Financial services in Calgary

High income. Uneven years. A strategy built for both. CWCC works with Calgary families, business owners and incorporated professionals 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

Calgary pays well. What it does not do is pay evenly. Bonuses, contracts, cycles: the income arrives in waves, and almost all financial advice is written for a household that receives the same amount every second Friday. 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, structured in the order that suits your income rather than a generic sequence.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to what you owe and what you are building.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, which matter more here than most people expect.
• 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 the plan that keeps a business in the family.

Cyclical income, obligations that are not

Bonus-weighted pay, or a contract renewed each year, against a mortgage that never asks what kind of year you had. That is the reality for thousands of Calgary households and it is the one that general rules of thumb serve worst.

The consequence is direct: a plan has to be built on what you can sustain in a thin year, not on what you earned in a strong one. That is not caution for its own sake. It is exactly what makes a plan survive a full cycle rather than collapse at the first slowdown.

What we do with the strong year is the other half of the work: convert it into something permanent while it exists, rather than treating it as a permanent raise.

What Calgary gives you earlier than most places

Housing costs meaningfully less here than in the large centres of the East and the West Coast. The consequence is not that Calgary households need less planning. It is that they reach surplus cash flow a decade before their counterparts elsewhere in the country.

The question of what to do with that surplus therefore arrives early, and it is a considerable advantage if you use it. Alberta adds the lowest combined top marginal rate in the country and no provincial sales tax: more money stays in the household, which makes where it goes the decision that actually matters.

For a young household with two incomes and a recent mortgage, the order is nonetheless the same as anywhere: enough term protection, disability coverage, an emergency fund, then the rest.

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.

Why that matters here in particular. A Calgary business that needs capital during a slowdown is negotiating with a lender at the precise moment that lender is least interested. Calgary has lived through that more than once. Capital available on terms written into a contract, rather than on the mood of a credit committee in a bad year, is worth more here than almost anywhere.

Three points, without exception. A policy loan is a real loan, it accrues interest, and it reduces the death benefit while it remains outstanding. Participations 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 incorporated professional in Calgary

Calgary holds one of the highest concentrations of head offices in the country and, with it, an unusual density of incorporated individuals: physicians, dentists, lawyers, accountants, engineers, geologists and consultants.

The pattern repeats. 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.

This is not a trick: it is a mechanism in the Income Tax Act. 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.

For the business owner

Where a business has more than one shareholder, the shareholders’ agreement deserves the same scrutiny as everything else. 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.

At death, the deemed disposition of the shares can also trigger a substantial capital gain, payable by an estate that holds shares rather than cash. That is the gap we size and fill.

What Alberta gives you

Probate here is capped at $525. Not a percentage: the same amount applies to a $300,000 estate and a $12,000,000 one. In Ontario or British Columbia a one-million-dollar estate pays roughly $14,000. That is a real structural advantage and it is worth building around.

A named beneficiary moves faster than a court. Registered plans and insurance contracts pay directly to the person you name, generally within weeks, without waiting for a grant. Alberta lets you use that.

What still needs a plan: the tax at death on your company shares or a rental property, which arrives on the Canada Revenue Agency’s schedule and is settled in cash.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits households with cyclical or bonus-weighted income, incorporated professionals and entrepreneurs accumulating surplus in a corporation, business owners whose shareholders’ agreement has never been funded, and real estate investors whose estate will owe tax without wanting to sell the properties to pay it.

It does not fit if you have no emergency fund, carry high-interest debt, or cannot rely on your cash flow through a slowdown. Those come first, and we will tell you so during the first meeting rather than sell around it.

The first meeting

Thirty minutes, online, at no cost, with no product presented and nothing to sign. We look at your actual situation, name the gaps in order of importance, and you leave with an honest answer. If what we do does not match your situation, you will hear it before the end. No proposal follows a Discovery Meeting.

Check us out

No form in this section. Before trusting anyone with money the right instinct is to verify, and nothing here should discourage it.

Canadian Wealth Creation Centre Inc. is registered as a firm with the Autorité des marchés financiers under number 602293, and the registration can be confirmed in the AMF public register. The Alberta Insurance Council licenses and oversees life insurance agents and agencies in Alberta and maintains a public licence search.

Frequently asked questions