With a top personal tax rate in Ontario of 53.53%, the tax spread between dividend income and capital gains is significant. As a result, planning has evolved over the last number of years whereby a taxpayer creates a capital gain as a means of extracting corporate funds in lieu of or in combination with paying themselves a dividend/salary, which would …
5 Strategies Where COVID-19 Can Reduce Taxes
There are are at least 5 strategies that can be executed under existing tax legislation to use COVID-19 to generate tax relief. These strategies were originally posted by us 7 weeks ago on March 19th. In particular, strategy No. 5 discussed below anticipated a reduction in the prescribed interest rate to 1% from the current rate of 2%, which will now be …
Planning Techniques to Eliminate the Double/Triple Levels of Tax After Death of a Corporate Owner
What Happens on Death? For illustrative purposes, we will assume that a taxpayer dies (with no surviving spouse) owning shares of a private company with a $1M capital gain. On death, there is a capital gain of $1M on the deemed disposition of the shares owned by the deceased, half of which is taxable. This would result in approximately …
Choosing the Will or Family Law – A Surviving Spouse Has the Choice
On the death of a spouse, the surviving spouse has the right to choose between accepting his / her entitlement under their partner’s will (where there is a will) or claim an equalization of net family property (an “equalization payment”) under section 6 of the Family Law Act.[1] Where there is no will, the surviving spouse has the right …