If you are an Ontario resident and have enrolled your kids in music or dance lessons, you might want to take advantage of the Ontario Children’s Activity Tax Credit (CATC) when preparing your income taxes. The CATC, which was introduced late last year, allows parents to claim up to $500 of eligible expenses per child. [...]
Mark Goodfield, the accountant behind The Blunt Bean Blog concludes the series on transferring the family cottage by outlining some ways to reduce the tax hit. Thank you for the excellent series, Mark. I sure learned a lot. In today’s final blog in my three part series (Part 1 of the series is available here [...]
In today’s post Mark Goodfield, a professional accountant and the writer behind the excellent Blunt Bean Blog, continues the series on estate planning issues surrounding the family cottage. Click here for Part 1 of the series. In my first blog in this three part series on transferring the family cottage, I discussed the fact you [...]
Today’s guest post is Part 1 of a 3-part series on estate planning issues surrounding the family cottage, courtesy of Mark Goodfield, a professional accountant who writes the The Blunt Bean Counter Blog. Mark covers accounting, tax and wealth management issues on his blog and if you haven’t checked out his site, please do so. [...]
In an article titled Taxing Families: Does the System Need an Overhaul? that appeared in a publication put out by the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, Prof. Jack Mintz of the University of Calgary argues that our current tax system is unfair to families with one working parent. Prof. Mintz addresses the criticism that [...]
The Family Tax Cut that the Conservatives say makes “the tax system fairer” disproportionately benefits one-income families with very high household incomes. I ran some numbers using the excellent Income Tax Estimator available here to find out how much benefit accrues to a one-income household with two children at various income levels. If you look [...]
There are some pretty big ‘ifs’ attached to the announcement made by the Conservative Party today that they are planning on allowing families with children split up to $50,000 of income for federal income tax purposes. First, the Conservatives will have to get re-elected with a majority because they are proposing to implement the promise [...]
Canada’s leading tax software product, QuickTax has been rebranded as TurboTax this year. Recently, I asked Intuit executives, Geoff Morgan and his colleague Cam Moore, about the name change and to provide us a rundown of what’s new this year. Here’s what I found: The QuickTax name was changed to reduce confusion with TurboTax and [...]
Starting July 1, 2010, Ontario will replace the Provincial Sales Tax (PST) with a 13 per cent federally administered Harmonized Sales Tax (HST). To ease the transition, Ontario has already cut the tax rate on the lowest income bracket by 1 per cent, will increase transfer payments, will provide an one-time transition benefit payment for [...]
Investors owning significant U.S. property need to be aware of changes coming to U.S. Estate Taxes (and you thought keeping up with the Canadian tax code was headache enough). With the tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration scheduled to expire at the end of 2010, estate taxes in the U.S. are expected to revert [...]
