Financial services in Fort Saskatchewan

Your income, your benefits, your pension and your house all depend on the same complex. CWCC works with Fort Saskatchewan households, tradespeople 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

The City lists Dow, Sherritt, Shell Scotford, Keyera, Plains Midstream, Nutrien, Pembina, MEGlobal and United Safety among its major employers, and millwrights, process operators, power engineers and instrumentation technicians among its key occupations. That is unusually good employment. It is also unusually concentrated, and the second fact has financial consequences the first one hides. 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 whatever the employer already provides rather than as though it provided nothing.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, owned by you rather than attached to a job.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, read against the plan you already have.
• 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.

One complex, and an entire household balance sheet

Financial advice talks a great deal about diversification and almost always means a portfolio. For a household here, the portfolio is the smallest item on the list.

Count what actually rests on the same set of plants. The salary. The group benefits, which end with the employment. The pension or the group retirement plan, whatever form it takes. Frequently the spouse’s employment, at the same site or at a contractor serving it. The value of the house, in a town whose housing demand comes from those payrolls. And the municipal tax base that funds the services the household uses. Six exposures, one underlying cause.

None of that is a criticism of the industry or a prediction about it. These are large, long lived facilities and the work is well paid, which is precisely why so many households have arranged everything around them. The point is narrower and it is a point about correlation: when this kind of concentration goes wrong, it does not go wrong in one column. The job, the spouse’s job, the benefits and the resale value of the house move at the same time and in the same direction.

The correction is not to earn less or to move. It is to make sure that some part of what the household owns does not answer to the same cause as everything else, and that the protection it relies on is not the protection that ends on the last day of employment.

A skill in demand somewhere, but not down the street

A fourth class power engineer, a chemical process operator or an instrumentation technician holds a genuinely valuable qualification, and that value is national rather than local. If the work here contracts, the same certification is wanted in Fort McMurray, in Sarnia, on the coast, in any jurisdiction with heavy industry.

That is good news with a condition attached, and the condition is the house. Taking a job in another province means selling a house here, and the year your employer reduces headcount is the year several hundred other households reach the same conclusion at the same time. The move is easiest exactly when the sale is hardest.

Households in this position get more value from liquidity than most, for the same reason: money you can reach quickly buys the ability to wait, and waiting is what turns a forced sale into an ordinary one. This is a specific argument rather than a general one about emergency funds, and it argues for a larger reserve than the usual advice, because the relevant scenario is not a broken furnace but a relocation on somebody else’s timetable.

One more note for the trades specifically. Certifications lapse, and a period out of the industry is harder to come back from than people expect. Where a household is thinking about how long it could hold out, that period is part of the arithmetic and it is longer than the mortgage calculator suggests.

What to hold that does not depend on the employer

Start with what is already provided, because the answer is usually more than people think in some places and less in others. Group life at a large industrial employer is often a multiple of salary and reasonably generous. Long term disability is usually present and worth reading rather than assuming: whether it pays on your own occupation or on any occupation, how long the waiting period runs, and whether payments stop after two years. For a process operator, an any occupation test after twenty four months is a very different promise from the one most people believe they hold.

Then the single sentence that matters most on this page. All of it ends when the employment does. Coverage that exists because of a job cannot be the coverage a household relies on if the job ending is the event it is worried about. The answer is not to refuse the group plan, it is to own something underneath it, sized to the obligations that would remain.

Where a defined benefit pension is part of the package, it deserves its own conversation and there is a fuller treatment on our Edmonton page. In short: a pension produces income for one or two lives and then stops, it cannot be left to a child, and the election made at retirement is generally irrevocable. Your plan administrator is the authority on your own plan and should confirm anything before it is signed.

Overtime during turnarounds is the last piece. It is real money and it is variable pay. A household whose fixed obligations require it has no margin, it only looks as though it does, and that is worth knowing before the schedule changes rather than after.

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 concentrated household. The argument here is not yield and it is not tax. It is that the contract is with an insurer rather than with an employer, so it is one of the few things a household in this town can hold whose value does not answer to the same cause as the salary, the benefits and the house. Capital reachable on terms written into a contract is also capital available in the year a relocation becomes necessary, which is the year an outside lender is least interested in the story.

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 contractor and the business owner

A large share of the businesses here exist to serve the plants: scaffolding, insulation, industrial cleaning, inspection, safety services, catering and transport. They are good businesses and they carry a specific risk that a retailer does not, which is a customer list of four names.

Two consequences follow. A single customer deciding to change vendors or defer a turnaround is not lost revenue, it is a materially different company. And the value of the business is tied to contracts that come up for renewal, so what it is worth to a buyer depends heavily on when the sale happens relative to those cycles.

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, and in a contracting company that is also the year the customers are deciding whether to renew.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a household with two incomes from the same industry, a specialist whose next job may be in another province, someone who has never owned coverage outside a group plan, or a contractor with a short customer list.

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 not yet read its group disability contract, because that is free and comes first. 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. Two things to have nearby: your group benefits booklet, and an honest answer to one question. If the plant reduced its workforce next year and both of you were affected, how long could this household stay in this house. Most people have never asked it out loud, and it is the conversation.

Frequently asked questions