Financial services in Cochrane

Your documents still describe the province you left. CWCC works with Cochrane 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 Cochrane 11th among Canada’s fastest growing municipalities between 2016 and 2021, at 24.5 per cent. The Town’s own 2024 census counted 37,011 residents, up 43 per cent since 2016, with nearly a quarter of the population under eighteen. A town that grows like that is a town where a great many households have been here under a decade, and moving provinces has financial consequences that nobody notices at the time. 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, which are federal and therefore came with you.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, with the beneficiary line actually checked.
• 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 an estate plan that matches where you live now.

A will made under another province’s law

People move for a job, a house they can afford or the mountains at the end of the highway, and the move is treated as a logistical event. Boxes, schools, a new licence. What almost nobody does is take the legal documents out of the file and read them against where they now live.

A will properly made in another province is generally still a valid will in Alberta, so this is not a fire. It is a fit problem. The will travelled and the law around it did not. Wills, intestacy, family property and the appointment of personal representatives are provincial, and the province that now governs your estate is this one.

The specific things worth a look are ordinary. Whether the executor you named years ago still makes sense now that they live three provinces away, because distance turns a manageable job into an expensive one. Whether the will has anything to say about property in more than one province. Whether the family situation it describes is still the family situation you have, which is the item that changes most and is reviewed least.

A separation, a remarriage or a new child changes an estate plan more than a move does, and the two often happen within a few years of each other. In Alberta, as in most provinces, marriage and the breakdown of a relationship can affect a will and a designation in ways that surprise people, and the details are provincial. That is a conversation with a lawyer, and it is a short one when the documents are in front of them.

The one line of paperwork that overrides your will

This is the most valuable paragraph on the page, so it gets said plainly. A beneficiary named on a life insurance policy or a registered plan generally receives the money directly, and the will does not change that. You can write a careful will leaving everything to your current spouse and children, and if a policy from 2011 still names somebody else, the policy pays that person.

It is the most common and most expensive stale document in Canadian personal finance, and it is stale for an entirely understandable reason: a designation is made once, on a form, in a meeting about something else, and then it is never seen again. Nobody sends you an annual reminder. It does not appear on a statement in a way anyone reads.

The forms worth checking are a short list and the check takes an afternoon: every individual life insurance policy, the group life plan at your employer, the RRSP, the TFSA, the RESP, and any locked-in account. Group life at a new employer deserves particular attention, because a new job means new enrolment paperwork completed quickly in a first week, and whatever was written on that form is what governs.

Two further notes. Where a beneficiary is a minor, naming the child directly can create complications that a trust arrangement or a properly drafted will can avoid, and how that works is provincial. And the rules on designations, including any creditor protection associated with them, differ between provinces, which is one more reason a designation made before a move is worth a fresh look after one.

A locked-in account, and land you still own back there

Two things frequently stay behind when a household moves, and both are quiet.

The first is a locked-in account. When someone leaves a job with a pension and transfers the value out, the money goes into a locked-in vehicle and stays subject to the pension legislation of the jurisdiction that governed the plan, generally regardless of where the person later lives. An Ontario or British Columbia pension does not become an Alberta pension because you moved to Cochrane. The rules on when it can be converted to an income stream, how much can be withdrawn each year, and whether any unlocking is available are the former jurisdiction’s rules. People discover this at the moment they want the money, which is the worst moment to learn it. Your plan administrator or the institution holding the account can confirm which jurisdiction governs yours, and it is worth knowing years before it matters.

The second is real property. Where a family still owns land or a house in another province, that property is generally governed by the law of the province it sits in, and settling an estate can require a separate administration proceeding there in addition to the one here. That is time and cost, borne by an executor who may be dealing with two provincial systems at once. It is manageable when it is anticipated and unpleasant when it is not.

One tax note for anyone whose move is recent. Your province of residence for income tax is the province you lived in on December 31 of the tax year, so the year of the move is decided by where you were on that date rather than by how many months you spent in each place.

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 that arrived recently, said plainly. It sits after the housekeeping. A family that has just bought at current prices, is carrying a large mortgage and has a stale beneficiary designation on a group policy needs the designation fixed, the term protection sized and a cash reserve built, and it needs those before anything permanent is discussed. When the mortgage is smaller and there is a durable surplus, this becomes a real conversation. One thing does travel well and is worth saying: an insurance contract with a Canadian insurer follows you across provincial lines in a way a good many other arrangements do not.

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

Cochrane has a growing base of owner-managed businesses and a large number of residents who are incorporated and contract into Calgary. A share of them brought a corporation with them.

That is worth naming, because a corporation incorporated in another province and now carrying on business in Alberta generally has registration requirements here, and the shareholders’ agreement, if there is one, may name the law of a province nobody involved lives in any more. Both are questions for your lawyer and both are cheaper to fix before they matter.

The ownership 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 moved provinces and has not looked at its documents since, anyone with a designation made before a marriage, a divorce or a child, a family with a locked-in account from a former employer, 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 just bought at current prices and has not yet sized its term protection, because that comes first and we will say so. 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 your will if you have one, your group benefits booklet, and a list of every account and policy with a beneficiary on it. In a first meeting with a household that has moved provinces, the beneficiary list is where the useful findings almost always are, and it is the one thing nobody has looked at since they arrived.

Frequently asked questions