Financial services in Riverview

Two incomes, one house, and one labour market on the other side of the river. CWCC works with Riverview 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

Riverview is the largest town in New Brunswick, sitting on the south bank of the Petitcodiac and facing Moncton and Dieppe. It was built to be lived in, and most of the people who live here earn their money on the other side of the water. That arrangement is comfortable, it is well established, and it concentrates more risk in one place than most households notice. 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 what a two income household actually has left after a mortgage.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to a household rather than to a rule of thumb.
• 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 business in the family.

Two incomes that look independent and are not

A Riverview household usually has two earners. One may work for a hospital, one for a school district, one for a distribution firm, one at an operation in Moncton or Dieppe or at the airport. On paper that is diversification: two employers, two industries, two pay cheques arriving on different weeks.

In practice it is one economy. Both jobs exist because Greater Moncton has the employers it has. If that regional economy has a hard few years, both incomes feel it, the local housing market feels it, and every alternative job either earner might take is in the same catchment. The household is not badly run. It is concentrated, and concentration is invisible while everything is working.

What follows is practical rather than alarming. The emergency fund in a household like this should be sized to the possibility that both incomes are affected at once rather than one of them, which usually means a larger number than the standard advice suggests. Coverage that belongs to the household rather than to either employer matters more here, because the scenario that hurts is the one where both group plans end in the same year.

The commute deserves one line of its own. A household with two vehicles crossing a bridge twice a day every working day has a real exposure to disability from ordinary road risk, and disability is the coverage people are least likely to have examined and most likely to need.

When the career ends but the health does not

The Moncton Area Control Centre is in this town, one of a small number of Nav Canada facilities managing high level air traffic across the region, including traffic that crosses the Atlantic. It is the clearest local example of something that matters to far more people here than work in that building: the job you can only hold while you hold a certificate.

Air traffic control is one. Commercial and heavy vehicle driving is another. Flying is another. So, in different ways, are nursing and the regulated trades and any role that requires a security clearance or a periodic medical. In each case the right to work is granted by a body that can withdraw it, and it can withdraw it on a finding that leaves you able to do plenty of other things.

This is the exact case that disability contracts split on, and the difference is one clause. A contract that pays when you cannot perform your own occupation responds when the certificate goes. A contract that pays only when you cannot perform any occupation for which you are reasonably suited may pay nothing at all, on the reasoning that you are perfectly capable of other employment. Both are legitimate contracts. They are not the same purchase, and the difference does not appear until a claim.

Two more clauses are worth finding in the same document. Whether the own occupation definition applies for the whole benefit period or converts to any occupation after a set number of years, most commonly two. And whether the policy is your own or your employer’s, because employer coverage generally ends with the employment, and the loss of a certificate can end the employment.

Critical illness sits beside this for the same reason. A diagnosis that ends a certificated career may not meet a disability definition at all, while it is precisely what a critical illness benefit is written to pay on.

The house is the plan, and the plan has a queue in front of it

In a town of houses, most of a household’s net worth ends up inside one. The mortgage gets paid down, the property appreciates, and by the middle fifties the family is genuinely well off on paper while holding very little it can spend.

Asked how retirement works, a great many households here give a version of the same answer: we will sell the house and move to something smaller. It is a reasonable plan and it has two weaknesses that are worth saying out loud before they matter.

The first is timing. You are not the only household planning it. A town built out over a few decades fills with people of similar ages who arrive at the same conclusion within a few years of each other, and they intend to sell into the same small market and buy the same smaller properties in the same small market. A plan that everyone executes at once is not a plan, it is a queue.

The second is that a house cannot be sold in a hurry without a discount, and the moments a family most needs money are the ones that arrive without notice: a death, a diagnosis, a parent who needs care. Selling the family home in the month after a funeral is the worst possible time to negotiate.

None of this argues against owning a house or against downsizing eventually. It argues for holding some liquidity somewhere else, so that the house is sold when you decide rather than when the situation decides.

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 problem named twice already on this page is that almost everything this household owns is illiquid and almost everything it earns comes from one place. Capital reachable on terms written into a contract is neither. It does not require the house to be listed and it does not require an application to a lender who is looking at the same two pay stubs.

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

Plenty of Riverview residents run businesses rather than commute to one: trades and contracting, professional practices, and service firms whose customers are spread across all three communities on both sides of the river.

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. In a small owner operated firm the person who has to find it is often a spouse who never worked in the business at all.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a two income household that would rather see its concentration named than ignored, anyone whose work depends on a licence or a medical certificate, a family whose net worth is mostly a house, or an incorporated owner 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. Bring the disability section of your benefits booklet, and bring your spouse. Almost every useful decision on this page is a household decision, and the disability section is the page nobody has read.

Frequently asked questions