Understanding the OAS Clawback

Seniors don’t take kindly to the clawback of their OAS (Old Age Security) especially in these inflationary times, but this can happen, especially if there was an unusual receipt of income during the past calendar year.  Here’s what you need to know to explain the consequences for 2025 and 2026:

There are lots of changes coming to retirement income planning, together with a whole new focus on how much is enough. . . a question being asked by all generations in the family.  That’s why retirement planning is really about multi-generational planning.

There are so many tax planning changes being introduced for 2016 – 2017 that tax, bookkeeping or financial services professionals may have trouble keeping up with answers to their clients’ complex questions this year.

Post-Thanksgiving reminder: "To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear." Buddha

Charities count on our support at year end. Not only is donating to a worthy cause the right thing to do, but digging deep to help others also makes good sense from a year-end tax planning point of view, especially for young, high-income earners.

The Distinguished Advisor Workshops soon to be running across Canada will discuss a major change in reporting or principal residence dispositions that will affect Canadians and the tax preparation broadly:  all principal residence dispositions must be reported on the tax return starting in 2016.

According to last month’s Knowledge Bureau Poll, the existing charitable donations tax credit could be more generous to taxpayers. So said 75% of the respondents, who also gave suggestions for improvement of the credit.  But the tax tail didn’t always wag the donation dog! Many respondents gave to charity for other reasons.