Financial services in Lloydminster

Your address decides more of this than your income does. CWCC works with Lloydminster households, oilfield workers 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. Which province you reside in decides which licence applies to your file, and we settle that before anything is placed. Every meeting is held online.

Where to start

Lloydminster is one city with one municipal government, incorporated by both provinces, with the boundary running down 50th Avenue. The 2021 census counted 19,739 residents on the Alberta side and 11,843 on the Saskatchewan side. Nearly every subject on this page is set by provincial statute, which means two neighbours facing each other across that street can have genuinely different answers. 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. In a bi-provincial city that is not a courtesy: it is the only way the work is done properly.

• Wealth creation. RRSP, TFSA, FHSA and RESP, which are federal and therefore the same on both sides of the avenue.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, placed under the licence that matches your province of residence.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, which matter where the income depends on the body.
• 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 names the right province.

What actually decides which province you are in

For income tax the rule is simple and it surprises people every year. Your province of residence is the province you lived in on December 31 of the tax year. Not where you work, not where your employer is, not where the payroll department sits. Where you lived, on that date.

So a household on the Saskatchewan side commuting to an Alberta employer files as a Saskatchewan resident, and the mirror household does the reverse. There is no split, no special local arrangement, and an address change in November changes the answer for the whole year.

What follows from that is longer than most people expect. Provincial income tax rates and credits differ. Wills, intestacy and family property are provincial statutes. Estate administration fees are set provincially. Automobile insurance is a public system in Saskatchewan and a private one in Alberta. Health services on the two sides are administered by different authorities. Insurance regulation is provincial, which is why the paragraph at the top of this page says what it says.

On our own licensing we will be plain rather than vague, because vagueness helps nobody. The firm is licensed to place insurance in Alberta with the Alberta Insurance Council. Your province of residence decides which licence applies to your file, and that is the first thing established in a first meeting, before any recommendation is made and long before anything is placed.

Two sets of estate legislation, and which one governs yours

Estate law is provincial, and the two provinces have separate statutes governing wills, what happens when someone dies without one, and how property is treated between spouses. They are not wildly different in spirit and they are genuinely different in detail, and detail is what an estate is made of.

The general rule is that the administration of an estate follows the province in which the deceased was resident, while real property is governed by the law of the province where the land actually sits. In a city like this one, those two can be different provinces for the same family, which is the whole of the problem in a sentence.

Administration fees differ. Alberta’s surrogate court fee is capped: the schedule in force since 2015 tops out at $525 for an estate over $250,000. Saskatchewan calculates its fee on a different basis. We will not quote a Saskatchewan figure on a website, because your lawyer is the authority and the number matters too much to be approximate. The difference between the two systems is real and worth an hour of a lawyer’s time before it becomes relevant.

The practical failure we see is not a badly drafted will. It is a well drafted will made under one province’s law by a family that has since moved to the other side of the avenue and never mentioned it to anybody, because moving nine blocks does not feel like a legal event. It is one. If you have moved across 50th Avenue since your will was signed, that is a phone call to your lawyer, and it is a short call.

One further item belongs here because it is provincial and because it is where insurance actually touches an estate. Naming a beneficiary on a life insurance policy generally causes the proceeds to pass to that person directly rather than through the estate, which usually keeps them out of the administration process entirely. The rules governing designations, and the creditor protection sometimes associated with them, are provincial and are not identical between Alberta and Saskatchewan. It is one of the few places where which side of the street you live on has a direct effect on how quickly a family is paid.

A change of jurisdiction without a change of city

Households move within Lloydminster constantly, and here that ordinary act can change the provincial rules that apply to them. It rarely occurs to anyone to treat it as anything other than a move.

The items worth checking after a move across the line are short and specific. Which province you will be filing in for the current year, which is decided on December 31. Automobile insurance, because the two provinces run entirely different systems. Your will, as above. Any beneficiary designation, which is a good habit after any move and a better one after this move. And health services registration.

The sales tax situation is the piece most residents know best and the piece most often described wrongly, so here it is precisely. Saskatchewan does not require businesses in Lloydminster to collect provincial sales tax on goods shipped to or picked up in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan for use within the city limits. Four categories are excluded from that exemption: vehicles, lodging, telecommunication services and electricity for commercial users. Anything bought for use outside the city limits is a different question again. For a household this is a modest matter; for a business making a large equipment purchase it is not modest at all, and it is a question for your accountant before the purchase rather than after.

The heavy oil economy sits underneath all of it. This is a city built on heavy oil, with an upgrader and a refinery, and it has the income profile that goes with that: strong, cyclical, and dependent on prices decided elsewhere. Run the household on the base rate and treat overtime as what it is.

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 life 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.

What the border does and does not change here. A life insurance contract is issued by a federally regulated insurer and the income tax treatment of the policy is federal, so the mechanics described above do not change when you cross the avenue. What is provincial is the regulation of the sale, the rules around beneficiary designations, and the creditor protection sometimes associated with them. That is a narrow and useful distinction: the contract travels, the surrounding rules do not necessarily.

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

Running a company here means dealing with two provincial systems daily, and most owners know that better than any website could tell them. What gets missed is not the operating side, it is the ownership side.

The pattern in an owner-managed company 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. The CDA is federal, which makes it one of the few large things on this page that is the same on both sides. How the shares themselves pass at death, and what your estate has to do to transfer them, is provincial.

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. Where the two shareholders are resident on opposite sides of the avenue, the agreement should say which province’s law governs it, and a surprising number of them do not.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a household that has never had the provincial questions sorted out properly, a family whose will predates a move across the line, a business owner dealing with two systems, or anyone who 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 a household that cannot sustain the premium in a year when heavy oil prices are poor, and those years come. 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. The first question takes ten seconds and settles a lot: which side of 50th Avenue do you live on, and how long have you lived there. Bring your will if you have one and your group benefits booklet if you have one. If your will was signed before your last move, that is where the conversation starts.

Frequently asked questions