Featured Book: Essential Tax Facts: 2013 Edition

"Jacks once again proves why she is Canada's foremost expert on the Canadian tax system. This book can help you avoid overpaying taxes throughout your life to help you save money and achieve a more comfortable retirement."
- Pat Foran, CTV journalist and Consumer Reporter on Canada AM

Excerpt from Essential Tax Facts: 2013 Edition
By Evelyn Jacks

Introduction

Back in 1972, 50 years ago, Canada underwent a major tax reform under the direction of Finance Minister Edgar Benson. Coincidently, this is my 50th book about taxes and tax-efficient wealth management; a subject I started writing about 32 years ago when I was pregnant with my first child.

When you get to know a subject so deeply, over a long period of time, some insights are bound to emerge. I’d like to share some of them with you, because I am passionate about helping you keep more of your hard earned income and capital, in the aftermath of the most significant financial upheaval the modern world has seen.

The first insight is this: Knowing more about your tax system is going to pay off. It will make you richer immediately and give you more control over your financial future. For millions of people this becomes real when they file their tax returns each spring. They become richer because when they are sure they have used all the tax deductions and credits they’re entitled to, and they get the biggest tax refund possible, they can focus on building tax-efficient wealth, because they get to work with more of their own money.

When you learn to do that, you’ll be comparatively richer, too.

That’s because the majority of taxpayers are so complacent about their tax affairs that they are willing to prepay and overpay them every two weeks all year long, without earning a cent for it! They happily provide the government with an interest-free loan of their gross wages, and then rejoice at the size of their tax refund in the spring.

Some call that “intaxication”… the euphoria of getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your own money to start with. (Look it up—it’s in the Urban Dictionary.) Intaxicated people give up control of the first dollars they earn.

Take charge people, on the other hand, make it their business to initiate sound tax strategies to create bigger dollars to work with every day… they ”detax” if you will. “Detaxication” is important to your financial health, because everyone wants more of your dollars these days, including debt-burdened governments.

A second insight begins there. In response to difficult times, governments are once again adding “super taxes” on six figure taxable incomes, which is an easy thing to shrug off at first glance, if your income is nowhere near that. Most people have no trouble with the concept of increasing taxes on the rich.

But here’s the big secret no one is talking about: in the absence of the general averaging provisions Finance Minister Benson introduced with his tax hikes of 50 years ago, today’s “super taxes” are an immediate tax on your inheritances. There are millions of dollars in unspent pension accumulations and accrued capital gains. Last surviving spouses—widows and widowers who have frugally saved and worried about having enough for their entire lifetimes—will now leave close to 50% (or more in some cases) to their biggest beneficiary—government—upon their deaths.

If this concerns you, and it should, because it can well be that your financial future is at risk, it’s time to take charge. This book will help you unlock the essential tax facts you need to know to pay only the correct amount of tax on your income. At the same time, it will teach you a few simple strategies for the tax-efficient accumulation, growth, preservation and transitioning of your savings, to keep more of them in the family, so future generations can build on your financial legacy.

Tax secrets, strategies and essential tax facts: knowing more about them will help you reward yourself with self-reliance: that is, the peace of mind of knowing there is enough for you and your loved ones to live your life with both dignity and fun! That’s what motivated me to learn more about tax 32 years ago and it’s been an interesting and rewarding journey I hope you too will embark on and benefit from in this new financial world filled with new tax and pension reforms.

Copyright © 2013 Evelyn Jacks Productions.