Five Financial Products You Should Own
By Brenda Spiering, Marketing & Communications Manager, Client Solutions, for Sun Life Financial.
1. Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP)
As soon as you begin your working life, you should have a Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP). It’s one of the most tax-effective ways to save for retirement.
You’re allowed to contribute up to 18% of your earned income from the previous year to a maximum of $24,930 for 2015 and $25,370 for 2016. (If you’re a member of a group pension plan, your contribution room is reduced by your “pension adjustment,” an amount you’ll find listed on your T4.)
Contributions are tax deductible, meaning you can net a tidy tax refund while building your savings. Plus, you can turbo-charge your RRSP savings by putting that tax refund back into your RRSP as soon as you receive your cheque. Read more 
Critical Illness – Are You Protected?
Why a Doctor Invented Critical Illness Insurance
Critical Illness insurance was invented by Dr. Marius Barnard. Marius assisted his brother Dr. Christiaan Barnard in performing the first successful heart transplant in 1967 in South Africa. Through his years of dealing with cardiac patients, Marius observed that those patients that were better able to deal with the financial stress of their illness recovered more often and at much faster rate than those for whom money was an issue. He came to the conclusion that he, as a physician, could heal people, but only insurance companies could provide the necessary funds to create the environment that best promoted healing. As a result, he worked with South African insurance companies to issue the first critical illness policy in 1983. Read more
Shared Ownership Critical Illness
Shared Ownership refers to a concept where more than one party owns an interest in an insurance policy. The most common of these arrangements is where the corporation is the owner and beneficiary of the death benefit and the shareholder or employee owns the cash value of the policy.
Recently there has been growing interest in applying this strategy to a Critical Illness policy. Although the CI policy does not have cash value, there is usually an option to have a Return of premium (ROP) in the following situations: Read more
Cancer Guard
Have you had a difficult time qualifying for Critical Illness insurance, or feel you can’t work the premium into your budget? If so, there is an alternative you should consider. IA Excellence recently introduced an important product available to Canadians from birth to age 65. Cancer Guard pays a tax free benefit of up to $100,000 if you are diagnosed with a life threatening cancer. There is no medical required and the policy is issued if you can answer “no” to only 4 questions. Read more