Financial services in Thompson

A large part of what you earn here is attached to the place, not to you, and it stops when you go. CWCC works with Thompson households, rotational workers and business owners on wealth creation, insurance and capital strategy. The firm is licensed to place insurance in Manitoba with the Insurance Council of Manitoba and matches you with an advisor licensed in the province. Every meeting is held online, which in the north is not a compromise.

Where to start

Thompson is the largest city in northern Manitoba, built around a nickel mining and milling operation, and it is the service centre for a region of more than fifty thousand people, many of them in communities reachable only by air or by winter road. Financial advice written for a southern suburb misses most of what matters here. 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 an income that is high now and located somewhere specific.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, portable by design because you may not be here in ten years.
• Living benefits. Critical illness, disability and long-term care, which carry more weight the further you are from a hospital.
• 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 working.

The allowance belongs to the address

Northern employment pays well and it pays in parts. There is a base rate, and then there are shift and rotation premiums, isolation or northern allowances, sometimes subsidised housing or travel, and a tax treatment that is different from the one a Winnipeg household files under. Added together the number is impressive. Taken apart it is a base rate plus a set of payments that are attached to a location.

The planning consequence is a single sentence: build the permanent commitments on the base, and treat everything else as the reason you are here. A household that sets its mortgage, its vehicle payments and its premiums against the full northern number has committed to obligations that follow it south while the income that funded them does not.

On tax, one detail is worth getting right because it is commonly got wrong. Canada’s northern residents deductions have two zones. Thompson sits in the prescribed intermediate zone, which is worth half the residency amount, while communities further north, Lynn Lake, Leaf Rapids, Gillam and Churchill among them, sit in the full northern zone. The claim generally requires living in the zone on a permanent basis for at least six continuous months, and it belongs on your return, prepared by your accountant. We raise it only because households routinely plan around a number that assumes a deduction they never claimed.

The last thing on this list is the most boring and the most valuable. High income for a fixed number of years is an opportunity that does not repeat. What separates the households who leave with something from those who do not is almost never the salary. It is whether the surplus was moved somewhere it could not be spent.

What a diagnosis costs when the specialist is a flight away

Provincial health insurance pays for the treatment. It does not pay for the rest of what happens to a northern family when a serious illness is diagnosed, and the rest is substantial: weeks or months in Winnipeg, accommodation, flights for a partner, childcare at home, and the income the partner stops earning while they are away.

That is the reason critical illness coverage reads differently here than it does in the south. It pays a lump sum on the diagnosis of a covered condition, and it pays it whether or not you are able to work, which means it can be spent on flights, rent and time rather than on replacing a paycheque. A southern family can lean on the fact that the hospital is twenty minutes away. A Thompson family cannot, and the gap is measured in real money.

Two honest qualifications, because this coverage is easy to oversell. It pays on the conditions the contract defines, in the terms the contract defines, and reading those definitions is the whole job. And it is medically underwritten, so it is bought while you are well or not at all.

Disability coverage sits alongside it and answers a different question, which is what happens to the income rather than to the costs. In a mining and trades economy the distinction between an own occupation and an any occupation definition is not a technicality. It decides whether a claim is paid.

Most households here intend to leave. The house does not

Thompson’s population has been falling slowly, and nickel production is well below the levels of its peak decades. None of that makes the town a bad place to work; it has been the anchor of the north for two generations and the city has been actively broadening its economy. What it does mean is that a house in a single industry town is the least reliable asset a household here owns.

In most of Canada, home equity is treated as the household’s reserve. In a northern town that assumption should be examined rather than inherited. A house may take a long time to sell, may sell for less than it cost, and may need to be sold at exactly the moment the local economy is soft, which is the same moment the household is leaving.

The practical response is to build the reserve outside the house. Registered accounts, liquid savings, and where it fits, a participating contract that accumulates value and can be reached by policy loan. All of them move when you do. A house does not move, and a group benefits plan does not move either.

That last point deserves a line of its own. Coverage provided through an employer generally ends with the employment, and leaving the north usually means leaving that employer. Owning something yourself, priced at today’s age and health, is the only part of the arrangement that travels.

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 the north. A contract with an insurer is not attached to a postal code. It does not care which town you live in, it is not repriced when you move, and the capital inside it is reachable without a lender forming a view about a northern property or a northern employer. For a household earning well for a defined number of years and intending to be somewhere else afterwards, that portability is the entire point.

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 are declared annually by the insurer’s board. 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 serving the north

A great deal of northern business is contracting: earthworks, camp services, freight, aviation support, drilling, maintenance and the trades. The pattern is a small number of very large customers, contracts that are renewed rather than permanent, and equipment financed against work that has to keep coming.

Two consequences follow. Customer concentration means a lost contract is a step rather than a slope, so the reserve has to be sized to a gap rather than to a slow quarter. And where the owner has personally guaranteed equipment or an operating line, that guarantee is a household obligation that a death does not extinguish. The balance is a known number and covering it is inexpensive.

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.

One further note, offered plainly. Financial questions for Status First Nations households, including how income and property situated on a reserve are treated, are a specialised field. Where a question belongs to that field we will say so and point you to someone who works in it, rather than guessing at an answer on a web page.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a household earning well for a defined stretch that wants the surplus to survive the move, a family that has understood what distance adds to an illness, a rotational worker whose coverage is entirely provided rather than owned, or an incorporated contractor with concentrated customers.

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, and scheduled around a rotation rather than around office hours. Useful things to have nearby: your benefits booklet, any policy you already own, and a rough answer to one question, which is how many more years you expect to be working in the north.

Frequently asked questions