Financial services in Edmonton

A stable income and a pension you cannot leave to anyone. CWCC works with Edmonton households, 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

Edmonton is the seat of the provincial government, the head office of Alberta Health Services, a university city and a refining centre. What follows from that is a workforce with unusually secure employment and, very often, a defined benefit pension. Almost all financial advice is written for someone who has neither. 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, ordered around a pension rather than as though you had none.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to what the pension will not do.
• 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 asset that does not appear in your estate

A defined benefit pension is usually the largest thing an Edmonton household owns, and on most balance sheets it does not appear at all. It pays for as long as you live and, depending on the option elected, for as long as your spouse lives. Then it stops.

It cannot be left to a child, and it cannot be left to anyone once the surviving spouse has died. That is not a defect. A pension is designed to produce income for two lives, not to build an estate, and it does the first job extremely well. But a household that has quietly assumed its pension is wealth it will pass on has assumed something the plan text does not say.

The practical consequence is narrow and worth stating plainly. If leaving something behind matters to you, the pension will not do it, and the assets that will are the ones outside it: the house, the registered accounts, and any insurance you own. Most Edmonton households we meet have thought carefully about the first two and never about the third, because the pension made the whole subject feel handled.

The election at retirement, and why it is different from every other financial decision

At retirement a member of a defined benefit plan chooses how the pension will be paid. A single life option pays the largest monthly amount and stops at the member’s death. A joint and survivor option pays less every month and continues to the surviving spouse at some percentage.

Two things make this decision unlike the others on this page. It is made once, and in most plans it cannot be changed afterwards, however much circumstances change. And in Alberta, as in most jurisdictions, a member with a spouse cannot simply take the single life option: the spouse must consent in writing to give up the survivor benefit.

That is the point at which insurance enters the conversation honestly, and the point at which it is most often oversold, so here is the shape of it without the enthusiasm. Some households compare the pension income given up under the joint option against the cost of owning life insurance instead, on the reasoning that the insurance would replace the survivor’s income and, unlike the pension, would leave something behind afterwards.

It works only when several things are true at once, and any one of them failing makes it the wrong answer. The member has to be insurable at a reasonable cost, which is a medical question answered before anything is elected, never assumed. The policy has to be permanent rather than term, because a term policy that expires while the survivor is still alive defeats the entire purpose. The premiums have to be payable for life from income that will not grow. And the survivor has to be genuinely comfortable holding a policy in place of a guaranteed pension, which is a question about temperament as much as arithmetic.

Where those conditions are not all met, the joint and survivor option is the better answer and we will say so. A strategy that depends on a policy staying in force for forty years is a strategy that fails if the policy lapses, and the honest version of this conversation begins there rather than ending there.

Shift premiums, turnarounds, and a body that has to last

Edmonton’s Industrial Heartland and the trades that serve it produce a distinct pattern: a solid base rate, meaningful overtime during turnarounds, and a household that has quietly built its commitments around the total rather than the base.

The exposure is not the income. It is that the income depends on physical capacity in a way a desk salary does not. Disability coverage is the first question here, before investments and before insurance of any other kind, and the question is not whether you have it but what it actually says: whether it pays on your own occupation or on any occupation, how long the waiting period runs, and whether it stops at two years.

Group coverage through an employer or a local is often good, and it is worth reading rather than assuming. It is also worth knowing that most group disability coverage ends when the employment does, which is the moment people discover the difference between coverage they own and coverage they were provided.

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 it reads differently against a pension. A pension member already holds a large, guaranteed, entirely illiquid income stream. What that household usually lacks is not more guaranteed income; it is capital it can reach without permission, and something that survives the second death. A participating contract answers both, which is a different reason for owning one than the reason a Calgary business owner has.

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 business owner and the incorporated professional

Edmonton’s private employers sit alongside the public payroll rather than instead of it: construction and industrial services, professional practices serving the health and education systems, and the suppliers around the refining complex.

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.

If you live outside the city and work in it

St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Spruce Grove, Leduc, Fort Saskatchewan and Beaumont send a large share of their working population into Edmonton every day. Nothing on this page changes for those households: the pension is the same pension, the plan text is the same plan text, and the firm’s licence covers the province rather than the city.

The one thing that does differ is the house. A household that bought outside the city usually holds a larger share of its net worth in property and has less liquidity than the pay slip suggests, and that shows up at exactly the wrong moment, which is a death or a disability rather than a retirement.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a household with a pension that wants to understand what the pension does not do, an incorporated professional with retained earnings, a business owner with a shareholders’ agreement, or a family that wants protection sized properly before anything else.

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 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. If you hold a defined benefit pension, bring the most recent annual statement and, if you have it, the plan booklet. Most of the useful conversation is in those two documents, and most people have never read the survivor section of either.

Frequently asked questions