Financial services in Winnipeg

A pension that pays two lives, and a form your spouse signs in a room you are not allowed to be in. CWCC works with Winnipeg households, business owners and incorporated professionals 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.

Where to start

Winnipeg holds close to fifty-five per cent of Manitoba’s population, the highest share any single city carries in any province in the country. One consequence is that a small number of pension plans and a small number of employers reach an unusually large part of the city at once. 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 a pension rather than as though you had none.
• Capital strategy. Infinite Financial Sovereignty®, described below.
• Life insurance. Term, permanent and participating whole life, sized to what the pension will not do.
• 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.

The most widely shared document in the city, and nobody has read the survivor section

The Civil Service Superannuation Fund is a defined benefit plan covering employees of the Manitoba government and other public sector employers, with tens of thousands of members. The Healthcare Employees Pension Plan is also defined benefit and describes itself as one of the largest in the province. Teachers are paid through the Teachers’ Retirement Allowances Fund under The Teachers’ Pension Act. A handful of documents therefore covers a very large share of working Winnipeg, and on most household balance sheets the largest asset of all does not appear: the pension pays for as long as you live and, depending on the form elected, for as long as your spouse lives. Then it stops.

It cannot be left to a child, and it cannot be left to anyone once the surviving spouse has died. That is not a defect. A pension is built to produce income across two lives, not to build an estate. But a household that assumed the pension is wealth it will pass on has assumed something the plan text does not say.

If leaving something behind matters, the assets that will do it sit outside the plan: the house, the registered accounts, and any insurance you own. Most households we meet have thought hard about the first two and never about the third.

The sixty per cent floor, and the form your spouse signs without you in the room

Manitoba does not leave the survivor question to the member. Under the province’s pension legislation, a member who has a spouse or a common-law partner when the pension begins receives it in a joint survivor form, and the pension continuing to that survivor for life must be at least sixty per cent of what the member was being paid.

A member can take less, including a single life pension that stops at death and pays more every month while it runs. Doing so requires the spouse or common-law partner to sign a waiver. Manitoba prescribes the form and the circumstances: the spouse signs it, it is witnessed while the member is not present, and it is signed within sixty days before the pension commences.

Three things follow. The larger payment is not yours to elect alone. The person who must weigh it is asked to give up a lifetime income in a room you are not allowed to enter. And the decision sits inside a window of weeks.

That is where insurance enters the conversation honestly, and it is also where it is most often oversold, so here is the shape of it without the enthusiasm. Some households compare the pension given up under the joint form against the cost of owning life insurance instead, on the reasoning that the insurance would replace the survivor’s income and, unlike the pension, would leave something behind afterwards.

It works only when several things are true at once, and any one failing makes it the wrong answer. The member has to be insurable at a reasonable cost, a medical question answered before anything is signed. The policy has to be permanent rather than term, because a term policy that expires while the survivor is alive defeats the purpose. The premiums have to be payable for life out of an income that will not grow. And the survivor has to be comfortable holding a policy in place of a guaranteed pension, which is a question about temperament as much as arithmetic.

Where those conditions are not all met, taking the joint survivor pension is the better answer and we will say so. The one thing we ask of anyone reading this before retirement is the boring thing: start early enough that nobody is deciding inside a sixty day window.

If your pay slip comes from an insurer or an asset manager

Winnipeg is one of the country’s insurance and investment management centres. Great-West Lifeco is headquartered here. IG Wealth Management built a new head office downtown. Wawanesa runs its executive office in the city. So does Manitoba Public Insurance, the Crown corporation that has provided basic compulsory automobile coverage since 1971.

Two things follow.

The first is concentration. A household in this sector often holds a salary, a pension and an employer share plan, all three tracing back to one company. That is three claims on one balance sheet, and the year it matters is the year the sector is under pressure. That is not an argument against a good employer. It is an argument for owning something that does not depend on the same institution.

The second is a habit of mind. Because basic auto coverage here is bought at a counter alongside a driver’s licence, insurance in Manitoba reads to many people as a public utility with a published rate schedule. A participating whole life contract is a different thing: long, owned rather than renewed, and dependent on how the participating account is managed over decades. People inside the industry grasp that faster than anyone, and have the least examined personal files in the city.

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. A pension member already holds a large, guaranteed, entirely illiquid income stream. What that household lacks is not more guaranteed income; it is capital it can reach without asking permission, and something that survives the second death. And where salary, pension and shares all point at one employer, a contract issued by an unrelated insurer diversifies who owes you money.

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 and the incorporated professional

Winnipeg’s private employers sit alongside the public payroll rather than instead of it: manufacturing, transportation and distribution, construction, and the professional practices that serve the health and education systems.

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.

One local note on estates. Manitoba abolished its probate fee in 2020, so the fee-avoidance arguments that drive a great deal of planning in other provinces simply do not apply here. Probate itself still exists and still takes time. What that leaves is the honest reason to plan: liquidity on the day it is needed, and a document set that says what you meant.

If you live outside the city and work in it

East St. Paul, West St. Paul, Headingley, Oakbank, Niverville, St. Adolphe, Stonewall and Selkirk send a large share of their working population into Winnipeg. Nothing on this page changes for those households: the sixty per cent rule is provincial, and the firm’s licence covers the province rather than the city.

What does differ is the house. A household that bought outside the perimeter usually holds a larger share of its net worth in property and less liquidity than the pay slip suggests, and that shows up at the wrong moment: a death or a disability rather than a retirement.

Who this fits, and who it does not

It fits a household with a pension that wants to understand what the pension does not do, a couple who would rather have the survivor conversation two years early than sixty days late, an incorporated professional with retained earnings, 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 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 hold a defined benefit pension, bring the most recent annual statement and, if you have it, the plan booklet. Most of the useful conversation is in those two documents, and most people have never read the survivor section of either.

Frequently asked questions