Financial services in Dieppe

A new house, young children, and the largest mortgage you will ever carry. CWCC works with Dieppe households, business owners and incorporated professionals on wealth creation, insurance and capital strategy. The firm is licensed to place insurance in New Brunswick with the Financial and Consumer Services Commission and matches you with an advisor licensed in the province. Every meeting is held online, and it is held in French if that is your language.

Where to start

Dieppe is the largest predominantly francophone city in Canada outside Quebec. Close to two thirds of residents have French as a mother tongue, three quarters are bilingual, and the city grew by roughly a tenth between the 2016 and 2021 censuses. A great deal of what you see here was built recently, and that produces one household shape more often than any other: young, recently a homeowner, with children still small. Choose the situation that looks most like yours.

What you get

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

• Wealth creation. RRSP, TFSA, FHSA and RESP, in the order that suits a young household rather than the order in which they are offered to you.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to a mortgage and to children who have to be raised.
• 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 the plan that keeps a business in the family.

The insurance the lender offered you is not yours

When you signed, you were probably offered insurance on the mortgage. A great many families say yes, because the question arrives in the middle of a stack of documents on a day when what you mostly want is for the house to be yours. It is real coverage and it is better than nothing. It is simply not the same thing as life insurance you own.

Four differences matter, and none of them is hidden: they are written down and rarely read. The lender’s coverage shrinks as the balance shrinks, while the premium does not shrink with it. The beneficiary is the lender, so the money clears the debt rather than going to your family, who therefore get no choice about how to use it. The coverage is tied to that loan at that institution, so moving your mortgage elsewhere ends it, at an age when replacing it costs more than it did at the start. And depending on the product, part of the review of your health may happen at the time of a claim rather than at the time you enrolled.

Personal term insurance works differently. The amount is fixed, you choose it, and it does not melt away with the balance. You name the beneficiary, and that person then decides what to do: clear the mortgage, or keep it and pay for something else. The contract follows you from lender to lender and house to house. And your insurability is reviewed once, at the start, while you are young.

We do not ask anyone to cancel anything on an impulse. We ask you to compare the two before cancelling either, and never to end existing coverage until the replacement is actually in force.

Naming a minor child as beneficiary does not do what you think

This is the most common error in young family files, and it is always made with the best intentions in the world. The children’s names go on the beneficiary designation, the form is filed away, and everyone assumes it is handled.

An insurer generally cannot pay a death benefit directly to a minor child. Depending on the situation, the money ends up administered under court supervision or by a person appointed for the purpose, until the child reaches the age of majority. That means delay and cost at the moment a family can least absorb either, and it also means that at nineteen a young adult receives a significant sum all at once with nobody in a position to say anything about it.

The correction is neither long nor expensive. It usually means naming a trustee or a person to receive and administer the money for the child, matched to a will drafted to say the same thing. The drafting belongs to your notary or lawyer and it is not us who do it. Our job is to make sure the question gets asked before it counts, and that the designation and the will agree with each other. Two documents that contradict one another are a lawsuit.

The will raises the other question nobody enjoys: who raises the children. Something close to half of young couples have no will at all. It is the cheapest and most important document on this page.

The RESP comes next, and it comes well after protection. It is excellent, the Canada Education Savings Grant is an immediate return you will rarely find elsewhere, and it does nothing at all if the parent funding it is no longer there to fund it.

You have the right to read all of it in your own language

New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in the country. That should not be a customer service detail, and yet in financial documents it very often is.

Here is what we see regularly in perfectly bilingual households: the group benefits booklet is in English, the beneficiary designation was completed in English, the policy illustration was explained in English. Nobody did anything wrong. The person in front of you spoke English, you speak English, and the meeting carried on.

Speaking a language and making a thirty year decision in it are two different things. An insurance contract is a technical text. The difference between own occupation and any occupation, between a guaranteed value and a projected one, between a revocable and an irrevocable beneficiary: those are distinctions you grasp better in your first language, and they are exactly the ones that decide the outcome.

With us the meeting is held in French if that is your language, the French version of a document is requested from the insurer wherever one exists, and questions get asked in French without it being a favour.

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.

And here is the part few people will tell a young family. This is usually not where you should start. While there is a large mortgage, small children and very little cushion, term protection and disability coverage buy far more security per dollar of premium. A capital strategy is an excellent second move and a poor first one, and we will tell you so in that order.

Four points, without exception. A participating whole life policy is life insurance and not an investment. A policy loan is a real loan, it accrues interest, and it reduces the death benefit while it remains outstanding. Dividends are never guaranteed: they are declared annually by the insurer’s board. And this is insurance rather than a deposit account, so 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

Dieppe has a business life of its own: retail and restaurants, construction and the trades, professional services delivered in both languages, and the firms that sit around the airport and the Greater Moncton commercial corridor.

The pattern in an incorporated practice 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 young household that has just bought and wants to know what it actually signed, parents who want a beneficiary designation that works, anyone who would rather read all of it in French, or an incorporated 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 someone who cannot sustain the premium in a difficult year, and in a young household that year arrives more often than expected. 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, in French if you prefer. The useful things to have nearby are the group benefits booklet from work, any paper you were given at the mortgage about insurance on the loan, and an honest answer to one question: who would raise the children, and have you written it down anywhere.

Frequently asked questions