Financial services in Moncton

A good job, and a benefits booklet that belongs to your employer. CWCC works with Moncton 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.

Where to start

Moncton sits at the geographic centre of the Maritimes and earns its living from that position: rail and trucking, distribution and warehousing, and the contact centres that came here for a workforce able to serve customers in both official languages. It is the commercial centre of Acadian New Brunswick and the home of the Université de Moncton. What a great many of those employers share is that the head office is elsewhere. 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, in the order that suits a household whose employer already provides some of the pieces.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to what the group plan will not do and will not continue.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, read against the booklet you already have rather than instead of it.
• 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 coverage you have is not the coverage you own

Most Moncton households we meet are covered, and they are right to think so. There is group life, usually a multiple of salary. There is group disability. There is often critical illness attached to the same booklet. It is real coverage and it costs the household little or nothing, which is exactly why it is so rarely examined.

The whole of it belongs to your employer. The employer chose the insurer, chose the amounts, can change the plan at renewal, and can end it. And in almost every case the coverage ends when the employment ends, whether the employment ended because you left, because the role was eliminated, or because the site was consolidated into another one.

Two features of a group plan deserve a reading before you need them. The first is the amount. Group life at one or two times salary was sized to be a benefit, not to retire a mortgage and raise children to adulthood, and the gap between those two numbers is usually large. The second is the conversion privilege. Most group life contracts let a departing employee convert some coverage to an individual policy without new medical evidence, and that right expires: the window is short, it is measured from the day the coverage ends, and it is described in a document most people first open the week they are laid off.

We read the booklet with you. Sometimes the answer is that the group plan is good and nothing needs to be bought, and we will say so.

Moncton has already learned this once

The Intercolonial Railway put its headquarters here in the nineteenth century, Canadian National ran its major Maritime locomotive shops here for decades, and generations of families built a life on the assumption that the work was permanent. The shops closed at the end of the 1980s.

What happened next is the part worth remembering: the city rebuilt, and rebuilt well, on distribution, on transport, on health care, and on service work that came here because people in this region can do it in French and in English. Moncton is a genuine success and nothing here suggests otherwise.

But the new economy repeats one feature of the old one. A large share of good local jobs sit inside operations whose decisions are made in Toronto, Montreal, or another country entirely. That is not a prediction about any employer. It is an argument for a simple structural point: the parts of your financial life that cannot be reorganised by someone who has never been to this city are the parts you own outright.

An individual policy follows the person. It does not end with a job, it does not change at a renewal, and it does not care which province you move to.

If you drive, or if you own the trucks

Distribution is what this city does, and a substantial number of the people who make it work are not employees. Owner-operators, small carriers and independent contractors run real businesses with real revenue, and they have none of what the previous two sections describe: no group life, no group disability, no employer plan of any kind.

Disability coverage is the first question here, before investments and before insurance of any other kind. The income depends on physical capacity and on holding a licence, and the second of those can be lost to a medical result that leaves you otherwise well. The question to ask of any policy is what it pays on: your own occupation, or any occupation you could reasonably perform. For someone whose licence is the business, that distinction is the entire value of the contract.

The second question is the structure. Many owner-operators incorporate, and once there is a corporation the rest of this page begins to apply: retained earnings, corporate-owned policies, and a succession question about equipment and contracts that are worth something only while someone is running them.

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. The theme of this page is ownership: what belongs to you rather than to an employer. A participating contract is consistent with that theme rather than an exception to it. The coverage is yours, the cash value is reachable without an application to anyone who might say no in a bad year, and none of it is affected by a decision made at a head office.

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

Moncton’s private employers include carriers and logistics firms, construction and industrial services, and professional practices that serve both language communities across the whole province from one office here.

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.

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 that wants to know what its group plan actually says, a family that wants protection sized properly before anything else, an owner-operator with no employer plan at all, or an incorporated professional 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. If you have coverage through work, bring the benefits booklet. It is the single most useful document in the conversation, it is free, and most people have never read the section that explains what happens to the coverage on their last day.

Frequently asked questions