Planning and Advice

Unlocking wealth for business owners

While many business owners have generated significant wealth, their investments are often inaccessible – locked up in their corporation for tax-planning purposes. At some point, however, the business owner may want to liberate those assets, and how he or she does so will significantly impact after-tax cash flow. Most of the clients we see have […]

By Mike George |August 1, 2010

4 min read

Planning and Advice

Ask them yourself!

I get so excited when I get such a positive response from so many of you who have been reading my column, here on Advisor.ca. So I wanted to say “thank you”. I know so many are listening and preparing for change, if you aren’t down that road already. The last article I wrote attracted […]

By Stephanie Holmes-Winton |July 29, 2010

5 min read

Planning and Advice

Some rules aren’t meant to be broken

If someone asked me to come up with the two defining characteristics of financial markets, my answer would be “opportunity” and “risk”. The opportunity to make a good return on an investment and the risk that an investment will diminish in value. Both have been well-illustrated in the past three years. Unchecked, opportunity and risk […]

By Peter Drake |July 12, 2010

6 min read

Planning and Advice

80% say “Help Me!”

On May 20th, Manulife Bank released the results of a survey: http://www.bit.ly/cIqjiX. You may have read about it. The results show that over 80% of Canadians rank becoming debt free as a top financial priority. Even with all the volatility we live in today, debt is still keeping our clients – and maybe even us […]

By Stephanie Holmes-Winton |July 2, 2010

4 min read

What’s your CPH?

The financial services industry is one of the best places to work. We have the freedom to earn as much or as little as we want to. The freedom to work as many or as few hours as we wish. It also gives us the freedom to deal with the types of clients we want […]

3 min read

Good debt versus bad debt

How do you approach your clients so they aren’t afraid of leveraging? Can you simply explain the concepts we are taught? Here are some of the ways I clarify the concept of good debt versus bad debt. As I work with my clients, whether they are business owners or employees, I always try to teach […]

4 min read

Lessons learned from privacy violations

A Summons to Witness can be considered a subpoena in certain circumstances for the purposes of paragraph 7(3)(c) of the Act. Three cases in the last two years emanating from the Office of the Privacy Commission of Canada remind us that when it comes to complying with privacy requirements, it’s not enough to simply post […]

5 min read

Ditch the pitch

During my first year in the business a wholesaler at an insurance firm told me the key to success would be to get 20 meetings a week. Although 90% would say no, 10% would become clients. That’s the way it was at the time. A few years later, I took in a presentation on ‘How […]

3 min read

NOT your responsibility, totally YOUR problem

In April, I traveled across the country on a speaking tour as part of the ‘World Critical Illness Insurance Conferences Road Show’. One of the subjects my fellow speakers talked about was critical illness insurance and how important it was. How the lives of their clients (or even their own) had been changed forever because […]

4 min read

A “fee” for non-advice

Here’s an idea for some intrepid entrepreneur: beat the consumer-ignoring Canadian regulatory system at its own game. When Melanie Aitken and her people at the Competition Bureau are through with real estate agents and their monopolized access to MLS, they could do something similar regarding mutual funds. The way things are structured now, most discount […]

3 min read