Finance

Now is not the time to panic. Dr. Mark Soth, the man behind the physician finance blog Loonie Doctor, discusses how the pandemic hit doctors’ incomes and what he tells physicians about saving for retirement.

There is no question globally there is a powerful movement towards passive (index) investing and the use of exchange traded funds (ETFs) as an investment vehicle to access those indices. The question is why is this happening? First, we must review the "what."

Conventional wisdom is to avoid realizing capital gains in order to defer taxation as long as possible. However, there are some times when harvesting the capital gains in a corporate investment account could actually defer tax even more.

Residents in their final year had prepared to write their certification exams[1] this spring. Then the pandemic struck. Now, with exams delayed until at least the fall, recent resident graduates are having to make some changes. In addition to having to adjust for the new exam timing and all that goes along with that, many are dealing with financial impacts as well.

Canada has finally come up with its most accurate picture of the distribution of net worth for Canadian families. The Parliamentary Budget Office released its report titled “Estimating The Top Tail Of The Family Wealth Distribution In Canada” in 2020. Here is a brief summary of what this report is all about.

Canadian physicians pay a substantial amount of income taxes. This is because of Canada’s graduated tax system, which means that the more money you earn, the higher the percentage of your income you will pay in taxes. This tax fatigue has increased in the aggregate because of the Trudeau government’s 2017 tax reform for Canadian Controlled Private Corporations (CCPCs), including medical corporations. Many physicians who were income splitting through their medical corporation can no longer save taxes using this income-splitting strategy because of the change in tax legislation.