Episode Notes

Dr. Kevin Mailo hosts Dr. Wing Lim interviewing KPMG tax lawyer Jason Pisesky, a Masterclass faculty member, about corporate structuring strategies and corporate tax planning. Jason pulls from a wealth of practical knowledge and experience to shed light on what to do and what to avoid with a PC.  

Dr. Wing Lim asks Jason to first explain the SBD, small business deduction, of $500,000 and strategies Jason advises around that amount. There are things to consider in how you structure your PC that will affect the SBD in the future, and Jason explains what those considerations are. Wing and Jason break down their discussion in ways that offer insight to physicians regardless of which career stage you’re currently in.

In this episode, you’ll learn from KPMG tax lawyer Jason Pisesky how to set up PCs between spouses in similar career fields, or with partners, that offer the structure for corporate taxes. He breaks down why it may not be the best advice to invest everything into your PC, things to consider for future sale options, and when to start a trust if you want one. Above all, Jason shares that investing and structuring with intention is the best way to plan ahead and advises talking to a professional if you haven’t started tax planning yet. 

About Jason Pisesky:

Jason’s practice covers a broad spectrum of taxation law matters including corporate, personal, farm and estate tax planning as well as representation in dispute resolution and litigation matters

Jason joined KPMG in January 2021. Prior to starting at KPMG, he spent over six years working at a leading western Canadian boutique tax law firm. Jason has experience in both the tax dispute and tax planning for both personal and corporate taxpayers.

Jason has worked with small and medium-sized owner-managed operations to reorganize structures in a tax-efficient manner, acting as counsel for vendors and purchasers in arm’s length deals as well as families in the midst of related party estate and succession planning. He has argued on behalf of taxpayers in many contexts and obtained favourable results for taxpayers from auditors, appeals officers and lawyers at the Department of Justice. Jason has appeared before the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench.

Resources Discussed in this Episode:

• Physician Empowerment Masterclass

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Contact Information:

Physician Empowerment: website | facebook | linkedin

Jason Pisesky: website | linkedin

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Transcript

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm Dr. Kevin Mailo, one of the co-hosts of the Physician Empowerment podcast. At Physician Empowerment, we're dedicated to improving the lives of Canadian physicians personally, professionally, and financially. If you're loving what you're listening to, let us know. We always want to hear your feedback. Connect with us. If you want to go further, we've got outstanding programming both in-person and online. So look us up. But regardless, we hope you really enjoy this episode.

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:00:34] All right. It looks like we've got everyone here. I am so sorry. Three years into everybody using Zoom, I still struggle with it, but we are slowly, slowly getting there. So at any rate, I want to thank everybody for joining us for the webinar tonight. I'm Kevin Mailo, one of the co-founders of the Physician Empowerment podcast. And our programming, as you know, we cover a wide spectrum of topics and today we are very, very glad to have Jason Pisesky returning back on the webinar, back on the show, to talk about tax hacks for busy physicians, busy medical professionals. And what we're going to be covering today is corporate structuring, one of the most powerful wealth creation vehicles that physicians enjoy in this country is the ability to be incorporated, to set up holding corporations. But it has to be done properly. And that's why we're bringing in an expert. So Jason is a tax attorney who works with KPMG. He is a KPMG tax attorney. And so he has an incredible, not only knowledge base, but a whole well of experience to draw on. So I'm going to be stepping back and Wing's going to be interviewing Jason. And if you like what you're hearing, you want to know more, come and join us for the Masterclass because this is what we teach. And Jason, of course, is one of our faculty members. So again, thank you, everyone, for being here tonight. And why don't I let you take it away, Wing?

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:02:02] Okay. Thank you, Kevin. Yeah. So welcome, everyone, to tonight's exciting episode. I'm Dr. Wing Lim. As most of you know me, some of you don't. I'm one of the co-hosts and co-founders of Physician Empowerment. So Jason and I went back quite a while. For those of us that haven't met Jason yet or haven't listened to a previous podcast, Jason and I went back, we were classmates on the dance floor and he was a really nice dude. He was openly admitted to be the teacher's pet. The teacher, the dance teacher, said that. He's a super nice guy with he doesn't have an ego problem. And a number of years later I went into some corporate tax planning pickle and then I dialed up his phone number and said, Hey, Jason, I think you're a lawyer, right? I think you can help me. So that's how we started to talk about a lot of these fancy corporate structuring that that he's doing on a daily basis. So welcome to the show, everyone, and welcome to the show, Jason. So Jason, so you and I were talking the other day about some good and bad stories in corporate tax planning. So you have two different cases you have in your file, in your portfolio of clients. Can you tell us the difference? And we can go from there.

Jason Pisesky: [00:03:15] Absolutely. Happy to be here. Thank you very much. And Kevin as well for the very nice intro. Thank you. So, yeah, we were chatting yesterday and just about all the different aspects, facets there are to corporate tax planning and wealth building, just some of the things I've seen. And we got talking about the issue of corporate association. So there's many different types of relationships in the Income Tax Act. There's related association, there's affiliation, there's connected, foreign affiliates, all these different terms for how different taxpayers can be linked to one another and what that means. For your small business corporation, one of the big ones is association. If you're associated, that means you have to share certain benefits. But there can be certain benefits on top of that too, to actually being. So it's not all consequences. What we were talking about was the approach to corporate investing. If you are associated corporations, you have to share the small business deduction. We talked about that a little bit in our last show. Small business deduction gets you the low rate of tax on generally the first $500,000 of income earned corporately on active business income.

Jason Pisesky: [00:04:20] So if you're associated, you have to share that amount, that 500,000. By the same token, if you're associated, I'm sorry to back up, when you earn investment income, that might start to reduce your small business deduction. Even if you're just one company and you're not sharing with anyone. And so we got talking about kind of some ways to structure around those two problems, not wanting to share, not wanting to reduce the small business deduction either. So we're talking about a client I've worked with in the past. It was two medical professionals. I've seen many ways done, many times done this way. The idea is you just have two different doctors, doctor/dentist, doctor/lawyer, and they each just have their own PC and they don't have any cross-shareholdings in each other's PC. So they just wholly owned their own. And that's the way to avoid association. Association arises once you start to own some shares of the other one, it can start to cause a problem. Not automatically, but once you cross certain percentage thresholds.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:05:20] So can we just stop there? Because I think we need to clarify this thing because not everybody may be on the same page. Right? So this is, you're talking about husband and wife. They're both professionals, let's say, pick this first case that they have both medical professionals. They both own a PC, and there are certain tax advisors, accountants would advise them, hey, you know, you can share a PC together. Right? And then so you're talking about the nuances about is this a good or a bad thing to do? Is that what we're diving into? Right.

Jason Pisesky: [00:05:49] Yeah. Or even, hey, just, you know, both of you be 50/50 shareholders in each other's PC. Just, you know, if one doctor has an up year, one has a down year, then you can maybe pay some dividends or shift or share in the growth across both of them. Yeah. So kind of a couple of different avenues to why you may get there, but the likely ideal structure is to have both of them having one PC, both of them doing their own thing, and both of them getting that full 500,000 shelter on the income until the investment base grows big enough. And then you have different problems. And what I've seen in other files is, for example, I had one where, again, it was it was two professionals. One of them had ceased kind of working and was just going to be the stay-at-home spouse. But they had kind of some cross-shareholdings. The one who had stopped working had been very successful and had built up a multi-million dollar portfolio in the PC. And then they were finding, though, that the investment income in that, call it the inactive PC, was starting to reduce the small business deduction in the active PC and starting to reduce the ability to kind of grow this tax-deferred base. Yet there's some easy steps you can go through to sever that association, to get rid of those shareholdings, change them into different shareholdings, transfer them over, repurchase them, lots of different avenues to kind of fix the problem as to for when they came to us. But yeah, and it's one of those things that happens organically, happens over time. And if you don't have that good advice at the outset, then, again, it wasn't a problem for the first, you know, three, four, five years. But after many, many years of working and building up this wealth, you start to have these relationships that maybe you didn't expect or you definitely probably don't want. So.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:07:32] Right. So I can totally relate. That's exactly us, right, some of you know, my wife and Jason definitely knows us both, and that's when I went to Jason because we had, over the years, right, we didn't have these nice seminars and webinars to go to. We didn't have the good mentors and advisors. We just bumble along the way. And before long, so I have a bunch of corporations, she has a bunch of corporations and everything collided, right? We share some of them, not all of them, and become a big spider web. And by the time we want to think about, oh, do we, can we take a SBD, small business deduction, it becomes like separating a Siamese twin, pair of twins. Right? Becomes very difficult. So what are the consequences? You talk about this erosion of the small business deduction. Can you bring everybody up to speed. This 2017, 18 new tax rule that came and stayed? How that would have impacted like this couple, this doctor / dentist couple with this erosion, what would that mean in tax load?

Jason Pisesky: [00:08:34] Absolutely. So corporations generally have a favorable tax rate, kind of no matter what your situation is. You know, at the height, again, we have this across cross-Canada audience. So the starting place, once you work through all the math, is, you know, in the low to mid 20s for the corporate tax rate, 23, 24, 25%, on active business income. We're going to talk about active business income right now, which everyone here would be earning from their medical practice. So that's your starting place. However, for small businesses, for small business corporations, there's a benefit, the small business deduction, that gives you a lower rate of tax for the first $500,000 of income. Slight variances across different provinces. Sometimes there's a provincial rate versus the federal, a different 500,000 amount. So it's not always 500,000 depending on the province you're in. But yeah, and that will drop it down to the low teens, low to mid-teens. So again, 11 to 12, 13% depending on the province you're in, and that's where the advantage comes. So you earn $100 of active business income and you don't need to take it out to spend it. Buy bonus or dividend. Then you just keep it in. And so instead of if you had maybe earned that personally, you would have paid up to 50, up to or even above 50% tax, depending on some provinces and tax rates. And then you'd only have, you know, $48 left to invest, leave it in the company and you all of a sudden might have 88, $89 to invest. So that's the advantage of having the small business deduction and why you don't want it reduced. And then but you also have to be mindful of how you are, you know, you have that $88, call it, you invest that and then it's going to start generating investment income or capital gains.

Jason Pisesky: [00:10:21] So you have to be mindful of tracking that as well, because once you have too much investment income, that can also start to reduce your small business deduction. And then there's also, the third one is there's also rules around once you reach a certain size, once you have, it's a very large amount, kind of I think it's right now 15 million and then it gets phased out slowly. So that's a far down the road concern for most. But yeah, those are the concerns of why you want it and how you start to lose it. And then planning around it is do we move those, we move those investments out of the PC, and if you're you're married and have a spouse, then you can try to put those into your spouse's hands. And like I was saying with that first example of the couples who have one corporation for one doctor, one corporation for the other, you can do the same thing if you have a spouse who doesn't have the advantage of being able to use a PC, their stay at home spouse, or they are just in a profession or a career where they don't have access to them. Which is most, then yeah, you can maybe make an investment corporation in that person's name and just figure out how to shovel all the assets into that other person's hands to go there. And then the income earned on that won't affect the small business deduction in the prime active business generating PC.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:11:39] Right, now so can I make a couple of points and observation? Number one, this husband and wife, the two spouses having separate corporations, even for yeah, medical versus non-medical corporations, right? Like for me we're not a double medical income, right? I'm a medical income. My wife has a bunch of corporations that are non-medical. But, and so this separation is not just good for tax planning for those of us, and a lot of the listeners are real estate investors, right? And when you want to apply for mortgages, you need your lending power. You know what? Everybody has a ceiling, right? Some banks, three, four, five high is probably 11 doors that they will lend you. Right? And again, we didn't know better, so we cosigned the loan for all of the properties that we had and then found that, oh-oh, when the time comes, we have capital to grow, now they say no, because you already exceeded that, right? So again, it makes sense to have husband and wife separate the corporations, right? Especially if you're going into investments, then you won't, you again have to, like double the amount of small business deduction, now you have double the amount of credit rooms to grow in the real estate empire. So that's one observation. That's not exactly tax planning. Secondly is, yeah, I have colleagues that have such a good year. They're up in the years and the stock portfolio did very well and their, I think their passive income that year I think exceeded - I forgot how much - I think first 50,000 they give you free, right? By the time you're 150,000, the small business deduction has gone. And then so this poor chap ended up losing the whole small business deduction. And so that was a very, very painful year. I would have thrown up if the accountant just said, cut the check. Right? I would have thrown up.

Jason Pisesky: [00:13:30] Yeah, you got the numbers right there. Yeah. So the first 50,000 of income, investment income to shelter doesn't affect your small business deduction. And the policy behind that being like, hey, corporations have to keep some money on hand to pay their current expenses, working capital, so and yeah, you shouldn't just have to keep that in burlap bags tucked under the bed. You can put that in a savings account and earn some interest. That's the reasoning behind it. But yeah, once you go above 50,000 of investment income, which includes capital gains, the taxable portion, it starts reducing the small business deduction that 500,000 on a 5 to 1 basis. So every dollar, so $50,001, you lose $5 of your small business deduction. So by, once you have 100,000 above 50,000, i.e. the 150 you talk about, your small business deduction is completely ground away. And you may have, you may find yourself having, you know, an extra 10 to 15% tax on that 500,000, which is, let's see if can do quick math in my head. You know, an extra $75,000 of tax. Now I'm self-conscious and want to double check that, but...

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:14:35] Well, it is very painful. How about that?

Jason Pisesky: [00:14:39] Yeah. 75. There we go. All right, good. All right. If it's a 15% spread between the two, it's kind of in and around there. It'll be 10 to 15%. So.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:14:48] Right. So suddenly you cough up with that because you had a good year. And when you think about, Wow, this guy is very successful. But when you think about it, by the time we retire, 150k, you hope there's 150k. 150k doesn't go very far by the time we retire, most of us, right? And so that's important. And the problem is this guy was not old enough to retire. They were just winding down. Still have an active PC. Right? And so this is very, very painful. The other observation is a lot of my colleagues, and they talk to their everyday accountant, they're advised to invest everything inside their PC. Right? And so, Jason, would you advise that or would you advise against that?

Jason Pisesky: [00:15:29] I would generally not for the one reason we talked about. The three big reasons come to my mind immediately. One, we talked about, hey, you're going to have to start to juggle this small business deduction as the portfolio grows and you'll probably start to get very annoyed at playing that game and having to time everything, to the non-tax reason, creditor protection. You generally want your assets not sitting right next to the business where if the business gets sued they're exposed. And so, yet professionals have a bit of extra layer to deal with there. We talked about this a little bit on the tax ID, we'll talk about it in two weeks time on the Masterclass. But professional corporations, you generally don't have that same type of corporate shield that someone who's just doing real estate or, you know, running a general store or whatever in a corporation would where there's a liability that arises because of the profession, the professional and the PC are usually equally on the hook. And there's insurance and things, of course. But for that reason it's also advantageous to kind of move things out of the PC to the extent you can into, again, ideally a spouse's hands if that's tenable to someone. And then the third reason is if you have a business that may be salable in the future, capital gains deduction, which shelters currently $971,000 of capital gains, it becomes harder to access as you have a big build-up of what we would call inactive passive investment assets in the corporation. So again, not all PCs are salable, but if it is or, you know, if there's a clinic or something else, usually having the investments not with the shares that may be sold is advantageous. So most generally advise to not just keep it all in the PC, even though that's simple and maybe hey, the first couple of years you do that, but long term you want a better, more nimble structure.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:17:23] Right. So while most accountants told us that medical practice were nothing, but practices are sold, right? Not very frequent, but they are. I'll give you an example. 30 years ago I bought a practice, right, that's when nobody wanted to buy a practice, I did. I borrowed money I hadn't got, bought my dream practice at the time. We just talked to friends who sold their practices at our clinic. We are in a joint clinic, new doctors come and buy out the old doctors, right? So these things do happen, right? And so I think that what you talk about is not totally out of date or irrelevant. It is irrelevant for some people who are planning to retire. Right? If they're lucky enough to be bought out, they want to be sure because this purification, that's what you're talking about, with the purification rule. There's the time of the sale and T-24 months. Right? Two years prior, you better plan your purification. Right?

Jason Pisesky: [00:18:18] Yeah. And I think even like ten years ago, I would have probably said, like you probably know, like based on your medical field if your PC is salable, but, and I don't know what the kind of what you're hearing from, you know, all the back channels, but what I'm starting to see is much more consolidation and there actually is a push, I know like it's happening with optometry, with dentistry, where they are having big conglomerates come in and try to snap up practices and build a big portfolio. And, you know, I don't know the exact inner workings, but it looks like kind of like, you know, make a public company model where you just, you know, own hundreds of practices across the country. And so I would say if, definitely you're on the younger side, you never know. So I think you kind of proceed on that basis of, Hey, I may be able to sell this. And so if it just, you know, is a little more kind of work expense and complexity, but I kind of set myself up for that potential down the line that would think it's it's worth it just based on how much the field is changing right now for medical professionals and kind of...

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:19:20] Yeah, so now in Alberta, we're not, we're still mostly fee-for-service, right? So we did our physician and empowerment talks. We were in Mexico, Kevin and I, teaching in Mexico and there's this very senior guy, he was high up in CMA and all that, and he retired and he sold his practice for a very high price. He had a very nice panel. So in Ontario it's capitation model, right? So you have the whole panel and each panel carry, every patient has a price tag, multiply I think 200 bucks times our number of patients, right? And so basically he sold it, the whole panel. And he was very happy. Right? So these things are actually more relevant than what we like to think, right? So I just want everybody to just maybe tuck it, file it somewhere in your brain and say, don't just dismiss this. Right? It might apply to you. And that's a lot of money. Right? So right now is, what, $915 thousand dollars, almost?

Jason Pisesky: [00:20:16] 971. So if it's not, and it's indexed to inflation, so if it's not a million next year, it will be by 2025, especially with inflation the way it's currently going. So even a million bucks of shelter.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:20:30] So yeah, exactly. And if you're not even, so if you're practicing just over a million at least whatever you sold it for, then it's tax-free, right? And then for those that are advantageous to have a spouse in there, whoever else to share the PC, I think each one have that capital exemption, then it could potentially be a big thing. And some people, they have a practice, not just a medical practice, they have a business side, let's say an esthetic practice, right? I know of one of our consultants, Mark Friesen, he's one of our consultants that work with some of our clients, and he worked with a Calgarian physician who had a cosmetic practice. And Mark is an accountant. He's kind of a CFO for hire. And helped to shape the practice in two years time, so they sold it for a very good price to a conglomerate, right? And only because they did all the right accounting, right tax planning, right structural corporate planning.

Jason Pisesky: [00:21:26] Mhm. Happens a lot in dentistry. You'll have the dental business and then the hygiene. The hygienist business.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:21:32] Right, Right.

Jason Pisesky: [00:21:33] So yeah, absolutely. Again you'll have hey, maybe you start a clinic and you have a building in there too. Or maybe you want to sell the building. There's opportunities there. So. Yeah. Where are you, where are you keeping things. I would say the rule of thumb is not just to keep it all in the PC. I'd say, yeah, you kind of need that advice and that, the long view range of where I may be in 20-30 years, what my exit plan looks like. And sometimes an admission of I have no idea what my exit plan might look like. I just need to, you know, set the chess pieces in the right place. So whatever comes, I'm in a good spot.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:22:04] Right. Now we're on the topic of small business deduction, I want to just dive into other things because a lot of physicians later on, they join venture with other people, other physicians or other businesses they encounter, or investment or real estate, they're going to different joint ventures, partnerships. But I think last time you talked about a lot of the tax ID, and I heard that if you're not careful, you end up everybody and their spouses, everybody shared one small business deduction of 500,000. So can you walk us through some of the bad or good and bad scenarios of how that could happen?

Jason Pisesky: [00:22:40] Absolutely. So I mean the most popular model, tax aside, for professionals to work together is a partnership. You know, the LLP, that's what 98% of all legal arrangements are for lawyers, sorry, accountants are just LLPs, partnerships, limited liability partnerships. So the starting rule with nothing else is that you kind of share one small business deduction between all the partners when you have a partnership. There were some old rules where you could kind of have two PCs and you have a PC providing services to the actual partner PC and then everybody got their own small business deduction. That was shut down maybe 2018, 2019, I don't think earlier. Yeah. So. But now, you kind of go back to the default rule, Okay, everybody shares the small business deduction if you're a partner. But there are other, so there are other arrangements out there that may give access to allow people to work in some way together or collaboratively in a way that isn't a partnership and everybody gets their small business deduction still. There are joint ventures, there's cost-sharing arrangements. Those are the big ones. You just have to be very careful with the wording of the arrangements to make sure you're not a partnership at law because a judge will look through it and say, fine, you slap the label on it of this, but when I actually look at it, it is a partnership. So there are ways for professionals to work in tandem, to some extent at least, and be able to still protect their small business deduction and not have to share it with the other professionals.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:24:19] Right. So let's say if some doctors, they got together and say, Hey, we want to buy this piece of land or just buy, start a new corporation, buy a strip mall medical building. So if they structure it incorrectly, then maybe it would collide with everybody's whole codes or PCs?

Jason Pisesky: [00:24:38] Yeah. And so that kind of circles us back to the association problem where we said we're like, Oh, you have two spouses, you should both just have your own PC. Because what can happen is, say you have two unrelated professionals who both have a PC, they're the only shareholders of it, and they say, Yeah, let's buy this piece of farmland and they buy it in a corporation that they both own 50/50, then you're probably all going to end up associated and you're going to be sharing the small business deduction with this unrelated doctor who you're not even carrying on a medical practice, he is just a buddy of yours who you're not carrying on medical practice with at all, in partnership or otherwise. And because of an investment you've made, you end up sharing the small business deduction.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:25:19] Right. Yeah. So I seem like I'm belaboring this, but I've seen a ton of this, right? I've been to some real estate clubs for 12 years, investment clubs, and I certainly know people who were avid real estate investors, right? They just keep forming partnerships and JVs and corporations and some, they begin to go into limited partnerships. Right? So but yeah, so basically, I tell my friends, you're just jeopardizing everybody's SBD if you have a good year, if you sold that building, that multifamily or whatever, you're going to have a tax problem. Right? So then for people who already have the spider web, or even with a spouse or non-spouse, other business partners, what would be your advice, Jason, to them?

Jason Pisesky: [00:26:04] I think talk to someone. I know, I like the term spider web, I see it all the time of you know oh I'm doing a new thing, pop up a new company, I'm doing a new thing, pop up a company, and it kind of sounds like maybe people could take two minutes like, Oh, Jason is saying, you want lots of companies, you want companies for everything and to protect all your stuff, that may or may not be the case. It's, you know, everyone's situation is completely unique. We have lots of clients who come in and they have the spider web and we end up kind of collapsing in on itself because, hey, you have too many, too many things going on. And your life is just kind of overly complex without giving you the benefits maybe you thought you were getting from it. So again, we have a handful of files right now, I always have a handful of files on the go, where we are, yeah, we have ones where we're adding complexity because they come to us and hey, you could really benefit from having some more entities and moving some things around. And we have some where they come to us and we have, hey, you have too many for what you have going on. Let's amalgamate them. You know, combine some companies together, let's dissolve them, and then simplify a bit and then rethink about what kind of complexity you want and what's going to benefit you. So that's the blessing and the curse of being a small business owner is it's highly customizable. Everybody goes through it entirely different, like what kind of investments you want to make first, if you want to get into real estate, if you want to build an investment portfolio, then jump into real estate down the line, completely changes and shapes how your structure grows out. But just being intentional about it, I think, and speaking to professionals.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:27:34] Intention, yeah. Intentionality I think is a big one. But most of us don't. We just kind of wing it, right, all the way through until we got caught in a spider web. So yeah, there's so much we can cover. Now, just one last question. Right? And then we'll open this file and then we'll be done. So at what point in our career, typical professional career, would you say that it's worthwhile to consider a family trust of sorts?

Jason Pisesky: [00:27:59] Um, for a professional, it's probably once you have kids, if kids are in your future, again, no real rule of thumb. I think it makes sense to chat with your accountant and your lawyer about it and find the right time, but I don't think you really need one immediately. So traditionally we would keep trusts around for 21 years. If people have heard the 21 year rule. Like trust can extend for decades and decades and decades. But there's a taxable event at the 21 year rule where, 21 year mark, where the trust is, basically it's deemed to, for tax purposes, to die. It, all of its property is deemed to be disposed of, reacquired, there's a taxable event if there's an accrual of value in there. So again, that sounds scary. There's ways to deal with that. You can transfer property out of the trust, you can roll it out, and then things continue on. The big, one of the big benefits of the trust is around sale planning and structuring. And so, you know, if you put a trust in too early, then you might miss the sale date. So I would say you don't want one fresh out of med school unless you kind of are going to be someone who kind of slowly grows and builds practices and then sells them and builds a practice and then sells it, maybe that makes sense. But I would say, yeah, graduate med school, build your practice, grow a little bit of wealth, start a family. And that's kind of when you want the family in family trust, right?

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:29:20] So what you're saying is there's a because there's a 21 year lifespan, you don't want to start too early. But then when you have kids and then you build some wealth, maybe some wealth outside of your PCs, right, and then it gets, when the spider web is starting to emerge, right, maybe it's time to consider a family trust, right?

Jason Pisesky: [00:29:39] Yeah. And I would say a good, to send people away, a good indicator of when you may be ready is when you start having another corporation. Hey, I want to start a real estate investment corporation. Because again, there's restrictions in most provinces on who can actually be in a family trust that owns shares of a PC. So in Alberta, for example, it can only be the professional, their spouse, and children under the age of 18. So that's restrictive. Otherwise you could have anyone under the sun in your family trust if you have a real estate company. And so yeah, but then it's great because you can have these things right under the family trust. And so, yeah, having that family trust at that point, that's kind of a good indicator of definitely when hey, I should talk to someone and see if now's a good time because I'm going to start a bunch of real estate things on the side. Should I do it under a family trust? And get that creditor protection, get the benefit to the family. And again, those may be more easily sold entities, too, whether they get the capital gains deduction or not, the ability to share proceeds amongst beneficiaries.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:30:42] Right on. Well, so good. So thank you, Jason, again for a wealth of information. I don't want to make this going on and on, I think there's a lot here to be digested and I want to thank you for bringing your wealth of knowledge and experience every day, a very live example that pertain to us. And of course, the different people here have different backgrounds, different scenarios, and different stages of life. And I think we're going to systematically look into these at future sessions in our masterclass and future podcasts. So thank you again, Jason. And so I guess, is it fair to summarize that this word that you bring up, this intentionality, right? We cannot just go in blindly and just go and wing it, right? I think we start a PC with, okay, what do we need, a PC, that was one step, that one thing we need to cross. Make that decision. Okay, I need a PC and then somebody says you need a whole code. Should I do it? Should I not? The spouse, both of the careers, and then there's a bunch of others. Right? So I guess what you're telling us today, the take-home message, is so that we have this intention to deal with this and when things get a little complicated, don't just be complacent with just what you think you know. It's time to maybe ask some professionals.

Jason Pisesky: [00:32:00] Yeah. I think that's well said. Yeah. The intention is important and, again, once you start to have some material accrual of wealth in the PC, that's when it's time to start thinking about do I need to add some complexity? And once you're starting to make different kinds of investments, again, the second opinion, it's talking to other people and just seeing what's going on and what's available. You don't want to go, you know, as with doctors and their patients, you don't kind of want to go 25 years never talking to a doctor and then show up riddled with issues. You know, you don't kind of want to go 25 years without talking to a tax planner or somewhere if you're building some complexity into your life.

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:32:40] That was kind of what I was doing, Jason So you're saying I shouldn't.

Jason Pisesky: [00:32:43] Are we talking about the medical part or the plotting part? If you've not seen a doctor in a while...

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:32:49] No, no, no, the doctor thing I'm doing. But yeah, certainly the tax planning, I really got to sit down with you at some point and begin to sort this out, because you're absolutely right, both of you, about being intentional behind this. And also one other point that you made, Jason, is being that everybody's situation is unique and that's why there is no cookie-cutter solution here. You need to sit down in front of a professional, a great accountant, a great tax lawyer like yourself, and really sort through what you need to be doing for you, not what a colleague did or someone else that you share clinic space has done, it's about what you as an individual need to do and it needs to align with your broader life goals in terms of retirement and wealth creation.

Jason Pisesky: [00:33:32] Yeah. And I think I may have said the benefit or the curse or the benefit of the cost, like, you know, you're not someone who's just working at a bank. You have a great pension or, with the government, even more. And they have, you know, a great guaranteed pension that's going to look after you. You're most likely out-earning those people. But that does put the onus on everyone on this call, you have to think about it. And if you, and it can be, you know, orders of magnitude between the people who put the thought into it and are intentional and get those extra percentage points every year compounded. There's tons of calculators that say, you know, adding 1% every year to your growth magnifies it. And here we're talking about not 1%, you know, tax savings is often your biggest expense in any business. And so again yeah, just over the life of your career, it's a huge opportunity. Again, everyone will probably be fine if you do no tax planning, but the opportunity is there to just really blow things out of the water. So.

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:34:30] I love that. I love that. All right. I think we should wrap it up. We always say we're going to keep this like, short, like 20 minutes, 30 minutes. But we always go over and I love it because what you have to share is just so outstanding, Jason And it's real value to the physician community where we're all busy, we're all working. So again, thank you so much for joining us today and we look forward to having you back again.

Jason Pisesky: [00:34:54] A pleasure, as always. Thanks for having me and thanks for riding shotgun with me, Wing. Pleasure, as always.

Dr. Wing Lim: [00:35:00] Well, yeah. Thank you. Thank you again, Jason, for your valuable time. And we look forward to more episodes together.

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:35:08] Thank you so much for listening to the Physician Empowerment podcast. If you're ready to take those next steps in transforming your practice, finances or personal well-being, then come and join us at PhysEmpowerment.ca - P H Y S Empowerment dot ca - to learn more about how we can help. If today's episode resonated with you, I'd really appreciate it if you would share our podcast with a colleague or friend and head over to Apple Podcasts to give us a five-star rating and review. If you've got feedback, questions or suggestions for future episode topics, we'd love to hear from you. If you want to join us and be interviewed and share some of your story, we'd absolutely love that as well. Please send me an email at [email protected]. Thank you again for listening. Bye.