Tax

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Departure Tax

If you decide to move to another country and become non-resident then you must pay a departure tax. This departure tax is calculated based on a deemed disposition of most of your assets (even though you may not have necessarily sold them) at the fair market value. You then must pay the regular capital gains [...]

14Jul2008 | Preet | 4 comments | Continued
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Where Does All Your Tax Money Go?

Do you hear that sound? Another deadline passing us by. When you owe money, you can actually here it whistle as it approaches… I found a presentation from the government that explains where all the revenues and expenses of the Government comes from and goes to. Some highlights for the fiscal year ending March [...]

1May2008 | Preet | 3 comments | Continued
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Revocable or Contingent Life Insurance Beneficiary Designations for Charitable Giving

If you are considering using life insurance to donate to charity but aren’t quite ready to irrevocably assign the policy ownership to charity or irrevocably designate the beneficiary, you have a couple of options:
1. Name the charity as a contingent beneficiary
2. Name the charity as a revocable beneficiary
Both options are not final and can be [...]

27Mar2008 | Preet | 0 comments | Continued
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Donating Old Life Insurance Policies to Charity Instead of Cancelling Them

If you’ve read my post on Charitable Gifts of Life Insurance, you’ll know that you can substantially increase your donations to your favourite charities with life insurance policies. However that post dealt with initiating a new policy specifically for charitable giving. It is also possible to donate an existing life insurance policy that was originally [...]

26Mar2008 | Preet | 0 comments | Continued
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Using Life Insurance to Increase Donations to Charity

If you donate to a certain charity on a regular basis you may want to consider using life insurance to generate a substantially larger gift. Let me give you a quick example. If we had a 40 year old who donated $30/month to his favourite charity and we assume that he lives to the ripe [...]

18Mar2008 | Preet | 1 comment | Continued
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Double Your Donations to Charity Through Employer Matching

If you happen to work for a larger company, chances are they have a program where they will match employee contributions to charities dollar for dollar. So in other words you could double the amount of money you donate with no extra cost.
It’s one of those things where when you hear about it you think, [...]

18Mar2008 | Preet | 1 comment | Continued
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Donating Investments Instead of Cash to Charity Has Big Tax Advantages

If you have a capital gain on some of your investments in your non-registered investment account and you are planning on donating to charity, you should know that instead of donating cash you might want to look at donating the investments directly to the charity instead (an ‘in-kind’ transfer). Recently the government legislated that any [...]

16Mar2008 | Preet | 0 comments | Continued
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Donate $10,000 to Charity for only $718 using Flow Throughs

You can substantially increase your donations to charity by using Flow-Through investments.
If you understand that Flow-Through Shares or Flow-Through Limited Partnerships are volatile investments and you have a desire to give to charity, there is actually a common planning strategy that marries the two together. To summarize, a donor would first make a purchase of [...]

14Mar2008 | Preet | 1 comment | Continued
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Buying an Annuity from a Charity as way to Make a Donation

This strategy was much more effective if you purchased the annuity on or before December 20th, 2002. The strategy is not as common now as the tax rules have changed, but you could still purchase an annuity from a charity now and receive some tax savings. A donation would be eligible for the tax credit [...]

13Mar2008 | Preet | 0 comments | Continued
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An iPod tax in Canada up to $75?!?!

Yikes! It’s actually a blanket tax on flash memory storage devices by the looks of it, and it will range based on the size of the memory - and for a 30GB iPod it looks to be $75!

24Jul2007 | Preet | 0 comments | Continued