Tax, Succession and Estate Planning in Metro Vancouver, including Burnaby, Surrey, Richmond and Coquitlam

Unless it goes to your spouse, the whole balance is added to your income on your final tax return, and at BC's top rate close to half of it can go to tax in a single year. Left to a spouse, it rolls over with no immediate tax. The name on the account's beneficiary form decides which of those happens, not your will.

Your children don't pay it; your estate does. Your main home is usually covered by the principal residence exemption, so there is no tax on it. A cottage, a rental or any second property is treated as sold at market value when you die, and the gain is taxed on your final return.

Canada has no estate tax, but on the day you die you are treated as if you sold your shares at market value, and the tax on that gain comes out of your estate. If the shares go to your spouse, the tax is deferred. If they go to your children, it is not. An estate freeze done early is the usual way to keep that bill down.

Then you sell it instead: to your managers, to an outside buyer, or to your employees through an employee ownership trust. Each is taxed differently, and a sale to managers usually takes a few years to set up, so the sooner the family has an honest answer, the more options stay open.

The twenty-one-year rule. Every 21 years a trust is treated as if it sold everything it holds, and tax is due on the gains even though nothing was sold. The usual answer is to move assets out to the beneficiaries before that date, which takes a few years to plan, so check when your trust was set up.

Yes. A child living abroad can't receive your RRSP or RRIF on a tax-deferred basis, and payments to them face Canadian withholding tax on top of the tax your estate already pays. Their own country may tax the inheritance as well. This is where planning years ahead makes the biggest difference.

Do nothing irreversible yet: no dividend, share redemption or sale until a plan is set. The company's value was taxed on the final return; without planning it is taxed again when the money comes out, and the remedies depend on steps taken within tight timeframes. Get a valuation at the date of death and have a conversation in the first few months.

Earlier than most people do. Most of the tax on a business, a property or an estate is decided by how things were set up years before they change hands, and an estate freeze only protects growth that happens after it is done. If a parent has already died without a plan, some fixes are only available for a limited time after death, so call before the first filing deadline, not at it.

Nothing. The first conversation is free. We use it to understand what you own, what you want to happen to it, and roughly what the tax would be if nothing changed. You decide from there.