Financial services in Medicine Hat

The cheapest place in Alberta to run a household is the easiest place to waste the difference. CWCC works with Medicine Hat households, business owners and retiring couples 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

Medicine Hat has been in the energy business for more than a hundred years and owns and operates both its gas and its electric utility. The City reports being among the most affordable Canadian cities of its size and having the lowest living wage in Alberta. That is a genuine advantage and it has a financial consequence most people here have never named. 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 household that has surplus rather than a shortfall.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to obligations rather than to a sales target.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, which matter more in a city planning to age in place.
• 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 margin is the asset, and almost nobody treats it like one

Two identical households, identical incomes, identical jobs, one in Medicine Hat and one in a larger Alberta city. The Medicine Hat household finishes each month with more left over. Everyone who lives here knows that. What follows from it is the part that goes unexamined.

A recurring monthly surplus is the single most valuable input any financial plan can have, more valuable than the rate of return on anything, because it is the one variable a household actually controls. A plan funded by a reliable monthly amount works. A plan funded by hoped-for growth on an amount that never quite gets contributed does not, and no product fixes that.

The difficulty is that a margin nobody has assigned a job to does not survive. It is absorbed, quietly and without a decision, by the ordinary upward drift of what a household considers normal. Five years later the surplus is gone, nothing was bought that anyone regrets, and there is nothing to show for it either.

So the first useful conversation here is not about a product. It is about naming the number and giving it somewhere to go, in an order that starts with a cash reserve, then protection sized to what the household actually owes, then registered accounts, then anything else.

The difference between a guarantee and an advantage

The Medicine Hat advantage rests on a business the municipality owns, operating in a commodity market. That is a real thing and it has been real for a very long time. It is not, however, a contract with you.

This matters because of how planning errors are actually made. Almost nobody plans by assuming something will improve. People plan by assuming today’s conditions continue, and then commit to a payment schedule that only works if they do. An advantage that is not contractual is an assumption, and an assumption inside a thirty year plan is a risk whether or not anyone wrote it down.

The correction is not pessimism, and we are not in the business of telling people their city is about to become expensive. The correction is structural. Build the plan so it survives a change in local conditions: keep a reserve, keep the committed premium at a level the household could sustain in a harder year rather than at the level it can afford in this one, and hold the protection you need regardless of what utility rates do.

That is a duller answer than most financial writing offers, and it is the answer that is still true in twenty years.

Staying here, and what that costs later

Medicine Hat reports a median age of 42.4, older than Alberta as a whole, and it is a city a great many people deliberately stay in rather than leave. Housing costs less here than the provincial average, which is one of the reasons.

Two things follow. The first is long-term care. Provincial health care covers a great deal and it does not cover everything, and the gap between what is covered and what a family actually wants for a parent is paid in cash by someone. In a household where the adult children have moved to Calgary or further, that someone is usually the parent, out of savings, at exactly the age when savings were supposed to be producing income.

The second is the estate. A household that lives modestly in a paid-off house and holds registered accounts will often leave more than it expected, and it will leave it in a form that requires the final tax return to be settled before anyone receives anything. Registered accounts are the item that surprises families most, because on the second death the remaining balance is generally brought into income in the final return, and the tax is payable in cash by an estate whose largest asset is a house.

None of that is an argument for a product. It is an argument for knowing the number, which your accountant can calculate in an afternoon, before deciding whether anything needs to be done about it.

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.

Why it reads differently here. This strategy is funded by a recurring premium, indefinitely, and its most common failure is a household that could afford the premium in the year it started and could not in year nine. A city with structurally lower fixed costs is unusually well suited to it for exactly that reason, and unusually exposed to the temptation of sizing the premium against the best case rather than a difficult one. The right premium here is the one you could still pay in a bad year, not the one you can pay in this one.

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

The local economy is broader than its reputation. Agriculture and food processing, petrochemicals, manufacturing and an aerospace and defence sector are all present, and the City reports producing more uncrewed aerial vehicles than any other Canadian city.

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. 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 household with a genuine monthly surplus and no job assigned to it, a couple intending to age in this city, a business owner with retained earnings, 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 a household that would have to size the premium against its best year to make the numbers work. 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 single most useful thing to bring is an honest figure for what your household has left at the end of an ordinary month. Not the best month. Almost nobody has calculated it, and everything else on this page depends on that one number.

Frequently asked questions