"Can we both retire at 60, and does our plan depend on Dad's money?"
She is a marketing manager at a manufacturing company and earns about $137,000 a year. She works from home and likes her job. She wants to be free at 60, partly because her parents may need her.
He works in retail distribution and earns about $113,000 a year. He wants to stop full-time work at 60 too. He is happy to keep a small part-time job after that, because he wants to, not because he has to.
They live in the Greater Toronto Area. Theirs is a blended family with children on both sides.
One goal came up in the first ten minutes. Neither side's kids should ever be forced to sell the house to settle things fairly.
They had done the hard part. Two good incomes, steady saving, and $2.24 million to show for it.
What they did not have was an answer. Nobody had ever shown them what happens after the paycheques stop, or what the gift from her father should actually do for them.
So the gift sat in the plan as a question mark. If the money was the reason they could retire at 60, that was a scary place to be.
On their current path, that is how much Old Age Security they would give up to the clawback over their lifetimes. It was the first sign that the tax bill, not the saving, was the real problem.
Two good incomes, $2.24 million saved, and a gift on the way. This is the part they could see.
$2.46 million of after-tax money for their kids, hanging on decisions nobody had made yet.
That is the whole job. The money above the line was already handled. Everything that mattered was underneath it.
Every Glacier Financial plan runs through The 57-Point Plan Review. Fifty-seven specific checks across tax, insurance, investments and estate, so nothing gets skipped because nobody thought to ask.
Here is what it turned up for them.
The common advice is to keep pulling money out of registered accounts past age 71. We ran it. For them, those extra withdrawals get taxed at about 58%, while the same money at the end of the plan is taxed at about 53.5%. So the popular move was rejected with math, not opinion.
It would have cost them $353,566They are not married or common-law yet. Income splitting only works if they are, and it starts mattering in 2031. So "get married before August 2031, it is worth real money" became a line item in the plan.
Nobody can make it disappear, and we will not pretend otherwise. What the plan does is give up $97,000 less of their Old Age Security to the clawback than leaving things alone would.
Naming a charity on the RRIF beats writing cheques from the chequing account. Roughly 50 cents of every donated dollar comes back in tax relief. They got a written giving guide with the plan.
It had a conversion option, and that option expires on his next birthday. The fix was cheap and the deadline was real. It went in the action table with a date on it.
Six levers. Nothing exotic, nothing that changed how they want to live.
Craig takes a part-time job at about $25,000 a year for five years, because he wants to. The plan does not need him to.
Waiting makes the government cheques much bigger, and those bigger cheques are paid for life and indexed to inflation.
In those years their income is low, because the paycheques have stopped and the government cheques have not started. We pull money out to a set taxable income each year, on purpose, at cheap tax rates.
Money moves out of the account that gets taxed every year and into the one that never does. Same money, better address.
Splitting it keeps the tax cost down on her father's side, and gives the plan two clean years to place the money properly.
$7,000 a year per child, every year, instead of one big cheque. It builds a habit, it keeps them out of debt, and it keeps the family plan intact.
Moves two, three and four are where the headline comes from. Delaying the government cheques, melting the RRSPs in the cheap years, and moving money into TFSAs are what produce the $2,461,231. The rest of the plan protects it.
We do not hand anyone a single answer. We build the paths side by side and let the numbers argue.
| Path | Path ADo nothing | Path B · chosenThe Plan | Path CIf the gift never comes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Funded status | 233% | 252% | 200% |
| Estate after tax | $16,714,022 | $19,175,253 | $13,802,061 |
| Difference vs doing nothing | The baseline | $2,461,231 more | Still overfunded with zero gift |
| Estate tax saved | None | $209,068 | Almost no estate tax left to pay |
| Old Age Security lost to the clawback | $771,452 | $674,031 | $41,955 |
| Their spending | $175,000 a year to 70, then $90,000 | Identical | Identical |
Spending figures are in today's dollars. Estate figures are the projected value at the end of the plan, in the dollars of that future year, so they are not comparable to money in your hand today. All three paths were run on the same model with the same assumptions.
Not a maybe and not a stretch. The plan funds the retirement they asked for, and Craig's part-time work is a choice rather than a requirement.
With zero dollars from her father, the plan is still 200% funded. The gift went from being the foundation to being a bonus, which is exactly where a gift should sit.
They had been quietly afraid to spend any of it. Once the no-gift path came back overfunded, the splurge trip stopped being a risk and became a line in the plan.
They had been carrying these questions for years. It took one honest conversation and a set of real numbers to end it.
"Freeing and shocking."
The change was not really in the spreadsheet. They came in asking permission to spend their own money, and they left planning a trip.
This is the package they received. It is the same package every planning client gets.