Financial services in Miramichi

The risk here is not dying too soon. It is living a long time. CWCC works with Miramichi households, business owners and retirees on wealth creation, insurance and retirement income. 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.

Where to start

This city was built on the forest and the river, and it has spent thirty years absorbing the loss of most of what that built. The base and the mine closed by the end of the 1990s. The paper mill closed in 2007. The service sector is now the largest employer here. The population is smaller than it was and older than the national average, and that combination produces a set of financial questions almost nobody writes about. 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, and the order in which to draw them down, which matters more here than the order in which to fill them.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to what a surviving spouse will actually need.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, which are the centre of this page rather than an afterthought.
• 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.

Outliving the money, which is the risk nobody insures against

Almost all financial advertising is built on an early death or a market crash. Neither is the thing most likely to go wrong for a household here. The thing most likely to go wrong is a long and healthy life on savings that were assembled during a period when this region’s economy was shrinking.

The arithmetic is unforgiving and it is worth doing rather than avoiding. A couple retiring in their early sixties should plan on one of them reaching their nineties. That is not a pessimistic assumption, it is the ordinary one, and it means a retirement that has to be funded for close to thirty years while prices keep moving.

What makes this sharper in Miramichi than in a larger centre is the house. Households here often hold a home that is fully paid for and worth considerably less than an equivalent home in Moncton or Fredericton. That is a wonderful thing to live in and a thin thing to retire on, and a plan that quietly relies on selling it later is relying on a small market and a buyer who has to come from somewhere.

The useful work is not a product recommendation. It is a drawdown order: which account is spent first, how the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security fit around it, how the pension income splitting rules apply to a couple, and where the guaranteed floor of income sits so that a bad market year does not become a bad decade. Some households find that a portion of savings converted to guaranteed lifetime income buys more peace than it costs. Others do not need it. Both answers are legitimate and the arithmetic decides, not us.

The money that came home from out west

For a long stretch this region exported workers. People flew out, worked rotations in Alberta, and came home for their weeks off, and a great many households here still hold the financial residue of those years: a pension from an employer half a continent away, or a locked-in account created when that employment ended.

Two things about that money are misunderstood often enough to be worth stating plainly.

The first is that it usually does not follow you home. Locked-in retirement savings generally continue to be governed by the pension legislation of the jurisdiction the original plan was registered under, not by the province you live in now. That decides the age at which the account has to be converted to income, the maximum you may withdraw each year, and whether any unlocking provision is available to you at all. Two neighbours on the same street can be under two different sets of rules, and both will have been told something confidently by someone who assumed New Brunswick rules applied.

The second is that people lose track of it. A pension earned in three years at an employer that has since been acquired twice is genuinely easy to forget, and the statements stop arriving when an address changes. If you think there may be something out there, it is worth finding, and your former employer or the plan administrator is where that search starts.

What we do with it is unexciting and it is the whole job: get all of it on one page, in one list, with the rules that apply to each piece written next to it, before anyone decides anything.

When the children live away

This is the part of the conversation that families here recognise immediately and that no national advertisement mentions.

In most of the country, the informal answer to needing help at eighty is a son or daughter twenty minutes away. In a region that spent decades sending its young people west and to Ontario for work, that answer is often unavailable. The children love their parents and phone every week, and they live four provinces away, and neither of those facts changes the other.

What that does financially is convert care from something a family provides into something a family purchases. Home support, personal care, and eventually a nursing home are all real costs, and they arrive at the age when income is fixed and least able to absorb them. The first person affected is usually the healthier spouse, who tries to provide the care alone and is worn out by it.

There are several ways to prepare and none of them is comfortable to discuss, which is exactly why they get postponed. Long-term care and critical illness coverage exist for this and are priced on health, so they are bought years before they are needed or not at all. A permanent policy with cash value can be a source of funds reachable without selling the house. And a frank conversation with adult children about what they can and cannot realistically do is worth more than any product, because the plan that fails is the one that quietly assumed somebody would move home.

One legal point belongs here too. A power of attorney and a health care directive, prepared while everyone is well, are what allow a distant child to actually help when the time comes. Without them, a family several provinces away can be left unable to act at all. That is your lawyer’s work rather than ours, and it costs very little.

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.

An honest word about who this is for in a city like this one. A strategy built on decades of compounding is a strategy for someone who has decades. If you are already retired, the conversation on this page is about drawdown, guaranteed income and care, and we will spend the meeting there instead. Where it does fit is a household still working, or a business owner, or a family that wants to leave something to the next generation without disturbing the money it lives on.

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 businesses that carry this city now are smaller and more varied than the ones that built it: contracting and the trades, health and professional services, tourism and the river, and firms serving the remaining resource operations.

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.

Succession has a particular shape in a small city. The obvious buyer for a local business is often a competitor rather than a child, because the children moved away, and a sale that has not been prepared for tends to happen at a discount and in a hurry. The time to think about who eventually buys it is while you still have the option of saying no.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a household within ten years of retiring that wants the arithmetic done honestly, a retiree who wants a drawdown order rather than a product, anyone holding pension money from another province, or a business owner with no obvious successor.

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 is usually not the right first move for a household already retired. 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. Useful things to have nearby: your most recent Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security statements, any pension or locked-in account statements including ones from employers in other provinces, and an honest answer to one question, which is who would help if one of you could not manage at home.

Frequently asked questions