family tax bill by taking advantage of a spouse’s or common law partner’s lower marginal tax rate where retirement incomes of spouses are disproportionate.

Eligible Dividends
In comparing the different tax rates on these sources of investment income, clearly, not all
investment income is equal on an after-tax basis.

Strategies to Minimize Capital Gains
This article examines various strategies to reduce the impact of a potential tax hit on realized capital gains as well as other related considerations of the voluntary or involuntary sale of a security that may represent a significant part of an investor’s portfolio.

Understanding Capital Losses
When you sell a security that has an accrued loss, the capital loss will reduce your capital gains for that particular tax year as well as other years in the case of a net capital loss.

Tax Deferral for Foreign Spin Offs
If you own shares of a foreign corporation that distributes shares (usually as a result of a reorganization) of another foreign corporation that it controls , the resulting transaction is referred to as a foreign spin-off.

Understanding Personal Holding Companies
It is important to understand the various tax implications of owning investments through a holding company as the tax considerations can be quite different from owning investments personally and a corporate structure introduces a number of other considerations.

Individual Pension Plans
An Individual Pension Plan (IPP) is a pension plan established for a single individual who is interested in maximizing his or her tax-assisted retirement savings. An IPP may allow a small business owner, owner-manager or senior executive to benefit from the retirement savings and tax deferral advantages of a registered pension plan.

Donating Appreciated Securities
The benefits of making a charitable donation are countless – from helping those in need to the personal satisfaction we gain when giving something back to a cause we feel passionate about.

Tax and Estate Consequences of Investing in U.S. Securities
If you currently own U.S. securities such as stocks issued by a U.S. corporation or real property located in the U.S., you may also have to pay U.S. income and estate tax.

Canadian Snowbirds and US Income Tax
If you are a Snowbird (a Canadian resident who spends part of each year in the United States), you should be aware of the potential liability to pay U.S. Income Tax on the same basis as a permanent resident of the U.S.