Financial services in Airdrie

The coverage the lender sold you protects the lender. CWCC works with Airdrie households, commuters and business owners on wealth creation, insurance and capital strategy. The firm is licensed to place insurance in Alberta with the Alberta Insurance Council and matches you with an advisor licensed in the province. Every meeting is held online.

Where to start

Statistics Canada ranked Airdrie 25th among Canada’s fastest growing municipalities between 2016 and 2021, at 20.3 per cent, from 61,581 to 74,100 residents. A city that grows that quickly is a city of recently purchased houses, large balances and young owners, and almost every one of those owners was offered insurance across the desk on the day they signed. Choose the situation that looks most like yours.

What you get

Seven areas, one team, and your accountant and lawyer in the conversation when the question belongs to them.

• Wealth creation. RRSP, TFSA, FHSA and RESP, in the order that suits a household carrying a new mortgage.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to the debt and the years the children are at home.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, read against what your employer already provides.
• Investment options. Segregated funds and education across the full menu available to Canadians.
• Group benefits. For your company, and a proper read of the plan you already have.
• Succession planning. Corporate shares, the Capital Dividend Account, and what the estate will owe.

What the coverage from the lender actually says

Creditor’s group insurance is the mortgage protection offered by a lender at signing. It is quick, it asks few questions, and for someone who would otherwise have nothing it is better than nothing. It also differs from an individually owned policy in four ways that are worth knowing before you need it rather than afterwards.

The benefit declines and the premium generally does not. The amount payable is tied to the outstanding balance, so it falls every month you pay the mortgage down, while what you pay for it typically does not fall with it.

The lender is the beneficiary. The proceeds retire the mortgage. That may be exactly what your family would choose, and it may not: a surviving spouse might rather hold a low interest mortgage and keep the cash for a period with one income. With creditor’s coverage nobody in the family gets to make that decision.

Underwriting is often done at claim time rather than at application. With an individually owned policy the insurer assesses your health before it issues, and once the policy is in force and past its contestability period the coverage is settled. With many creditor’s products the health questions are reviewed after the claim, which is the worst possible moment to discover that an answer given years earlier is being disputed.

It is attached to that mortgage with that lender. Move the mortgage to another institution at renewal, as households routinely do to get a better rate, and the coverage generally ends. You then reapply at your current age and current health, which are both worse than they were.

An individually owned policy is the mirror image on every point: the amount is what you chose, your beneficiary is who you named, the underwriting is done up front, and it follows you rather than the loan. That is the comparison. Whether it is worth acting on depends on your health today, which is why the question is worth asking now.

A payment sized on two incomes

The Airdrie pattern is two earners, one or both commuting to Calgary, and a mortgage approved against the combined figure. That is ordinary and sensible, and it produces an exposure that is rarely stated plainly: the house was bought by two incomes, so it is carried by two incomes, and the household has no version of itself that runs on one.

Death is the case people insure for. Disability is the case that is more likely during the working years and less often covered properly, and it is worse in one specific respect: the lost income stops, and the person is still there, which means the household’s costs go up rather than down.

The number that matters is not a multiple of salary from a magazine. It is the answer to a concrete question: if one income disappeared tomorrow, how long could this household stay in this house without changing anything. If the honest answer is a few months, that is the finding, and it is fixable while everyone is healthy and employed.

Where both spouses work, both need to be considered, including any spouse whose contribution is not a salary. A household that loses the person who manages the children, the driving and the second half of the logistics is a household that starts paying for those things in cash.

Whether the policy outlasts the debt

Plenty of Airdrie households did the right thing and bought term insurance. The common defect is not the amount. It is the term.

A ten or twenty year term policy bought at the same time as a twenty five or thirty year amortization expires while the mortgage is still outstanding, and it expires at the age when replacing it is most expensive. The policy and the obligation should end in the same year, and very often they do not, because they were chosen in different conversations.

Two features are worth checking in whatever you already hold. Renewability, which lets the policy continue past its initial term without a new medical, usually at a substantially higher rate. And convertibility, which lets a term policy be exchanged for a permanent one without a new medical, typically up to a stated age. Convertibility is the more valuable of the two and the more commonly overlooked, because it preserves the insurability you have today for use in a year when you may not have it.

Reading the policy you already own costs nothing and is the first thing we do. It is also, reasonably often, the end of the conversation, because the coverage turns out to be adequate. We would rather tell you that than sell you something.

The strategy

In almost any financing arrangement, someone supplies the capital and someone else owns the structure it moves through. Most people occupy neither role. Infinite Financial Sovereignty® is about changing which side of that you are on.

It draws on the educational approach known as The Infinite Banking Concept®, set out by R. Nelson Nash in his book Becoming Your Own Banker®. CWCC is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Infinite Banking Concepts, LLC.

In practice: capital accumulates inside a participating whole life contract issued by a Canadian mutual insurer, on a tax-deferred basis, and you reach it through a policy loan from the insurer rather than by applying to an outside lender.

Where this sits for a household with a new mortgage, said plainly. It sits later. A household carrying a large recent mortgage on two incomes needs term protection sized to the debt, disability coverage that has been read, and a cash reserve, and it needs all three before it needs anything described in this section. We are not going to pretend otherwise in order to move a bigger contract. When the mortgage is smaller and the household has room, this conversation becomes a real one.

Three points, without exception. A policy loan is a real loan, it accrues interest, and it reduces the death benefit while it remains outstanding. Dividends are never guaranteed. And this is insurance rather than a deposit account: protection comes from Assuris, within its published limits.

The full mechanics, including an entire chapter on where the strategy does not fit, are set out in Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, Simplified.

For the business owner and the incorporated professional

Airdrie has a growing base of owner-managed businesses serving both the town and the Calgary region, and a large number of residents who are incorporated and contract their services rather than drawing a salary.

The pattern repeats wherever it is found. The corporation earns more than the lifestyle requires, the surplus stays inside because taking it out costs tax immediately, and it accumulates in company-held investments.

The Capital Dividend Account enters here. Where a corporation owns and is beneficiary of a policy, the death benefit generally credits the CDA by the excess of the proceeds over the adjusted cost basis, and that balance can be paid to shareholders as a capital dividend, generally free of tax subject to the rules in force. It depends entirely on how the policy is owned, and a policy held by the wrong entity can create a taxable shareholder benefit rather than the intended effect. It requires your accountant, your lawyer and us.

Where a business has more than one shareholder, a buy-sell clause with no funding behind it is a promise that the surviving shareholder will find several hundred thousand dollars in the year the business has just lost a principal.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a household that wants its mortgage protection examined by someone who is not the lender, a couple whose payment depends on two incomes, or a business owner with retained earnings.

It does not fit someone looking for a short-term investment. A participating whole life contract is a long-horizon instrument and the early years are the expensive ones. It does not fit a household that has not yet sized its term protection and read its disability coverage, because those come first and this comes later. And it does not fit anyone hoping to be told that a strategy will outperform a market, because that is not a claim this firm makes.

The first meeting

Thirty minutes, online, no cost and no obligation. Bring the mortgage protection paperwork from your lender and any individual policy you already hold. Half of what is useful in a first meeting is already in documents you have and have never read side by side.

Frequently asked questions