The QuickTax 2009 giveaway is now closed. The winner, Jim Squires, has been contacted but I haven’t heard back from him. Jim, if you are reading this, check your email for the winner notification and get back to me. If not, I’ll be picking a new winner. In addition to entering in the giveaway, readers [...]
QuickTax is Canada’s leading tax software product and it is easy to see why. When compared with all its competitors, QuickTax has the slickest and most intuitive interface and provides the maximum flexibility by allowing users to prepare their taxes with either the interview method or directly using forms or switching back and forth between [...]
Some of the media coverage on Ontario’s move to harmonize its sales taxes with the GST has verged on the hysterical. Our local paper, The Ottawa Citizen, for instance features an online calculator which purportedly tells you how much extra you’ll be paying on such items as gasoline, electricity, internet services, hair cuts and home [...]
When Ontario announced that it is harmonizing its sales taxes, the mutual fund industry went on a publicity drive shedding crocodile tears over how the HST is going to cost investors. I thought the chutzpah of an industry known for its sky-high fees complaining about investment expenses to be breathtaking (See post: Harmonization and mutual [...]
In an article titled Squeezed published in the December 2008 issue of MoneySense magazine, columnist Rob Gerlsbeck refers to a Fraser Institute study on taxes: Because while a pay raise once went straight into your pockets, it is now likely to disappear before you even see it. Who gets it? The taxman. A generation ago, [...]
With Governments around the world running large deficits, it makes sense that taxes will be hiked at some point in the future. This column in The Globe and Mail speculates what form the taxes hikes might take: Change the capital gains inclusion rate. Recall that while the rate is currently 50%, it used to be [...]
Over the weekend, I completed our tax returns and printed out our T1 General to double check our returns. On the top of Page 2 there is a box that says “Please answer the following question:” followed by “Did you own or hold foreign property at any time in 2008 with a total cost of [...]
[Thanks to Robert A. Smith, CFA, CFP, a Financial Advisor in Markham area and author of Dollars From Change (Review), for suggesting today's topic and providing most of the content in the post.] If you have a net capital loss for the 2008 tax year (who doesn’t?) and reported taxable capital gains in 2005, 2006 [...]
It is perhaps unsurprising that the Canada Revenue Agency’s website is probably the best online resource on tax matters. Every tax form and tax guide published by the CRA can be found on the website and there is hardly a need to look elsewhere for most straightforward tax questions. If you are looking for more [...]
I’m just about finished with our taxes and found that we had three small tax deductions for 2008 that would have been easily missed if I weren’t paying more attention. These deductions are small enough on their own (less than $100, often less than $50) but they might add up to a significant amount. Public [...]
