Month: July 2026

What Your Cottage Will Actually Cost Your Kids

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Quiet wooden cabin on a Canadian lake at sunrise with a dock, canoe, and Muskoka chair, representing vacation property succession planning

The $150,000 Surprise Waiting in Your Family’s Cabin

There’s a moment that happens at a lot of family lake properties, usually near the end of a long weekend. Someone looks out at the water and says something like, “This place has to stay in the family.” Everyone nods. Nobody says anything else, and that’s usually where the planning ends.

Central and Eastern Canada calls it the cottage. Here in the West, we call it the cabin. Different word, same problem. It’s the property nobody wants to talk about losing, and the one families are least prepared to actually keep.

I understand the hesitation. This isn’t just a line item to most families. It’s where the kids learned to swim, where someone taught everyone to play crib at that same table, where the same board games have lived in the same cupboard for thirty years. Talking about what happens to it after Mom and Dad are gone feels like inviting the ending into the room.

But here’s what I see over and over. The families who avoid the conversation don’t protect the cottage. They just hand their kids a hard decision and a tax bill nobody warned them about.

The tax bill that shows up uninvited

Canada doesn’t have an inheritance tax, and that fact alone convinces a lot of families the cottage passes down free and clear. But it doesn’t work that way.

When someone dies, the CRA treats them as having sold everything they owned at fair market value the moment before death, even though nothing actually sold. It’s called a deemed disposition, and for a property that’s been in the family for decades, the number can be a shock.

Say your parents bought a lake property in 1985 for $120,000, and it’s worth $850,000 today. That’s a $730,000 capital gain sitting on their final tax return. Half of it, $365,000, gets added to their income for that year. Depending on the province and their other income, the tax owing can land somewhere between $160,000 and $200,000. Sometimes more.

And here’s the part that catches families off guard: that bill comes due before anyone inherits anything. If the estate doesn’t have the cash, something has to be sold to cover it. Often, that something is the cabin itself. The family doesn’t lose it because anyone wanted to sell. They lose it because nobody planned for the tax.

When Raymond got the call from the accountant
Raymond and his two sisters inherited the family cabin at Sylvan Lake when their mother passed. Their parents bought it for $95,000 in the early nineties. It appraised at $780,000. The accountant walked Raymond through the final return: the deemed disposition put over $340,000 of taxable income on his mother’s last filing, and the estate owed roughly $150,000 in tax. The estate’s bank accounts held about $60,000. The siblings had ninety days to come up with the difference or list the cabin. They listed the cabin.

The part parents don’t expect: the kids may not even want it

Here’s something I’ve noticed working with families over the years; it’s usually the parents who are attached to the cottage, not the kids.

The parents built the memories there. They spent thirty summers doing the dock repairs, the dinners, the traditions. To them, the cottage is the family. But their adult kids often have a different life entirely. One lives across the country. Another has a young family and no time for property upkeep two hours away. A third genuinely loves the place but can’t afford a third of the taxes and the new septic system it’s going to need.

Parents assume the kids will want what they wanted. Often, they won’t, not in the same way. And that gap between what Mom and Dad hope for and what the next generation actually has the time, money, or desire for is where a lot of these plans fall apart. It’s worth having that conversation honestly, before it’s written into a will as a foregone conclusion.

The fallacies that cost families the most

Fear makes a terrible planner. When the capital gains changes were proposed back in 2024, I watched families rush into decisions based on headlines. Some of those decisions can’t be undone. So let’s clear up the myths doing the most damage.

“The new higher capital gains rate means we have to act now.” No. The proposed increase to the inclusion rate was cancelled entirely in March 2025. The rate is still 50%, right where it’s been for years. If you’re reading advice from 2024 that references a 66.67% inclusion rate, it’s describing rules that never took effect. Families who transferred properties in a panic during that window triggered real tax bills to dodge a change that never happened.

“We’ll just gift it to the kids and skip the tax.” The CRA doesn’t recognize gifting as a way around capital gains. Any transfer below fair market value is treated as if it happened at fair market value. Gift the cabin to your daughter today, and you owe tax on the full gain today, exactly as if you’d sold it to a stranger. Gifting only changes the timing, not the bill.

“We renovated constantly, so the gain can’t be that big.” Renovations reduce the gain, but only capital improvements count: a new roof, an addition, a rebuilt dock. Painting, repairs, and general maintenance don’t. And the burden of proof is on you. The CRA routinely denies cost base increases that aren’t backed by receipts. Thirty years of improvements with no paperwork looks, to the CRA, like thirty years of nothing.

“Adding the kids to the title avoids all of this.” Putting children on title as joint owners can sidestep probate, but the transfer itself usually triggers a partial capital gain right away. It also exposes the cabin to your kids’ lives: their creditors, their divorces, their financial troubles. A cabin on your son’s title becomes an asset in your son’s divorce.

The planning tools that actually work

None of this means the cabin is doomed. It means it needs a plan, and real options exist.

Life insurance sized to the tax bill. For a lot of families, this is the simplest fix. A policy that pays out on the second parent’s death, sized to cover the estimated capital gains tax, gives the estate the cash to pay CRA without selling anything. The cabin stays. It’s not glamorous, but it solves the exact problem that forces most sales.

Trusts, with eyes open. Parents over 65 can move a property into certain trusts without triggering immediate tax, which buys time and control. But trusts come with a built-in deadline: a deemed disposition every 21 years. A trust isn’t a way to avoid the tax forever. It’s a way to choose when and how the family deals with it.

Gradual transfer. Transferring partial interests to adult children over several years spreads the gain across multiple tax years, often at lower rates than one lump hit on a final return. It takes discipline and good advice, but it turns one crushing bill into several manageable ones.

The principal residence question. Families with a city home and a cabin get to choose which property the exemption shelters, year by year. If the cabin has grown in value faster than the house, designating the cabin may save more tax. That’s a calculation worth doing with a professional before the will gets finalized, not a guess.

The fight nobody plans for

Money is only half of it. The other half is what happens between the kids once the cottage actually lands on their plate.

Leave it to three siblings equally, without any framework, and you haven’t given them a gift. You’ve given them a negotiation, at the worst possible time, with no rules attached.

The courts are full of these stories. Verbal promises about who gets the cottage. Title transferred to some kids and not others. Wills that never mention the arrangement everyone assumed was understood. These cases drag on for years, cost tens of thousands in legal fees, and end relationships that a single signed document could have saved.

When Keiko asked her brothers to write the rules themselves
Keiko’s parents wanted their Muskoka cottage to go to all three kids. Instead of just writing it into the will, her father asked the three of them to draft a sharing agreement first: who pays what, who gets which weeks, what happens if someone wants out. Keiko and her older brother had a working draft in a month. Her younger brother read it and admitted he didn’t actually want the cottage. He wanted the equivalent value from the estate instead. It made for an awkward dinner. It was also the cheapest dispute resolution the family ever paid for, because it happened while their parents were alive and could still adjust the will.

That’s the strategy I like best: have the next generation draft the co-ownership agreement themselves, before anything transfers. If they can’t agree on paper while everyone’s healthy and talking, they won’t agree at the lawyer’s office after a funeral. And if the exercise reveals that one kid doesn’t actually want the cabin, that’s not a failure. That’s the plan doing its job.

A good agreement covers cost sharing, a usage schedule, how repairs get decided, what happens when someone wants out, and how disputes get settled.

Where you live changes the math

The province matters too. Here in Alberta, there’s no estate administration tax, just flat court fees capped at a few hundred dollars regardless of estate size. An Ontario family with the same cottage faces probate fees of roughly 1.5% of the estate’s value, which is why Ontario cottage owners often use strategies like multiple wills that make no sense out here. Quebec runs on different concepts entirely. Advice that’s perfect in one province can be pointless in another, so make sure whoever’s guiding you knows the rules where the property actually sits.

If your family keeps avoiding or circling this conversation without landing anywhere, The Will Blueprint™ walks you through exactly the decisions above, who inherits, how it’s structured, what to flag for your lawyer. You’ll walk into that appointment with your thinking done and your questions ready, instead of paying hourly rates to figure out what you want. Find it with all my planning tools at nexsteps.ca/tools/.

The cabin holds the family’s best memories. It shouldn’t hold its worst fight. The families who keep it for another generation aren’t the luckiest ones or the richest ones. They’re the ones who had the conversation honestly, memories and all, and then kept talking after everyone came in off the dock.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

Locked Out: What Happens to Your Digital Life When You Die

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Man locked out of his late father's online accounts, laptop showing an account locked screen beside estate documents and a crypto wallet balance

The Digital Side of Estate Planning

When Arjun Mehta’s father died in the fall, the funeral was the least of his problems. His dad’s line of credit payment was due in four days, and the only way into the bank’s site was a two-factor code sent to an email account Arjun couldn’t open. He later learned his dad had set up a Google Inactive Account Manager years earlier, naming a friend Arjun had never met as the one who’d eventually get access, long after any four-day window would have mattered.

That’s the story most people don’t hear until it happens to them. We plan for the house, the bank accounts, the car. Almost nobody plans for the version of themselves that lives online, and the gap between what people assume happens to their digital accounts and what actually happens can catch even the most prepared families off guard.

The assumption that trips everyone up

Most people picture their executor logging into an account the same way they would: type in a password, see everything, done. In reality, an executor’s authority comes from a grant of probate, and that authority is meant to extend to every asset in the estate, including digital ones. The problem is that privacy law and platform terms of service don’t always agree with that. An executor can have every legal right to an account and still get turned away.

Canada doesn’t have a national framework for this the way some other countries do. What exists instead is a patchwork: a handful of provinces with legislation, a few court decisions that are starting to push back on uncooperative platforms, and a lot of families left to figure it out account by account.

Where executors get stuck

Cryptocurrency is the sharpest example of this problem, because access depends entirely on how the asset was held. If it sat on an exchange, an executor can generally file a death claim with a death certificate and probate documents, much like closing a brokerage account. If it was self-custodied in a wallet, the private keys are the only way in, and if those keys are not accessible, there’s no customer service line to call to recover them.

When Léa Fontaine was 34…
her partner died unexpectedly, and she knew he’d been putting money into Bitcoin for a few years. She just didn’t know where. She found a hardware wallet in a drawer, but no password, no seed phrase, nothing written down anywhere. Months later, she’s still not certain how much was there or whether it’s gone for good.

Crypto investors got a national-scale lesson in this when Gerald Cotten, founder of what was once Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, died suddenly in 2018. He was the only person who knew the passwords to the exchange’s cold wallets. According to his widow’s affidavit filed in the bankruptcy proceedings, roughly $250 million CAD in customer crypto was left locked away, unreachable by anyone else. It’s an extreme case, but the underlying problem, one person holding the only key, plays out in ordinary estates every day.

Email, cloud storage, and social media hinge on whatever tools the platform happens to offer, and this is where Arjun’s story matters most. Google has an Inactive Account Manager. Apple has a Digital Legacy program. Facebook has a Legacy Contact. Under the model legislation several provinces are working from, whichever instruction came most recently takes priority. So someone who names a digital executor in their will, then years later sets up an Inactive Account Manager and forgets about it, has narrowed what that executor can do.

Subscriptions and online banking are the least dramatic and the most time-consuming. Executors typically need a death certificate and proof of their authority just to close an account or access a balance, and with dozens of small recurring accounts, the paperwork adds up fast even when nothing valuable is at stake.

That paperwork assumes the executor already knows what they’re looking for. Often they don’t. Without a list, an executor is left piecing things together from paper statements, old emails, and whatever recurring charges show up on a bank statement after the fact. A streaming subscription might keep billing a credit card that’s still active without anyone noticing. A second bank account at a smaller institution might never show up at all, because there’s no central registry that tells an executor where someone banked. Account numbers, in particular, are rarely written down anywhere, which means even a cooperative bank often needs the executor to prove the account exists before they’ll discuss it, not the other way around.

How this shifts by province

Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick have all passed legislation that gives an appointed executor or attorney a clear right to deal with digital assets, similar to how they’d handle any other property. Most other provinces still have nothing specific on the books, which means the default is whatever the platform’s own terms of service happen to say.

Alberta hasn’t passed anything yet, but movement is happening on two fronts. The Alberta Law Reform Institute recommended in 2024 that the province adopt this kind of legislation, confirming an executor’s existing authority already extends to digital accounts. Then this spring, in a case called Wada Estate, the Court of King’s Bench affirmed that tech companies are bound by a grant of administration just like anyone else, and shouldn’t be allowed to slow down an estate simply because the asset happens to be digital. The law isn’t on the books yet, but the courts are already moving in that direction.

When Priyanka Osei was 58…
she was named executor for her sister’s estate and assumed the grant of probate would open every door. It opened most of them. One overseas subscription service simply refused to respond to anything, probate included, and there was no local court to compel it. She eventually let it go. Some things stay out of reach, and knowing that ahead of time would have saved her weeks of frustration.

British Columbia has no specific framework either. Its estate legislation predates cryptocurrency and cloud computing entirely, so digital assets get handled under general property law, with a grant of probate theoretically covering them even though platforms don’t always see it that way.

What makes a difference

Legal authority usually isn’t the obstacle anymore, especially with courts starting to push back the way they did in Wada Estate. What trips executors up is not knowing an account exists in the first place.

A few things consistently make the difference:

  • A current, maintained list of accounts and where they’re held, updated as things change, not written once and forgotten.
  • For crypto specifically, the location of wallets and keys matters more than anything written in the will itself.
  • Passwords never belong in the will. Wills become public documents through probate, so credentials need a separate, secure home.
  • Platform tools like an Inactive Account Manager or Legacy Contact should be set up to match what the will says.

This is what In Plain Sight™ was built for: one place to record every account, every asset, every digital detail your executor will need, so none of it depends on someone finding a hardware wallet in a drawer or guessing at a password. It’s part of the full planning toolkit.

Getting it all in one place

Once you’ve built your In Plain Sight record, it exports as both a PDF and a downloadable file, so however you choose to store it, the record itself travels with you.

Where you keep that finished document matters too. A fireproof home safe works. A safety deposit box works. Some people also choose to store the completed file in an encrypted online vault, like the one offered by InheritIQ, so it’s accessible the moment it’s needed instead of locked away somewhere only they know about.

Arjun eventually got into his dad’s accounts, days later than he needed to. His dad had done almost everything right. He just hadn’t connected the will to the accounts themselves, and that is what catches most families off guard.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

She Paid Mom’s Bills for Years Until the Bank Froze the Account.

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Adult daughter helping manage bills for aging parent, power of attorney planning

You’ve Been Handling Your Parent’s Finances for Years. You May Have No Legal Authority to Do Any of It.

Colette had a system. Every second Tuesday, she’d sit at her mother’s kitchen table with the mail sorted into three piles: bills to pay, statements to file, and anything from the government that needed a phone call. She’d been doing it for eighteen months, ever since her mom’s eyesight got bad enough that reading a hydro bill became too difficult.

Nobody had ever questioned it. Colette knew her mother’s account numbers. She knew the answers to the security questions. She’d sat next to her mom on speakerphone with the bank so many times that one of the tellers at the branch knew her by name and would wave her through to the counter.

Then her mother had a fall in March. Nothing catastrophic, a hairline fracture and a few weeks of rehab, but it was enough that Colette needed to move some money around to cover a private caregiver while her mom recovered. She called the bank the way she always did.

This time, the answer was different. The account was flagged. Her mother’s cognitive assessment from the hospital had been noted in a routine records request, and the bank’s compliance team wanted proof that Colette had legal authority to act on the account before releasing another dollar. Not proof that she’d been doing it responsibly. Not proof that her mother trusted her. Proof that the law said she could.

Colette didn’t have it. Nobody had ever put it in writing.

What actually gives someone authority

Being a name on a joint account, having a debit card, or knowing someone’s PIN isn’t legal authority. Neither is a phone call where your parent tells the bank “she can handle this for me.” Financial institutions rely on those informal arrangements every day, right up until something changes, whether it’s a health scare, a large or unusual transaction, or simply a staff member following a compliance rule that didn’t used to get enforced as strictly.

The document that actually grants authority is an Enduring Power of Attorney or a Power of Attorney for Finance.  It’s called different things in different jurisdictions, but the authority it grants is the same. It’s a legal instrument your parent signs while they’re mentally capable, naming someone (often called an attorney, though no law degree is required) to manage their financial and legal affairs. It can take effect immediately or only once a doctor confirms incapacity, depending on how it’s drafted. Once it’s in place, a bank, a pension provider, or a government office has something concrete to check against. Without it, they have no legal basis to let anyone but the account holder make decisions, no matter how long that person has been doing the work.

This is the part that so often catches families off guard. A POA isn’t a formality for people who don’t trust each other. It’s the mechanism that lets trust actually function once a bank or a government office needs proof instead of a phone call.

A closer look: When Tariq’s father was hospitalized after a stroke, Tariq assumed his years of managing his dad’s online banking would count for something. The hospital needed consent for a treatment decision tied to a life insurance policy, and the insurer wanted documentation, not a son’s word. Without a POA on file, Tariq spent three days getting a lawyer to draft an emergency application while decisions that should have taken an hour sat unresolved.

Why adding your name to the account isn’t the fix

A lot of families think they’ve already solved this by adding an adult child to a parent’s bank account as a joint holder. It feels like the practical shortcut: no lawyer, no paperwork, just a form at the branch. And it does give that child access to move money and pay bills, which is exactly why so many people think that’s a solution.

But a joint account isn’t the same thing as legal authority to manage a parent’s affairs, and it comes with its own set of problems. Legally, a joint account holder owns the funds, not just the ability to access them. That can create real complications if your parent later needs to qualify for certain government benefits, if there’s a dispute among siblings about how the money was used, or if you have creditors of your own who could, in some provinces, claim against funds sitting in an account with your name on it. It also doesn’t cover anything outside that one account. It says nothing about your parent’s investments, their pension, their tax filings, or any decision that requires someone to act on their behalf rather than simply move money they already have access to.

An Enduring Power of Attorney does what a joint account can’t. It authorizes someone to act in your parent’s name across the full scope of their financial and legal affairs, without transferring ownership of anything. Your parent stays the owner. You become the person legally permitted to manage things on their behalf, with the authority to prove it when an institution asks.

Why “we’ll get to it” doesn’t work

The reason so many families end up here isn’t neglect. It’s timing. A POA is easy to talk yourself out of when everything still feels manageable. Your parent is still driving, still remembers birthdays, still seems like themselves. Setting up legal paperwork can feel like planning for a version of them that hasn’t arrived yet, and bringing it up can feel like an accusation: I think you’re declining.

But a POA can only be signed while your parent has the legal capacity to understand what they’re agreeing to. Once a diagnosis, a fall, or a hospital stay changes that, the option is gone. At that point the only path forward is a court application for guardianship or trusteeship, which is slower, more expensive, and in most provinces requires a judge to weigh in on decisions your parent could have made themselves in twenty minutes with a lawyer.

The families who avoid the freeze, the delay, the court process, are the ones who treat the POA as something you set up while things are calm, not something you scramble for once they aren’t.

If you’re the one who’s already doing the work, whether that’s bill payments, appointment scheduling, or fielding calls from your parent’s bank, the conversation about formalizing it doesn’t need to be difficult. It can start as simply as asking what would happen if you weren’t available for a week. That question tends to answer itself.

Where to start

Our tool Who Speaks for You?™ walks a family through exactly what a Power of Attorney needs to cover and helps you prepare for that conversation with a lawyer instead of walking in unsure of what to ask. And because financial authority is only half the picture, Your Voice Your Care™ does the same for a Personal Directive, the document that lets someone make health and personal care decisions if your parent can’t communicate them directly. Together, they cover the two gaps that leave families stuck: money and medical care.

Colette got her mother’s POA sorted three weeks after the account freeze. It took one appointment with a lawyer and a signature. She still wonders what would have happened if the fall had been worse, and the account had stayed locked for longer than a brief appointment could fix.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions  or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

Why Don’t Most Canadians Have an Estate Plan?

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Estate planning documents and notes on a kitchen table, representing the gap between intention and action in Canadian estate planning.

They Keep Saying They’ll Get to It, But Most Never Do.

Marcus and Keiko had been together for eleven years. They owned a home, had two kids in elementary school, and both worked full time. They were organized people. They budgeted. They had RESPs. Every so often, usually after hearing something on the news or after a friend mentioned a difficult probate situation, one of them would say, “We really should get our wills done.” The other would agree. Then the week would fill up again, and the conversation would quietly disappear.

They’re not unusual. They’re the majority.

A new study from IG Wealth Management, released in May 2026, surveyed 1,024 adult Canadians and found that 84 percent say having an estate plan is important. But only 41 percent actually have one. That’s not a knowledge gap. People know they need a plan. So what’s getting in the way?

The awareness is there. The follow-through is not.

When nearly everyone agrees that something matters and fewer than half have done it, the problem isn’t information. It’s resistance; the kind of resistance that builds up around anything that feels big, complicated, and uncomfortable all at the same time. Estate planning lives at the intersection of money, mortality, and family dynamics. That combination is uniquely good at making people look away.

There’s also a timing problem. Estate planning rarely feels urgent in the conventional sense. No deadline arrives. No one sends a reminder. Life simply continues, and the task waits.

The IG study also found a specific gap around charitable giving. Sixty-eight percent of Canadians believe charitable giving should be part of an estate plan. Fewer than a third have formally discussed that intention with an advisor or their family. They have the wish. They haven’t taken the step that would give their wish any legal authority.

What’s actually stopping people?

Most people who haven’t completed an estate plan aren’t uninformed. They’re stuck. When you take a deeper look at where the sticking point is, a few things tend to come up.

The first is not knowing where to start. People picture a lawyer’s office, a stack of documents, and a series of decisions they don’t feel equipped to make. They’re not sure what they actually need. They don’t know what questions to bring.

The second is not knowing what they want. It’s hard to book an appointment to discuss your wishes if you haven’t sorted out what your wishes are. Who raises your children if something happens to both of you? How do you want your assets divided? What happens to the business? These aren’t questions with obvious answers, and sitting down to formalize them when they’re still unresolved feels like walking into a test unprepared.

The third is avoidance. The topic involves thinking about your own death, or incapacity, or the possibility of a spouse dying first. Most people would rather not spend a weeknight on that.

None of these are unreasonable responses. They’re human responses. But they have consequences, and those consequences are rarely felt by the person who delayed. They’re felt by the family left to sort things out.

It’s not just a will.

Here’s something worth understanding: an estate plan isn’t just a will. It includes who manages your finances if you’re incapacitated. It includes your healthcare wishes and who speaks for you if you can’t. It includes beneficiary designations on registered accounts and insurance policies that pass completely outside your will. It includes how your executor is going to know what you own and where to find it.

Each of those areas has decisions attached to it. And most people haven’t thought them through in any structured way.

That’s not a criticism. It’s simply what happens when a topic feels overwhelming and there’s no clear place to begin.

What a real first step looks like.

The first step in estate planning isn’t booking a lawyer. It’s getting clear on what areas need your attention and what decisions each one actually requires.

A lawyer documents your choices and makes them legally binding. But they need you to show up with some sense of what you want to accomplish. If you haven’t done that thinking, you work it out in real time at billable rates, and you often still leave the appointment with things unresolved.

Two tools in the NEXsteps Planning Toolkit are built for exactly that preparatory stage. Both are jurisdiction-specific, covering all thirteen Canadian provinces and territories, so the guidance reflects the rules where you actually live.

Estate Architect™ is a comprehensive, self-guided tool that walks you through every major area of estate planning: wills and trusts, powers of attorney and incapacity planning, personal directives, beneficiary designations, executor roles and responsibilities, and tax considerations including deemed disposition and probate fees. Built-in Q&A guides you through the questions that tend to come up along the way. It works whether you haven’t started yet or have existing documents you’re not sure still fit your life. At the end, you’ll have a clear picture of where things stand and a more informed starting point for the conversations that matter.

The Will Blueprint™ goes deeper on the will itself. It takes you through twelve sections, from jurisdiction and personal information to executor selection, guardianship for minor children, asset overview, estate distribution, and specific wishes. As you work through it, the tool flags issues that need attention before you meet a lawyer. When you’re done, you can print or save a summary to bring to your appointment, a complete record of your answers and every flag the tool raised, so nothing gets missed at the table.

Neither tool replaces legal advice. They’re the preparation that makes the professional conversation actually worthwhile.

When Diane finally sat down before her appointment

She’d booked the lawyer meeting under pressure, knowing it was overdue. But she wasn’t ready. She didn’t know who she’d name as executor, hadn’t thought through what would happen to her condo, and had no idea her beneficiary designation on her RRSP was still her ex-husband’s name. She spent two evenings working through The Will Blueprint, section by section: her family situation, her assets, her executor, her estate distribution wishes. The tool flagged four issues she hadn’t considered, including the RRSP designation. She printed the summary and walked into the appointment with it in hand.

Based on the IG Wealth Management study, nearly 20 million Canadians are in the same place Marcus and Keiko are, waiting for the right moment, or the right prompt, or enough clarity to feel ready. The data confirms that being in the majority on this one isn’t where you want to be.

Getting clear on where you stand is a place to start. That part doesn’t require a lawyer’s appointment.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

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