TFSAs 101: My guest appearance on The Tax Chick Podcast with Amanda Doucette

On this week's episode, I was delighted to be a guest on Amanda Doucette's The Tax Chick Podcast to talk about all things Tax-Free Savings Accounts (TFSAs).

 As we delve into the nuanced world of TFSAs, you'll gain a clearer understanding of how these accounts can be much more than a place to stash your cash. Get the scoop on navigating over-contributions and withdrawals, and learn the critical aspects of setting up beneficiary designations and successor holder arrangements—vital knowledge for polishing your estate planning.

This episode isn't just about saving; it's about strategizing for wealth accumulation. We break down the best practices for leveraging your TFSA for long-term investments and dissect the all-important recontribution rule. I'll guide you through the minefield of contribution limits and the confusion that can arise from registered versus non-registered investments within your TFSA. Savvy financial planning can be complex, but with our insights, you'll be well-equipped to make informed decisions without attracting unintended attention from Canada's tax authorities.

Lastly, we shine a light on the profound impact TFSAs can have when it comes to passing on your wealth. Discover the seamless transfer benefits that come with naming a spouse or common-law partner as a successor holder, and consider the more intricate scenarios that arise with other beneficiaries.

Stay tuned for Amanda's appearance on  next week's episode as we expand our discussion to the world of trusts.

Listen to The Tax Chick Podcast Here

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

Hello and welcome back to the Canadian Money Roadmap Podcast. I'm your host, devin Neufeld. On this week's episode, we're turning the tables a little bit because I am the guest. Recently, I was able to join Amanda Doucette's podcast, the Tax Chick, and Amanda talks about all things tax and I got to talk about things tax-free, so we're talking about TFSAs as a little teaser for next week as well, amanda is going to be joining me on my podcast, so we're going to have a bit of a back-to-back together, where she's going to share her expertise on the topic of trusts. So please keep an eye out for next week's episode as well. But without further ado, today's episode is about TFSAs, and so here's my guest appearance on the Tax Check Podcast with Amanda Doucette.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Well, hello friends, welcome to season five of the Tax Chick podcast. I feel like I need those air horns or something to announce the celebration of this season. I cannot believe that we are in season five and doing a big launch today with a bunch of episodes all at once, but I'm starting off with a guest episode and this is pretty cool. It's a guest episode with a fellow Saskatoon podcaster who happens to also be podcasting on finance, tax, money issues, which is really cool. So today my guest is Evan Neufeld, and Evan is a certified financial planner in the city and he specializes in retirement planning and investment advice for Canadians over 45. But he is also the host of the Canadian Money Roadmap, which is an awesome podcast. I highly encourage you to listen to it. They're nice short episodes released regularly, and Evan is really passionate, much like myself, about providing foundational information to the public about what they need to know on certain topics, and so I think you'll find his podcast to be very, very good. It was such a pleasure recording with him, as it always is when recording with fellow podcasters. They've got a great mic, it's just an easy setup, and we have always great conversations. I have never had the chance to meet Evan in person yet, and we were talking about that while on our recording today and said you know, we really need to like go for lunch. Our offices aren't that far apart, so stay tuned for a meeting of podcasters in the wild. I'll try to update you guys.

Speaker 2: 2:34

But anyway, evan's talking today with me about TFSAs, and we chose this topic because we both get a lot of questions about this type of investment vehicle. I find that no matter how much I write about it and podcast about it, I still get a lot of questions and there's a lot of miscommunication around what it is, how it's taxed and, in particular, what happens when you die and what options are available for planning involving the TFSA prior to your death. And so we're tackling all of those topics today. We're talking about what can go in a TFSA, what happens if you contribute too much, what happens when you pull stuff out and also what happens when you receive a TFSA as either a beneficiary or something called a successor holder, which we'll talk about in a little bit either a beneficiary or something called a successor holder, which we'll talk about in a little bit.

Speaker 2: 3:27

So I'm really excited to kind of get into the episode with you. I will give you some updates on what's been happening in my life over the last couple of months in one of my mini episodes, so check those out. But for now, without further ado, I'm going to head to this wonderful conversation with my new friend, evan Neufeld. Well, evan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's great to have a fellow podcaster in the house.

Speaker 1: 3:50

And a fellow Saskatonian too. Right, we're keeping it local here.

Speaker 2: 3:54

Yeah, I guess we could be in the same room together, if we really wanted to be, but we just had a huge dump of snow. So we're each in our own locations with our pretty podcast mics and doing this a bit remotely. Someday we'll be in the same room together.

Speaker 1: 4:08

I'm sure yeah, but for now this works. Great Technology is wonderful.

Speaker 2: 4:13

Well, I'm really glad you popped on. Today. We decided we wanted to have a bit of a chat about TFSAs. I think it's a comment and a question that a lot of my clients have. Even though I'm a lawyer, I get asked about them a lot, and I know it's a comment and a question that a lot of my clients have. Even though I'm a lawyer, I get asked about them a lot and I know it's certainly an area that you have some expertise in, and so we thought we'd do kind of TFSA 101 today on this podcast, and so I propose we like dive right in. Are you cool with diving right in?

Speaker 1: 4:39

Yeah, set me up. Where do you want to start?

Speaker 2: 4:41

Well, how about we go back to foundations? How about we go back to what is a TFSA?

Speaker 1: 4:47

Sure A TFSA. I like to spell it out because lots of people actually say TSFA. So if you just say it, you'll figure out the acronym. It's tax-free savings account and it is just a plan type. So it's a registered plan type. It's not an investment in and of itself, and my frustration that I've had in terms of financial literacy is that the banks largely have latched onto the TFSA, especially when it first launched back in 2009. They latched onto it because it has that SA in there, that savings account, and the banks are like we do that, we do the savings account thing. And so when you went to the bank in the mid-2000s there and you opened up TFSA, they said, okay, we'll put you in a high interest TFSA and that's what everybody thought it was at the beginning. No, that's not what it is. First and foremost, a TFSA is just a plan type, no that's not what it is.

Speaker 2: 5:59

First and foremost, a TFSA is just a plan type and then the investment component sits within your plan type. So I explain it. One guess when we think about a plan type if you're listening to this I mean, a TFSA is one plan type and RRSP is a plan type. It is a thing that you can use as an investment vehicle. It just has a fancy name. I always think TFSA. It always makes me think of like flying and whatever that other acronym is TSA.

Speaker 2: 6:23

Yeah, yeah, that's what I always think of Transportation Security Administration yeah, that kind of goes through my head when I hear TFSA. Okay, so we've got the basics on TFSA. How about we talk about limits to what you're allowed to put into a TFSA? Because, as you've identified, this is not a savings account. This is not a. You can do whatever you want with it and put in and take out and have a fun time to your max. There are certain rules and guidelines and limitations. Can you speak a bit to that?

Speaker 1: 6:53

Yeah, so you can't just put in however much you want like a traditional savings account or a bank account would be, because it is a registered plan type. There's always rules that kind of sit around these plans, like an RSP, like you mentioned before as well. So at TFSA you gain room based on your age.

Speaker 1: 7:12

So when you turn 18 is when you start getting room. The challenge there is that it launched in 2009. And I suspect many of you listening were at least 18 in 2009. And so you have the lifetime maximum available to you. So every year that has passed since it launched, you get the contribution room for that year and it just carries forward. It's not a situation where if you don't use it, you lose it. You can accumulate it over time and then use it all at once, or never, or in lumps, however you feel, or however it works with your financial plan, but on an ongoing basis. So every calendar year that rolls over, every January, you'll get the new room that everyone 18 and older gets for that year. So easy example if you turn 18 here in 2024, you get $7,000 of room. That's the current annual maximum. Let's back up one more year just to kind of do the math. If you turned 18 in 2023, the new room in 2023 was actually 6,500. And so if you were turned 18 in 2023, you have 6,500 for last year, 7,000 for this year. You're testing me on the math. It's 13,500. Yeah, so you can do 13,500 and you can kind of go backwards. That way I'll do the extra math for you.

Speaker 1: 8:39

So if you were at least 18 in 2009,. So if you're born in 1991 or later, you will have the lifetime maximum of $95,000, because the amounts have changed so many times, because it started at $5,000 and then it gets indexed to inflation, rounded to the nearest 500. Yeah, and there was one year in 2015 where they did a random $10,000 a year. A certain government was trying to get reelected, believe it or not, and so crazy things happen. So it's tough to calculate your TFSA contribution room. But if all of those numbers and math didn't really check the box with you, you can log on to your CRA my Account and they'll put a reasonably recent estimate of how much you can put on there. It can be a little bit complicated. So I say trust the CRA number loosely, because your financial institution doesn't have to report your contributions until the end of March for the previous year and so if you look in January, it won't know anything from the previous year or anything in the current year. Yeah, whatever.

Speaker 2: 9:51

It can get pretty complicated. That is a very good point, and I think that actually segues really nicely into the next point we were going to talk about, which is what happens if you over-contribute. So what happens if you rely on the wrong number or you don't know what number you're looking for and you contribute too much?

Speaker 1: 10:09

Perfect. This is. It's relatively straightforward. It is just a penalty. You get a 1% per month penalty on any dollars over your contribution limit. So say you've got the lifetime maximum of $95,000 and, hooray, you won the lottery. You got a hundred grand sitting in your bank account and you put a hundred grand in on day one. Oops, you over-contributed by $5,000. And so you would have a $50 penalty every month that you have the over-contribution.

Speaker 1: 10:42

So the way that that gets solved is either through absorbing your previous over-contribution with new contribution room when the calendar year rolls over. That's one way. Another way is responding to the nasty letter that you'll get from CRA and withdrawing it immediately. I'd highly recommend that approach. But yeah, so those are the main things. So it's a penalty, but it can be solved. Cra doesn't really have a strong track record of enforcing this on the first offense, and so they usually say, hey, you messed up, this was honest mistake, right? Just take the money out and go forth and send no more kind of situation.

Speaker 2: 11:24

Yeah, no, that's very true and it's interesting because you'd assume that they would get a little nastier with it. But I've seen those letters and it's true. As long as you pull it out, we all just go back to life as is and you pay the penalty for whatever period of time that you were over, but there's no special elections that need to be filed. You don't have to really seek discretion or permission for things, it's just no, they've asked you to please remove it, then remove it and we all move on. So it's not the end of the world.

Speaker 1: 11:52

Yeah, a few times I've seen it where we've caught an accidental over-contribution before a communication has been received from CRA and in some cases I've seen them waive the penalty entirely because it's like, oh, you actually caught it and removed it quite quickly, and so they're pretty reasonable. Cra is not known for being the most reasonable tax authority in the world. They're pretty reasonable. Cra is not known for being the most reasonable tax authority in the world, but with TFSAs, if you do an honest mistake the first time, it's okay. But yeah, just be aware that you probably don't want to test them too much on it.

Speaker 2: 12:25

Yes, don't become a repeat offender.

Speaker 1: 12:27

That's never a good thing with CRA for sure, a frequent flyer, to use our flying analogy from before.

Speaker 2: 12:39

Well and I mean now that we're starting to talk a bit about CRA I think this leads us to the next point, which is you know why do we care about TFSAs? Well, we care about them because they're fairly tax efficient. So let's talk about how are TFSAs taxed.

Speaker 1: 12:50

Perfect. In the grand scheme of things, the main benefit of the TFSA is that when you invest, in the grand scheme of things, the the the main benefit of the TFSA is that when you invest in the plan, all of the growth that happens in there is yours to keep and you don't pay a dime of tax on it. Um, maybe I'll caveat this later with the odd instance where that might actually come into play, but for the vast majority of us that would use a TFSA for pretty benign investment strategies you will not see a dime of tax on your investment growth. So when you put your money in the reason I don't like it as a savings account, like we were talking about before is that? Okay? Let's go back to the general principle of tax, if you would agree with me on this. You're the tax expert here. But the general philosophy is if you make money you pay tax. And then there's caveats from there or exceptions or whatever. Tfsa is one of those exceptions where if you make money, you don't actually have to pay tax.

Speaker 1: 13:49

So with some investment accounts, say with capital gains in a non-registered account, you pay tax when you incur the capital gain or when you have the income, so when you receive a dividend, you pay tax In a TFSA. If you receive a dividend, you don't pay tax. If you receive interest from GICs or bonds, or if you have it in a high interest savings account, you don't pay any tax on that. A high interest savings account you don't pay any tax on that. But the rate of growth on interest is typically quite low.

Speaker 1: 14:23

So the benefit of a TFSA is typically seen for long-term investing. This comes along with risk. Here's my caveat. Here You're the lawyer, I'm a financial planner. We got to caveat this Investing is not a universal truth or it shouldn't be recommended for everybody. But if that matches your financial plan for a long term and you happen to make more money in your TFSA by investing, you get to keep all of the growth. Typically the government shares it. If it's in an RSP, you share that with them. If it's a non-registered account, you share it with them. Tfsa you keep it for yourself.

Speaker 2: 14:55

Perfect, and I think that is one of the big perks. You're correct, though the gains are not as great and the money you're making is not as great. That's how they kind of get you, but you can still have this growth that, for the most part, accrues on a tax deferred basis. So what happens then? You've been growing your TFSA and you say I need to take money out of my TFSA. Then what happens?

Speaker 1: 15:22

Same thing. So there's no instance where you have to get a tax slip. So I'll contrast this with an RSP, which is quite common. You can always take money over your RSP, even if you're not retired I know it's in the name but you can take money out of your RSP. You just get a T4 RSP slip for it.

Speaker 1: 15:33

Yeah, with the TFSA there's no slips. So it's very, very simple. So say, you're invested in, say, like an index fund or a mutual fund, or you can sell it. It still stays in your TFSA, but then when you withdraw that money from your TFSA to your bank account, you don't pay any taxes on that either. So this is, if I could kind of take this one step further as far as the contribution room goes, any dollars that you take out of your TFSA can be recontributed back into your TFSA here's the big one when the next calendar year rolls over. So you have to wait until the next calendar year for you to get that room back.

Speaker 1: 16:16

So you don't get the original contribution room. You actually get the high watermark of whatever you withdrew. I'm going to assume it's a high watermark. I assume people make money. It's not always true, though. I guess the opposite is true, then right. So if you had something that was worth 20,000, declined in value to 10 and you took and you took out $10,000, you can only put back in $10,000. You can't put in the original $20,000.

Speaker 2: 16:39

Yeah, right, yeah, and I think that's a really good point, because I feel like that's where I see people get tripped up. They're going about their year and they need to pull out some funds because they're going to buy a car or they're going to invest in something, and so they pull the funds out and then they do whatever they're doing, and then they come upon another windfall and they go great, I'm just going to throw it back in. And then that's when we end up in the over-contribution scenario because they haven't waited till that next calendar year. And I mean part of that all comes back into this weird timing thing that we were talking about, where it's not always as easy.

Speaker 2: 17:11

You've kind of got to run that calendar year cycle in order to get your room increased again. Now keep in mind if you're somebody who has not maxed out your full contribution room and you take some out, you can probably put it back in as long as you had enough contribution room to begin with. So it's just, if you're in that scenario where you fully maxed out your contribution room, you take something out, you cannot put it back in until such time as you've garnered new room in that new calendar year. So if you're doing this, this in and out, it's something that you're going to want to do in conjunction with advice or review, by hopefully your financial advisor or whoever you're working with to do those investments, because otherwise you could end up receiving one of those letters from CRA that we all like to avoid receiving, if we can.

Speaker 1: 18:01

Yeah, the most common instance of over-contribution doesn't usually come from people just dumping in huge volumes of money. It's usually from the in and outs, right. So it's you put 50 in, you take 50 out. Oops, I didn't actually need the 50. I'll just pop it back in there. Nope, now you've over-contributed, right, um and so that can happen. But to your earlier point. You know, if you have 95,000 of room, you put 10 in and then you take 10 out and then you put 10 back in. Well, now you've technically used 20,000 of room which you haven't over-contributed. You've just used a new room twice. Does that make sense? I feel like I'm singing the hokey pokey in my head as you're saying you put the 10 in.

Speaker 2: 18:43

Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, that's what you guys can all, you can all hear that in your head now when you're taking your stuff in and out of your TFSA. So when you talk a bit about some of these investments or like permitted investments within a TFSA, I think sometimes there's a bit of a confusion over the language that's used. You know, registered investments versus non-registered investments, versus a mutual fund versus an RRSP, like. We use all these terms and I feel like sometimes, as a lay person, it's hard to understand the difference between the terms. Can you talk a bit about what some of the permitted investments are within a TFSA?

Speaker 1: 19:16

Sure. So I'll kind of try to use my bucket analogy again. And then the things that go in the bucket. So back to the TFSA is a bucket, rsp is a bucket.

Speaker 1: 19:27

A mutual fund is not a bucket. A mutual fund is something that can go in your bucket so the plan types can accept things like mutual funds and ETFs. Your listeners might have heard of ETFs before, maybe not. An ETF is functionally a mutual fund, they're just different. So both a mutual fund and an ETF, they're pools of stocks, bonds, cash, things like that.

Speaker 1: 19:49

If you want to invest in the stock market, it is dreadfully expensive. If you look at a single share of a company, it might be many hundreds of dollars and perhaps in US currency, things like that. So for the average investor to actually build a diversified portfolio, it's very expensive, it's very difficult, the actual logistics of doing it are challenging, and so that's why mutual funds and ETFs exist, because they're just pools of stocks and bonds that you can buy with smaller dollars. And so that's why mutual funds and ETFs exist, because they're just pools of stocks and bonds that you can buy with smaller dollars, and it just makes it a lot more simple to build a diversified portfolio. So, as far as permitted investments in a TFSA goes, you can have the building blocks of mutual funds, so you could have stocks, bonds, cash, gics same thing with RSPs, the same rules apply or you could have them in bundled form in the form of mutual funds and ETFs.

Speaker 1: 20:41

Those are very, very common. You can't own your primary residence or rental properties inside of a TFSA or an RSP. The permitted investment types are usually reserved for public securities. That would be the most common Online. There is reference to certain instances of having small business shares in there. I've never seen the instance where that's actually applicable, to be honest, and so that might be buried further in the income tax act that I'm familiar with, but that, largely speaking, uh, public securities are the main things, yeah.

Speaker 2: 21:21

I agree, I I've heard rumors of that as well. I've never seen it in practice, um, and it just seems like an odd thing to do in that particular instance. Well, the the other thing that I know we have some questions about every now and then is that you know, somebody will start investing and they'll buy a bunch of RRSPs, and then you know you hear, oh well, let's move your RRSP over to TFSA. So maybe we can talk a little bit about how the stuff gets in the bucket, because I think our natural reaction is, oh, we just take cash and we deposit it in the bucket, but are there other things, other ways we can get stuff in that bucket?

Speaker 1: 21:54

I would say yes, but not without cost. So if you have money in an RRSP already this is an RRSP podcast, so I won't get into the mechanics there necessarily but every dollar that ever comes out of an RRSP comes with a tax bill, and it's taxable at your marginal rate, and so I assume that most people listening know what marginal tax rate is. So it comes out at your marginal rate, and so there could be an instance where you might be in a lower than usual marginal tax rate where that could make sense or you could take some money out of doing what's called an in-kind transfer, where you transfer an investment directly that you own. It's like cool, now you just have it in your TFSA, but the tax bill still comes. So there's no tax advantage to doing it. Same thing with a non-registered account, so you could have an investment in one of these registered buckets of TFSA, rsp even things like a lira, if you have old pension money.

Speaker 1: 22:53

There's many other plan types. You cannot transfer them with a tax advantage into your TFSA. So there's a tax bill that comes in the middle, because when you invest in a TFSA, the tax bill shows up at the front end. You earn your income, you pay your taxes and now you invest after-tax dollars into your TFSA With an RRSP. The theory is that you're investing pre-tax dollars, so theSA With an RRSP. The theory is that you're investing pre-tax dollars, so the government's got to get there some way. They're not going to give you too many advantages here. So to get money into your TFSA out of cash is a great one. You can do it from investments that you already have. But say, if it's a non-registered account and you do a direct transfer, you're still going to get the capital gains tax bill on its way in Yep.

Speaker 2: 23:37

So if anyone was listening to this and thinking, wow, tfsas are amazing, I can do anything I want and not get taxed. Sorry to burst your bubble, we were just getting to it, it just took us some time.

Speaker 2: 23:47

There are really wonderful things about this vehicle, but I think, as you've indicated, anytime you're doing a transaction that involves some sort of financial component and you're buying and selling something or you're investing in something, you have to take that step and think okay, what am I doing and is there a tax consequence to what I'm doing? And and as you've said, evan, I mean sometimes the numbers work out and it actually makes sense to do that. Most of the time it doesn't, so you don't want to go into it blind without knowing exactly what you're doing. So if you've got cash, you're throwing in, that's an easy one. We know what's happening there.

Speaker 2: 24:22

If you're putting anything else in, there's likely going to be some sort of a consequence associated with that, and you'll want to do that calculation before you dive in headfirst. Well, maybe we should talk a bit about death, since we're talking about happy topics, like when you get taxed, because I think there's a bit of a confusion around what happens to a TFSA on death and, in particular, who you can give it to, how it impacts their room, all of those things. Can you speak to any of that for the listeners?

Speaker 1: 24:55

Yeah, so I'll just take the morbidity out of the conversation and just speak from a logistic standpoint. And TFSAs for estate planning gets me really excited because it's like a miracle of estate planning.

Speaker 2: 25:05

It's such a great tool. You do look really excited. You guys can't see him right now, but he kind of started glowing with excitement.

Speaker 1: 25:10

Okay.

Speaker 2: 25:11

Go forth, Evan.

Speaker 1: 25:12

It's a really good tool for conventional wisdom. Or you look online and be like TFSAs are great for saving for your car and next vacation or whatever it's like. Yeah, maybe, but it's also great for retirement income and it's also great for estate planning. The reason for that is because the designations that you're allowed are they allow you to roll money over to someone else, also on a tax-free basis. So let's use the first example. If you have a spouse or a common law partner, you can name them as something called a successor holder on your TFSA. This is very unique in the registered plan beneficiary world, I guess. In the registered plan beneficiary world, I guess it is unique because if you have a spouse, you can roll over your TFSA upon your passing to your spouse and they absorb your TFSA and they are able to keep that dollar amount tax-free inside of their own account.

Speaker 2: 26:14

They don't accrue double the room on a go-forward basis, but in theory they could have a double TFSA and keep that money invested and withdraw all of it tax-free in their own name at that point, yeah, so I think the key there is if you've named this a successor holder and that person, for example, is a spouse, they can receive those funds on your death and it doesn't put them into an over-contribution scenario. That's the key. It doesn't mean that on a go-forward basis, they get to have this double amount of room, but it allows them to initially absorb this room and not have them in an over-contribution, which is really cool, right? And so if you're transferring to somebody who's not a spouse, are there any different rules that apply?

Speaker 1: 26:58

Yeah, different rules a little bit. So the person you can name them as a beneficiary of the plan and the difference there is that a beneficiary, largely speaking maybe you'd have a better explanation here is a beneficiary, gets a check. They don't get to absorb it into their own TFSA but they do receive it tax-free outside of the estate and so the assets inside of a TFSA, as long as there is a beneficiary or a successor holder named, they bypass probate as well, which is great. It's a very slick process going through the estate. So you can name a friend, you can name an adult child, whatever the case is there. So I assume you can actually name a minor child. That comes with a few wrinkles there, but I haven't thought about it because it's not rolling into a TFSA of their own because you have to be 18 to have one. But anyways, I'm thinking on my feet here a little bit, but you can pretty much name whoever you want as a beneficiary of your plan. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:56

Very true. Well, it's almost kind of like an insurance policy, right, where you can name anybody you want as a beneficiary. When you're naming people that are under 18 for insurance or for this sort of scenario like a TFSA, you just run to the pickle where, well, they're under 18, they're minors, they can't hold property, so on what terms and conditions are they receiving this asset? Is there built-in trust provisions? Are you trying to roll it into some form of a trust? So it does create some additional complexities, but as a general matter of law, yeah, you could name anybody you want to be that beneficiary, and I think this is maybe a great time to kind of give that PSA here of when you're kind of doing your annual review of your investment portfolio and what you have, whether it's pensions through work, whether it's, you know you're you know using an online investing vehicle, whether you have an investment advisor I don't really care what your vehicle is but stop to find out what you have and if there is an ability to name a beneficiary and or, in the case of a TFSA, a successor holder, and have you named somebody?

Speaker 2: 29:03

Because sometimes we just assume that we have or the person that we actually have named doesn't really match anymore. I see this happen a lot when couples get married. Previously they probably had their parents down as beneficiaries. They just sort of assumed that somehow this got switched on the date of marriage, but nobody made that request. Similarly, on the way out of a relationship, once you've divided all of your property, unless some or all of these investments are somehow looped into your property division, you probably don't want to have an ex-spouse as the beneficiary of your TFSA. I'm thinking so it's a great time to kind of go through and do that cleanup and if you don't remember what you've put, your advisor can always tell you Because I'm always forgetting what I've changed and what I've done and I just phone up my advisor and she gives me this nice little summary and I feel better about myself because I know I've done it right.

Speaker 1: 30:01

Yeah, that's part of our review process with clients. For us it's kind of old hat because we do it all the time, but I had a client specifically say last year. He said can we talk about this every year Because I always forget it's like yeah, absolutely. And once you have a spouse, perhaps that passes away. It's a good time to make that change over to somebody else too.

Speaker 2: 30:19

Yes, Well, this was great. I knew it would be great. I really appreciate you coming on. Anybody listening. Please check out Evan's podcast. It's really good. Evan takes the same approach that I've taken to my podcast, which is we're speaking to you in a way that we're trying to give you foundational principles so that you can go forth and empower yourself to speak to your advisors and get things done. It's very interesting to hear some of the items that he's speaking about. So he has talked about EFTs in his podcast. I saw that one come through and he's got a great episode on how to use the my Account with CRA, which is also something I think we're all going to be looking at here in the next little bit as we get ready to file our taxes for this season. So, evan, thank you so much. It's been fun and I hope we get to do this again.

Speaker 1: 31:05

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: 31:07

Please note that the views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast episode belong solely to the speakers and are not necessarily the views of the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual. In addition, the information provided and discussed in this podcast is not legal advice. We encourage you to consult with your legal advisor for specific advice.

Speaker 1: 31:30

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Canadian Money Roadmap Podcast. Any rates of return or investments discussed are historical or hypothetical and are intended to be used for educational purposes only. You should always consult with your financial, legal and tax advisors before making changes to your financial plan. Evan Neufeld is a certified financial planner and registered investment fund advisor. Mutual funds and ETFs are provided by Sterling Mutuals Inc.