Creating cash flow from home equity (July 2022)
If Canadians have the feeling that they are being squeezed from all sides when it comes to household finances, it’s because they are. In 2022 Canadian consumers have been hit by a double whammy of t...
Disputing your Notice of Assessment (June 2022)
Of the 27 million individual income tax returns already filed with the Canada Revenue Agency for the 2021 tax year, no two were identical. Each return contained its own particular combination of types...
How to not fall victim to a tax scam (April 2022)
It is a sad fact that, every year, thousands of Canadians become the victims of scams in which fraud artists claim to be representatives of the federal government. Equally sadly, in most cases the mon...
How to pay your taxes for 2021 (April 2022)
Our tax system is complex and, understandably, its myriad rules and exceptions are a mystery to most Canadian taxpayers – and most are happy to leave it that way. There is however, one rule in the C...
Claiming medical expenses for 2021 (March 2022)
The Canadian tax system provides individual taxpayers with a tax credit for out-of-pocket medical and para-medical expenses incurred during the year. Given that such expenses must be incurred at some ...
What’s new on the return for 2021? (March 2022)
While the requirement that Canadians file an income tax return each year never changes, the actual content of that return is never the same year to year. While many of the changes — like inflation-r...
Claiming the Canada Child Benefit (August 2019)
Raising children is expensive and, in recognition of that fact, the federal government has, for more than half a century, provided financial assistance to parents to help with those costs. That assist...
More debt … and more interest (February 2019)
The fact that debt levels of Canadian households have been increasing over the past decade and a half can’t really be called news anymore. In particular, the ratio of debt-to-household-income, which...
The tax scam that won’t go away (October 2018)
Tax scams have been around, probably, for about as long as Canada has had a tax system. They also have a tendency to proliferate at certain times of the year — often during tax return filing and ass...
Deciphering your Notice of Assessment (June 2018)
By the middle of May 2018, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) had processed just over 26 million individual income tax returns filed for the 2017 tax year. Just over 14 million of those returns resulted ...
