Life insurance in Victoriaville

CWCC works with self-employed people, manufacturers, families and business owners in Victoriaville and the Centre-du-Quebec on life insurance, living benefits, succession planning and capital strategy: entirely online. The firm is registered with the Autorité des marchés financiers under number 602293, where Jose Salloum practises as a Financial Security Advisor.

What makes Victoriaville different

Victoriaville is a town of entrepreneurs as much as of factories, and that changes the protection question completely.

A strong manufacturing tradition. Furniture, processing, specialised products, with businesses that are often family-held and rooted here.

A great many self-employed people and small businesses. Subcontracting, trades, professional services, shops. Rarely a group plan.

A substantial agricultural base. Around the town, with the succession questions that come with it.

A stable community. Families settled for a long time, where the business and the house often belong to the same people.

Self-employed: what does not exist, and what has to be asked for in advance

This is the central question here, and it starts with an observation nobody enjoys making.

The layers you do not have

An employee at a plant here generally has several layers of protection stacked on top of one another: paid sick days, sometimes short-term disability, long-term disability, group life insurance and health coverage.

A self-employed person has none of those layers by default. A week not working is a week without income, and it starts on day one rather than after a waiting period.

The public net, and the enrolment that has to have happened first

There is a mechanism many self-employed people do not know about: certain special benefits under the employment insurance scheme, including those tied to illness and family responsibilities, can be available to the self-employed.

That access is not automatic. It requires a voluntary agreement entered into in advance, and a period passes between enrolling and the moment a benefit can be claimed.

The consequence is direct and admits no exception: you cannot enrol once you are ill. It is a decision to be taken while everything is fine, like a policy.

The conditions, the timing and the contributions belong to the scheme itself and they change: we do not describe them here and we invite you to verify them directly with the body that administers it. We flag the mechanism because a great many people have never heard of it.

The trap nobody mentions

Here is the most useful point on this page, and it concerns individual disability insurance.

A disability benefit is set according to the income you can demonstrate. For an employee, demonstrating it is simple. For a self-employed person or a business owner, the insurer generally looks at net income after expenses, not at revenue.

Many entrepreneurs legitimately arrange their affairs so as to reduce their net taxable income. That strategy, perfectly sound in tax terms, produces a side effect few people anticipate: the protection you will qualify for is calculated on that reduced income.

This is not advice to pay more tax. It is a matter of knowing the two decisions are linked, and of raising them with your accountant and with us at the same time rather than two years apart. It is a three-way conversation, and it belongs before the application.

When the business and the house are tied together

In a great many files here, the family home has served as security for business financing, or the business occupies a building the owner holds personally.

That interlocking means a difficulty on one side transmits immediately to the other. It is a fact to know when settling on an amount of protection, and the structure itself belongs to your accountant and your lawyer.

The Quebec framework

A death benefit payable to a named beneficiary is generally not part of the estate, which lets it be available while the rest runs its course.

Recall too that a common-law partner does not inherit without a will, however long the relationship has lasted, and that designating a married or civil-union spouse is in principle irrevocable unless stated otherwise.

What we do for self-employed people here

We start with demonstrable income rather than with a product, because that is what determines what you will qualify for. That conversation belongs with your accountant, and we would rather they were in it.

We then check whether you have enrolled in the public mechanism, and if not, we tell you where to verify its conditions yourself.

Finally we set the amounts on a full year of activity rather than on a good quarter.

The first meeting

Half an hour, by video, at no cost and with nothing to sign. Your accountant can attend, and that is often the most efficient meeting. At the end you will know what your demonstrable income allows, which is the real starting point.

Frequently asked questions