Cut tax while cashing in a whole life policy + MORE Apr 22nd

Q: My question is about whole life insurance. My wife and I both have policies. her cash surrender value with paid up additions is around $200,000. My policy is about $190,000. We have no children. We both have pension plans and comfortable assets. We are looking at surrendering one if not both insurance plans. Do you have any suggestions to help minimize the share the taxman will get?
—Roy

A: Roy, to start I would verify the Adjusted Cost Base of the policy and the amount of the Taxable Gain if the policy is surrendered. You can get the information from the insurance company that sold you the policy and I would request a response in writing. This is just good practice and the insurance company is less likely to make a mistake if you put it in writing.

You may also be able to to do a dividend withdrawal which allows you to maintain the coverage and still take out money from your policy. In general, whole life policies have two parts—a guaranteed cash value (that you need to cash in the policy to get, or alternatively, get a loan against) or “dividends”, which is an amount that has built up over the years that you are able to withdraw without surrendering the policy…

“Grandma’s house” has three tiny chairs with woven seats. At one time, one each was for Justin, Sacha and Michel, gifts from Fidel Castro to Pierre Trudeau on a family trip to Cuba. The artifacts now blend into the rest of the grandchild-sized furniture.
Margaret Trudeau retires this month from her philanthropy work, stepping down as honorary president of WaterAid Canada, the international not-for-profit where she served for the last decade and half. Any future humanitarian trips will be personal ones, taken quietly, without the press. At 69, she lives in a Montreal apartment, normalized by her cat laser toy and achy meniscus, a woman who spent the ‘70s as the wife of the prime minister and who will spend her 70s as the mother of one.
Retirement is long-awaited. Trudeau started volunteering 22 years ago, after the end of her second marriage to Fried Kemper. While chaperoning a field trip to a museum with her then-six-year-old daughter, Alicia, she saw a booth for WaterAid, prompting Margaret to travel to West Africa with the organization building wells and latrines…

As a veteran financial advisor, T. E. Wealth senior vice president Warren Baldwin often regaled clients with his “glide path” approach to semi-retirement and gradual retirement. As noted in our review of Clay Gillespie’s book, Create the Retirement You Want, retirement is a gradual process, not a single event, and consists of several stages.
At 66, Baldwin is on his own personal “glide path” to retirement, retrenching to roughly a day a week of work or a few hours at a time here and there: acting on the advice he has dispensed to clients hundreds of times before.
When used in the context of airplanes and flight, glide path is a familiar image that Baldwin’s clients easily understand. His own “glide path” to semi-retirement began three and a half years ago. “Maybe it takes five years because it takes two years to plan and get your mind around it. For me, it was coming up three years ago, when I was 63. The timing was right.”
Another way to describe this is the “Work Optional” stage of life, a term popularized by Emeritus Retirement Solutions’ Doug Dahmer…

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes part in an event marking the completion of masonry work on West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, February 1, 2017. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)
The bill to enable the Trudeau government’s proposed infrastructure bank has been introduced in the House of Commons. It must be one of the Liberals’ biggest and most poorly understood projects: $35 billion from Ottawa as seed money, to attract potentially hundreds of billions from large investors for major new infrastructure projects.
A federal source told Maclean’s the structure of the bank and its location—a political hot potato, since mayors including Montreal’s and Calgary’s have been quick to announce that their cities are natural locations for the bank’s head office—will be announced within “weeks.”
Which means that important decisions over the bank’s structure, mandate and operations need to be decided soon. Which helps explain why the head of one of Canada’s largest pension funds was quite talkative when I put these questions to him…