One product, three entirely different jobs
Most arguments about life insurance go nowhere because the two sides are discussing different things. It can be a safety net for a family, an asset that compounds tax-sheltered, or a route for money to leave a corporation and reach the family without tax.
Those three jobs need different products and are judged by different standards. What follows is sorted by the question you arrived with, not by product name.
Would my family be alright?
The first job of a policy, and the only one most people are ever sold. It is also the easiest to get wrong in the direction of buying the wrong kind rather than too little.
The complete guide to life insurance in Canada
Term, whole life, universal life — what each is actually for, and how to tell which argument is being made to you.
Policy options, in plain language
Riders, conversion privileges and the options that quietly decide what the contract is worth a decade later.
Insurance for children — parents first
Why a policy on a child is rarely the right first purchase, and the case where it genuinely is.
Capital protection
The service page: how we structure protection around what you already have.
Is a policy an asset, or just an expense?
A participating whole life policy accumulates cash value that compounds tax-sheltered and can be borrowed against. That is a real financial instrument — and it is also slow, illiquid early, and expensive if abandoned. Both halves are true.
Why whole life gets called a financial instrument
The mechanics behind the claim, and the conditions under which it stops being true.
How to read a par whole life illustration
The single most useful skill for anyone being shown one. Which columns are guaranteed, which are a projection, and where the assumption is hiding.
Capital you cannot touch
The long one. How permanent insurance behaves as an asset class over decades, next to the alternatives.
My money is stuck inside my corporation.
This is where insurance stops being about protection and starts being about tax. Corporately-owned policies interact with the capital dividend account, and that interaction is the reason this strategy exists at all.
Corporate life insurance, the CDA, and the Smith Manoeuvre
How the capital dividend account turns a corporate policy into a tax-free pipe to the family.
Shareholder borrowing against a corporate policy — does it hold up?
The structure, the guarantee fee CRA expects, and the conditions under which it fails.
Immediate Financing Arrangement (IFA)
Funding a policy without giving up the use of the capital. Who it fits and who it does not.
Retirement & legacy
The service page: how the pieces fit together across retirement and what follows it.
Run it on your own numbers
Reading only ever gets you someone else's example. Both of these run on your figures, and both are willing to return the answer that it does not work.
Shareholder borrowing calculator
Borrow against a corporate policy, or sell shares and pay a dividend? Runs both to age 90 on your numbers — and will show the strategy failing when the numbers say so.
Investment loan calculator
The leverage side of the same question, priced with your own marginal rate.
Don't take our word for it
Primary sources from the regulators and the tax authority. We gain nothing from these and they will not agree with everything we say, which is rather the point of listing them.
Life insurance — Financial Consumer Agency of Canada
The federal consumer regulator's own plain-language explainer. Neutral, and it names the questions to ask.
Assuris — what is protected if an insurer fails
The industry-funded protection scheme for Canadian policyholders. Worth knowing the limits before you need them.
OSFI — Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions
The federal regulator supervising the insurers whose contracts these are.
CRA Income Tax Folio S3-F6-C1 — Interest Deductibility
The CRA's current position on when borrowed-money interest is deductible. The source, not a summary of it.
Wallace Wang Financial Services holds LLQP licensing (life insurance and segregated funds) across five provinces, carries errors-and-omissions coverage and a FundServ code. We are not securities-licensed; nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell a security, and none of it is tax advice. Policy terms are governed by the contract issued by the insurer.