Kelsey Rolfe

A primer on everything Canadians need to know about estate planning, from wills to trusts to powers of attorney. Written for Scotiabank through Contently.

A growing number of single people and couples are choosing not to have children for myriad reasons – a decision that advisors say have implications for their long-term financial and estate plans.

Communicating estate plans — from future inheritances to executor and power of attorney appointments and other end-of-life wishes — can be delicate and difficult for clients, whether because of family tensions or an understandable discomfort with death. Advisors say there’s significant value in helping clients communicate their wishes to their children or other inheritors.

Group RESPs, also known as group scholarship plans, have long had a bad reputation in the personal finance world. As opposed to individual or family RESPs, which parents can easily open at their bank or other financial institution free, group RESPs are sold by private companies. The five major providers of group plans that are either active or closed to new members, which have a combined $15.7-billion in assets under management, were named in a Quebec class-action lawsuit certified in 2021.

Whether it’s selling secondhand clothes over Poshmark, driving for Uber Technologies Inc., or renting out a room on Airbnb Inc., a growing number of Canadians have taken on gig work or side hustles in the past year to make ends meet. But that comes with tax implications that new gig workers may not understand and that advisors can help clarify.

I filled in as interim section editor for CIM Magazine for two magazine issues, including their May 2023 issue, which involved assigning and editing three magazine sections and working with freelancers to shepherd their stories through the editing process.

Andrea Panagopoulos’s employer knows the length of every customer call she handles and can listen back to any of them. The company knows if she pauses before accepting another call. It knows how much time she takes for her allotted daily breaks.
Panagopoulous, a remote employee for Air Canada’s customer-support call centre in Toronto and who has worked for the airline for 28 years, said she understands why the company uses monitoring and measuring technology—but it still has her on edge.

Most retail investors traditionally have two main asset classes in their portfolios – stocks and bonds. (A balanced portfolio, by definition, contains both.) But while everyone loves to watch the stock market, and worry about its ups and downs, fewer investors pay as much attention to bonds. Many don’t really understand how they work and the benefits, and risks, of investing in them.