The freezing of current share value so that your chosen successors can easily participate in the future growth of your enterprise is a common estate planning technique. What if the value of the frozen shares now exceeds the value of the enterprise as a whole? I wrote about this sometime…
Category: Investments
Total 116 Posts
During her marriage, a spouse inhabited a home wholly owned by her husband. He passed away and the house became an asset of the estate. Subsequent to her husband’s passing, the spouse purchased a new property. She had not re-married or entered into any common law partnership. Is the spouse…
In the recent case of Sokalski Estate (Re), 2019 ABQB 285, the deceased left two wills one in 2011 and the other 2017, without expressly revoking the earlier one. The estate applied to the Court for a determination regarding which document or documents form the deceased Mr. Sokalski’s last will….
Wikipedia defines cryptocurrency (or crypto currency) as a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets. Cryptocurrencies use decentralized control as opposed to centralized digital currency and central…
This blog has been written by Robert Boyd, Director, Scotiatrust. Mutual Funds, Hedge Funds and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are all well known to the general public and reasonably well understood investment vehicles, however there is a trust specific fund that has fallen out of favour in recent years, somewhat…
I was reading recently that approximately $30-trillion in assets will be shifting from one generation to the next across North America in the next few decades, according to consulting firm Accenture. A couple of years ago, I wrote about gifting cash or assets during one’s lifetime as an alternative method…
Due in particular to the outcome of some recent court cases, many have feared that formal applications to rectify plans would receive a favorable hearing only in the event of obvious clerical errors in the documentation. However a recent court case in the Supreme Court of British Columbia demonstrated that…
Control is an important concept for applying certain income tax rules and valuation issues (amongst others) when dealing with corporations, with serious implications to current and future (and estate) planning scenarios. De jure control refers to legal control of a corporation, which requires a look at shareholdings. Control in fact,…
In the past few years, many associated with this blog have written about the benefit of post-mortem pipeline transactions to avoid double tax on disposition of certain assets. Again, and briefly, a pipeline transaction is a form of transaction whereby the assets of a corporation are distributed to shareholders utilizing…
Recently, I encountered a scenario where the trustees of a family trust were planning an allocation of proceeds from a share sale transaction to the beneficiaries of trust using the lifetime capital gains exemption but it appeared that the allocated amounts would physically end up in the hands of other…