Caring for Clients Newsletters

Caring for Clients produces and posts a quarterly newsletter to keep our clients and potential clients informed about current market conditions, tax tips, recent news and other money related matters.

July 2010

Second Quarter, 2010

We hope you are all having a wonderful start to the summer! As we settle into enjoying the warm weather in our backyards, cottages and beyond, we want to provide you with a few helpful insights. Please feel free to share them with others.

One topic, which has recently received a significant amount of media attention, is the Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA). Upon its introduction to the financial world in 2009, many eager investors jumped at the opportunity to open an account of their own. These accounts were widely marketed by banks and other financial institutions, without necessarily providing investors with the proper know-how to manage their accounts. Many investors are now learning the TFSA contribution rules the hard way. Ellen Roseman of the Toronto Star provides a helpful overview of these common misunderstandings in her article, Taxpayers hit with penalties on tax-free savings accounts. At Caring for Clients, we were happy to be able to help our clients navigate their new TFSAs, allowing them to avoid 2010 tax surprises. If you know anyone who has experienced a TFSA mishap, please feel free to have them contact us with any questions they might have.

Not only is it important to administer your TFSA properly at the outset, but to understand the estate implications of this new savings vehicle is also essential. When opening a new TFSA, you are provided with the option of designating a beneficiary of your account or indicating your successor holder. Wilmot George, Director of Tax and Estate Planning at Mackenzie Financial, provides a detailed explanation of the importance of these designations in his article, TFSAs – A look at estate planning implications.

Although many people have their financial lives and estates well planned, we are learning more and more that the prevalence of divorce can seriously disrupt these plans at any time. There are a variety of ways that divorces can be handled in order to ease the process as much as possible. We wanted to share a unique perspective with you from the Senior Negotiator with Fairway Divorce Solutions, Oscar Dal Bello. We have included a link to Oscar's interview with Caring for Clients. 

In closing, we wanted to provide you with a quick update on our Caring for Clients blog – www.caringforclients.com/blog. Since our last newsletter, we have covered a variety of topics in our eight recent blog postings, including: whether you should give your child an allowance, why not to invest in money market funds, why volatility can be costly and why banks aren’t trusted, just to name a few. If you would like to receive notification of our weekly blog postings, please feel free to sign up for the RSS feed, which can be found on our blog page.

We hope we have left you with some interesting topics to think about and to share, over the next few months. Further, we would like to wish you a very healthy and happy summer season. If you have any questions about the above topics, or if you have any other financial planning or investment related questions, please feel free to contact us at any time.

Best regards,

Rona, Clifford & Emily