Life insurance in Abbotsford

CWCC works with small business owners, farm operations, transport companies and families in Abbotsford on life insurance, living benefits, group plans, succession planning and capital strategy: entirely online. The firm is registered with Quebec’s AMF under number 602293 and is licensed to place insurance in British Columbia, where Jose Salloum is a licensed life insurance agent with the Insurance Council of British Columbia.

What makes Abbotsford different

Abbotsford is one of the most significant agricultural and agri-food centres in the country, and its economy rests on a large number of mid-sized private companies rather than a handful of large employers.

An agricultural and agri-food base. Production, processing, storage, distribution. Family companies often run by the second or third generation.

A substantial transport sector. Trucking, logistics, warehousing, with employees whose work is physical and whose hours are irregular.

A strong entrepreneurial culture. A great many owner-operators who built the business themselves and now employ between five and fifty people.

A workforce that is hard to keep. Competition for skilled employees is real, and it is decided less and less on wages alone.

Offering a group plan: what to know first

This is the central question here, and it nearly always arrives the same way: an employee you do not want to lose asks whether the company offers benefits.

What a plan actually accomplishes

A group plan is first of all a retention and recruitment tool, and it should be judged as one rather than as an ordinary insurance product. Its value to you is measured in employees who stay, not in benefits paid.

What it gives your employees comes down mostly to access: dental care, medication, vision and paramedical services that many of them would never buy individually. The life insurance that comes with it is generally modest, often a multiple of salary.

Why the premium rises

This is the point owners most often learn afterwards. For a small group, the renewal premium depends largely on the claims experience of the group itself: a heavy year among a small number of employees shows up directly in the following year’s cost.

That leads to a difficult decision: absorb the increase, reduce the coverage, or raise the share employees pay. It is better to have thought that decision through before putting the plan in place, because taking a benefit away costs far more in workplace morale than never having offered it.

The question nobody will ask you

The plan you put in place for your employees will poorly protect the one individual the company depends on: you.

An owner’s group life coverage is usually a multiple of their declared salary, which is often well below what the business is actually worth to them. It belongs to the company, it ends if the company closes or is sold, and it does not follow the owner. A group plan does not replace personal coverage, and an owner who counts on it believes they are covered without being so.

Questions of premium deductibility and the tax treatment of benefits belong entirely to your accountant, and employer obligations under employment law belong to a lawyer. We handle the insurance part.

From the employee’s side

If you are covered by an employer’s plan rather than offering one, two things deserve checking in your booklet rather than assuming.

The first is that this coverage does not belong to you: it ends with the job, and it ends the day you leave, not at the end of the month. The second is the conversion window, which allows group coverage to be converted to individual coverage without evidence of health. It is short, it runs from the end of coverage, and it does not come back.

What British Columbia adds

The province charges probate fees calculated on the value of assets passing through the estate. For an owner-operator, shares of the company held personally pass through it, and valuing them takes time while the business has to keep running.

Provincial law also allows a spouse or a child to apply to vary a will they consider inadequate. In a family business where one child has worked in it for fifteen years and another not at all, that is a possibility to discuss with a lawyer while everyone still agrees.

What we do for companies here

Before talking about a plan, we ask what you are trying to solve: keeping one particular person, answering a general request, or matching a competitor. The three do not call for the same answer, and one of them does not call for a plan at all.

We then look at your own situation separately from the group’s, because they are two distinct files that get run together far too often.

We work with your accountant on the tax side and send you to a lawyer for employer obligations.

The first meeting

Half an hour, by video, at no cost and with nothing to sign. If you already have a plan, bring the renewal notice: it shows the change in premium and often the reason. At the end you will know whether this belongs in your company, and if the answer is no, you will hear it during the meeting.

Frequently asked questions