Financial services in Red Deer

A steady job inside a cyclical business. CWCC works with Red Deer 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

Red Deer sits 150 kilometres from both Calgary and Edmonton and serves an immediate trade area of more than 312,000 people. The city’s own list of key industries puts health care, retail and construction alongside manufacturing, and the manufacturing here builds for the oil and gas industry rather than being part of it. That distinction decides most of what follows. 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 for a household that may have a thin year without warning.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to the mortgage and the years the children are still at home.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, read against what your employer already provides.
• 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 shop in the family.

Your employer is not an oil company. Its customers are.

Red Deer builds equipment for the energy industry. The city says virtually every component used in oil and gas is manufactured here, and the firms that do it are fabricators, machine shops and equipment builders employing anywhere from a dozen people to a few hundred.

That produces a pattern almost nobody plans around. The household income looks like a salary and behaves like a commodity price, one step removed and roughly a year late. When capital budgets are cut elsewhere, the order book here thins some months afterwards. The overtime goes first, then the shifts, then the jobs. When budgets recover the same sequence runs in reverse, and just as slowly.

The delay is the difficult part. A household whose income falls in the same week as the news at least connects the two. A household whose income falls a year later has usually spent the intervening year adjusting its commitments upward, because for that year nothing appeared to be wrong.

What follows from this is not an investment strategy. It is a liquidity one. Money you can reach without asking anyone is worth more to a household in this position than a slightly better rate of return, because the month you need it is the month your employer is also short and every lender is looking hard at the same sector. That is a narrow point and it is the whole point of this page.

Coverage you own, and coverage you were given

Most Red Deer employers of any size provide a group plan and most of those plans are reasonable. The difficulty is not their quality. It is that the plan and the job are the same thing.

Group life and group disability generally end when the employment ends. In a cyclical town that is not an abstraction: the coverage disappears in the same week as the income, in a year when the whole sector is releasing people, and the household is asked to replace it at exactly the moment it can least afford to.

Worse, it may not be able to replace it at all. Insurability is not a permanent condition. It is a state of health on a particular day, assessed by an insurer, and the day you finally go looking for coverage is rarely a day when your health is better than it was five years earlier. Coverage bought while you are well and employed is coverage you keep on the terms you were given. Coverage postponed is coverage repriced.

Disability deserves a closer reading than it usually gets. Whether the contract pays on your own occupation or on any occupation, how long the waiting period runs, and whether benefits stop after two years are three questions with very different answers, and the answers sit in the booklet rather than in the one-page summary. For someone whose income depends on being physically able to do a specific job, the difference between those definitions is the difference between a plan and a hope.

The other half of the workforce

Red Deer is also a regional health care centre, a polytechnic city and the retail and distribution hub for central Alberta. Red Deer Regional Hospital and Alberta Health Services are among the largest employers, a major hospital expansion is under way, and Red Deer Polytechnic has been granting degrees since 2018.

Those households look different from the ones above. Employment is stable, benefits are usually better, and the questions arrive in the ordinary order: enough term protection while there is a mortgage and children at home, disability coverage that has actually been read rather than assumed, a cash reserve, and only then everything else.

One point applies to both halves of the workforce at once. Many people moved here from one of the two metros because housing cost less. Whatever that difference is in your case, it is only an advantage if it goes somewhere. A household that moves to a less expensive city and lets the saving disappear into monthly spending has converted a real advantage into nothing at all, and has usually done it without noticing.

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 in Red Deer. An outside lender forms a view of your sector before it forms a view of you, and it forms that view at the worst possible time, which is when the sector is out of favour. Access written into a contract does not consult the sector. For a household whose income is decided a year in advance by somebody else’s capital budget, that is a different and more useful property than a marginal difference in yield.

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 owner of the shop

A great many Red Deer businesses are the same shape: a founder who started with a truck and a welder, twenty or forty people now, real equipment, real receivables, and no written plan for the day the founder stops.

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. That is the ordinary pattern. The Red Deer complication is that the value of the business moves with the same cycle as the order book, so a business sold in a poor year is not the same business at all, and a founder who has to sell in a particular year rarely gets to choose which year that is.

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. In a shop where one person holds the customer relationships and another holds the shop floor, that promise is usually made between friends and almost never funded.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a household whose income is steadier on paper than in practice, an owner with retained earnings and no succession plan, 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 cannot sustain the premium in a difficult year, and in this city that year will 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 two useful documents are your group benefits booklet, not the summary card, and whatever you have that shows what a thin year would actually cost your household. Most people have never opened the first and have never calculated the second.

Frequently asked questions