Financial Planning - Concord Insurance & Financial Planning Group Inc.

Financial Planning:

Financial planning is more than budgeting and saving. It is a process that sets you on a course to achieve your life goals through the proper management of your financial affairs. Financial planning is a disciplined, multi-step process of assessing your current financial and personal circumstances against what you desire for the future and developing strategies that help meet your personal goals, needs and priorities in a way that aims to optimize your financial position.

Financial planning varies in scope and complexity ranging from straightforward planning advice focused primarily on one financial planning area to more sophisticated forms of planning requiring extensive integration across multiple financial planning areas.

Effective financial planning takes into account the interrelationships among all aspects of your financial situation. These include:


Financial Management:


Would you like to achieve financial freedom?

Financial Management is the process of managing our finances to achieve our financial objectives. The whole objective of Financial Management is to aim at a positive cash flow at the end of the day. If this objective is not attained for any reason, then it is a clear case that there is a larger problem with the system of your financial and money management abilities.


Investment & Risk Management:


Purchasing insurance means we are reducing our risk of income loss by transferring it to an insurer for a premium. Unfortunate events such as death, disability, and illness are a financial risk for everyone daily, while risks such as fire, theft, vandalism or other forms of destruction can pose a significant financial loss. Not only will losses be financial, but they can be emotional, or psychological damaging. There is no way to eliminate risk, but we can reduce their impact on our financial well-being and on those we love by carefully preparing a risk management plan.


Investment Planning:


Are you a saver or investor?

Saving refers to the act of setting something aside for future use, accumulating something, or preserving something. If the return of saving is less than inflation, then we are taking on inflation risk.

Investing is a more active approach to wealth accumulation. It means committing capital for the purchase of property, securities, business and other firms, with the expectation of earning a profit. Investing involves an element of risk with the expected returns are compensated to the investor for taking that risk.

A proper investment plan means we need to develop a plan that takes into consideration the many factors specific to our objectives, goals, tax implications, risk and investment markets.


Retirement Planning:


The primary objective is to ensure that our standard of living is preserved when we retire.

The retirement planning process includes:

  • Preparing projections of pension incomes and use of savings to meet a target retirement income.
  • Establishing a sustainable level of target retirement income;
  • Evaluating various "what if?" scenarios to assess the impact of variations in assumptions such as inflation, life span and investment returns;
  • Evaluating alternative savings plans to accumulate the additional savings required at retirement.

Tax Planning:


The goal of tax planning is to arrange our financial affairs in the most tax-efficient manner possible. It allows the other elements of a financial plan to interact more efficiently by minimizing tax liability.


Estate Planning:


Ask yourself some of these questions. Would you rather share your wealth with the government? Do you want the government to prevent you from sharing your money to your loved ones or a designated charity of your choice? Do you want to have no ownership over any of your registered assets (RRSP, RRIF, LIRA) you have accumulated over the years?

If you answered no to all of these questions. Then there is a large possibility that you might have a problem with your estate plan or simply have not thought about your estate plan.

Did you know upon death not including the taxes you pay to the government, there are additional costs associated with settling an estate? Fees such as executor fees, probate fees, legal and administrative fees can reduce the size of an estate by as much as 50%

Did you know that when we die, our registered assets are deemed to be disposed of at fair market value and are included as income to the estate according to the government?

Your estate will lose from 39 to 50% of the value of the registered assets at death, depending on the province of residence. For residents of Ontario and Quebec, you can even expect your losses to be very close to 50%.


Compare the difference between an individual with an estate plan to one that does not.

Would you like to be told when you can dispose your own home or other assets? Solutions such as adding loved ones to our assets as joint-owners are not an effective or acceptable plan in minimizing estate tax or probate fees as according to the government, as soon you die, the ownership control is lost.

With proper estate planning, we can maintain our ownership rights; minimize taxes at death and ensure a cost-effective way for our beneficiaries to pay estate taxes and probate fees.


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