Will you have enough income
for life to retire comfortably?
Pension Plans
Your benefits
As an incorporated professional or small business owner, you can move beyond the limitations of RRSPs and fund your retirement with corporate dollars. Your choices are one or more of the following:
- Individual Pension Plan (IPP)
- Retirement Compensation Arrangement (RCA)
- Corporate Insured Retirement Plan (CIRP)
Each retirement strategy addresses different needs. Since we offer all three, we’ll help you pick the approach that’s ideal for you.
Individual Pension Plan (IPP)
An IPP gives more contribution room than an RRSP. Your corporation makes tax-deductible contributions, and a pension actuary evaluates your plan every three years to make sure you are on track.
An IPP works best if:
- You are age 40+
- You could be making the maximum contributions to your RRSP based on your employment income
- You have stable income that is unlikely to be interrupted
Flexible options
Our approach is flexible:
- Choose your benefit platform
- Defined Benefits (DB): contributions fluctuate based on your income, years of service and investment earnings
- Defined Contributions (DC): benefits fluctuate based on your contributions and the growth of the savings
- Hybrid: switch between DB and DC
- Choose your investment platform
- Conventional: a wide selection of investments managed through your current investment advisor
- Insurance: a limited selection of group segregated funds (with discounted investment charges)
- Compare with an RRSP
- Get a quote that shows a comparison with an RRSP
Retirement Compensation Arrangement (RCA)
An RCA is a specialized vehicle that is more flexible than an RRSP or IPP. An RCA can be useful if:
- Your corporation receives a large taxable lump sum (e.g., upon sale of an asset) and would benefit from larger tax deductions
- You have a short working lifetime (e.g., a professional athlete)
- You have the income to save more than an IPP or RRSP would allow
As with an IPP, the contributions are tax-deductible to your corporation, and you are not taxed until you receive the benefits. With an RCA, contributions and realized earnings are subject to a 50% withholding tax that is refunded when payments are made from the plan.
Corporate Insured Retirement Plan
The Corporate Insured Retirement Plan (sometimes called a “Corporate Insured Retirement Strategy”) is an effective way to supplement your retirement income by growing the retained earnings inside your corporation using permanent life insurance with a cash value. This is especially valuable because passive investment income is taxed at over 50%.
Life insurance allows tax-sheltered growth, tax-free access to the cash value, and the use of tax-free capital dividends to extract assets at death.
Other resources
Here are articles:
How might a pension plan help you?
To find out, reserve a private consultation.