Financial services in Edmundston

A working life earned on both sides of the river, and an estate that touches two legal systems. CWCC works with Edmundston 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.

Where to start

Edmundston has the highest proportion of French mother tongue of any city in the province. It sits in Madawaska, a short drive from Quebec and directly across the river from Madawaska, Maine. Forest and paper built it, and the mills on the two banks have long worked as halves of one business, with pulp crossing the border to be finished into paper. People here speak of a single economy. They are right, and it has financial consequences nobody writes down anywhere. 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. On a cross border file that is not a courtesy: it is the only way the work is done properly.

• Wealth creation. RRSP, TFSA, FHSA and RESP, ordered with an eye to whatever was accumulated somewhere else.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to a bill that can come from two countries.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, which matter where income depends on physical capacity.
• 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.

A career earned in two countries

Here that is not a curiosity. People worked years in Maine, or for a business whose operations continue on the far bank, and came home every evening. It leaves traces in the paperwork, and those traces do not fit the boxes ordinary financial advice provides.

What such a household holds often looks like this: an American employer plan or a retirement account opened over there, years of contributions to American social security, and years of contributions to the Canada Pension Plan on this side.

Three points are worth knowing and none of them can be guessed. Canada and the United States have an agreement on social security that allows, under conditions, periods completed in one country to be taken into account for eligibility in the other, so a career cut in half is not necessarily two lost half careers. Next, money held in an American retirement plan does not move freely into an RRSP: the conditions are specific, so are the tax consequences, and a transfer made without advice can be expensive on both sides. Finally, a pension paid in American dollars to a household that buys its groceries in Canadian dollars carries a permanent currency risk, and that risk belongs in the retirement budget alongside investment return.

We do not prepare tax returns and we do not give American tax advice. What we do is build the complete list of what you hold on both sides, then send you to an accountant who does cross border work before anyone moves anything. The worst file we ever see is the one where somebody has already acted on advice given for a single country.

Property on the other side of the river

A great many families here own something in Maine: a camp, hunting land, a small house inherited from a parent. You go on weekends, you pay the municipal taxes, and you never think of it as an international file. It is one.

The United States can tax the estate of a non-resident on property considered situated there. American real estate is included. Shares of American corporations held directly can also be included, which regularly surprises people who have never set foot south of the border. The tax treaty between Canada and the United States provides relief, but it depends on the size of the worldwide estate and on other conditions, and it is not automatic.

Whether any of this reaches you is a question for an accountant or tax specialist who works cross border. It can be answered. It should not be assumed, in either direction. The most expensive instinct is to decide that it is only a small camp and therefore cannot concern anybody.

There is a second, purely practical layer. Real property in another country passes according to the law of that place, and the estate often has to be opened there separately, with its own delays and its own costs, while the family is already settling the rest in New Brunswick.

Our role is the one that belongs to insurance in a file like this: where an amount will have to be paid in cash at a moment when the family will not have it, life insurance is the instrument that produces that sum at the exact moment it is required. What remains is knowing the size of the amount, and it is the tax specialist who calculates that, not us.

Two systems of law for one family

Quebec begins a short drive from here, and Madawaska families have always lived on both sides of that line. A brother in Riviere-du-Loup, a camp in Temiscouata, an elderly parent in Quebec, a child who studies there and stays: that is ordinary life in this region.

But Quebec and New Brunswick do not share the same private law. Quebec is a civil law jurisdiction and New Brunswick is a common law one. The rules differ on the form of a will and how it is proved, on what happens to family patrimony and to spouses’ property, and on what a spouse or a child may claim. A will that is perfectly valid on one side can operate differently on the other, and real property generally follows the law of the place where it sits, whatever the province the person lived in.

None of that makes anything impossible. It makes one thing necessary: that someone qualified in each place involved looks at the plan, rather than a single professional who assumes their own rules apply everywhere. A notary in Quebec, a lawyer in New Brunswick, and for American property an advisor in that state.

What we bring to that table is modest and concrete. A life insurance benefit with a named beneficiary is generally paid directly to that person rather than through the estate, which makes it simple and fast in a file where everything else is slow and divided between two or three jurisdictions. It is often the only thing in the whole matter that arrives quickly and without argument.

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 here. An estate touching several jurisdictions is slow, and a tax bill is not. A Canadian contract held by a Canadian resident, with a named beneficiary, is the simple part of the file: it produces money quickly, in the right currency, while everything else takes its course. One warning matters, though. If anyone in the household is an American citizen or an American tax resident, holding contracts and investments needs American advice before anything is put in place, never afterwards.

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

The economy here still turns on the forest and what is made from it: sawmills, processing, trucking and forestry contractors, alongside retail, health care, professional services delivered in French to the whole region, and the university campus.

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.

A business here that sells across the border also carries a currency risk and a trade policy risk it has no control over. That is not solved by an insurance policy. It is managed with liquidity, and it is one more reason not to leave the entire surplus locked up in a single place.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a household whose career or property crosses a border, a family whose estate will touch more than one jurisdiction, anyone who wants to be served in French from the first call to the contract, 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 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. Useful things to have nearby: any statement from an American employer or plan, the deed to any property held outside the province, and an honest answer to one question, which is whether anyone in the family is an American citizen. It is the question that changes the most answers, and it is the one most often left unasked.

Frequently asked questions