For incorporated professionals —your corporation is a planning tool. Use it.
Doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, realtors, and consultants who practice through a corporation hold an advantage most Canadians don’t: efficient corporate dollars and a structure built for long-horizon planning. Tanya makes sure the insurance layer actually uses it.
High income, high tax, and a corporation doing too little.
Incorporated professionals share a distinctive financial shape: strong income taxed hard personally, a professional corporation accumulating retained earnings, a practice whose value depends heavily on one person, and a late-starting but steep wealth curve. Each feature changes how insurance should be designed — and funded.
The funding insight comes first: premiums paid with corporate dollars — typically taxed at lower rates than your personal income — can require meaningfully less pre-tax earnings than personal funding for the same coverage. For a professional buying decades of protection, that difference compounds into real money.
Retained earnings raise the second question: surplus sitting in the corporation as passive investments is taxed at high rates and can erode the small business deduction. Repositioning a disciplined portion into exempt corporate-owned permanent insurance may offer tax-advantaged growth within Income Tax Act limits — and an eventual Capital Dividend Account credit — subject to CRA rules and your accountant’s confirmation.
And the practice itself needs protecting while you’re alive: critical illness and disability-coordinated coverage that funds a locum, services practice debt, and preserves the goodwill you’ve built — so a diagnosis interrupts your career instead of ending it.
Four moves for the incorporated professional.
Corporate-dollar funding
Personal coverage needs, funded through the corporation where structure permits — the same protection, sourced from cheaper dollars.
Practice protection
Critical illness and key-coverage sized to locum costs, practice debt, and overhead — so the practice survives your recovery.
Retained-earnings strategy
Exempt corporate-owned permanent insurance as a destination for surplus — tax-advantaged growth within prescribed limits, reviewed with your accountant.
The CDA endgame
At death, corporate policy proceeds may credit the Capital Dividend Account, potentially allowing tax-free capital dividends to your estate, subject to CRA rules.
Three patterns Tanya sees in professional corporations.
Association-only coverage
Group or association plans that end, shrink, or reprice exactly when health changes make replacement hard. Foundations belong in owned policies.
Personally funded premiums
Paying with top-bracket personal dollars while an efficient corporation watches from the sidelines.
Aimless retained earnings
Surplus compounding in a high-tax passive holding pattern — with no defined destination and no CDA plan for its eventual exit.
None of these are errors of intelligence — they’re defaults nobody revisited. Professionals in Edmonton, Vancouver, and Toronto typically fix all three in a single planning cycle with Tanya and their accountant.
Professionals Tanya builds for.
The physician at mid-career
An Edmonton physician converts association term into owned, corporately funded coverage; adds CI sized to a locum and clinic overhead; and starts a participating policy as a retained-earnings destination — one plan, three problems solved.
The dental practice owner
A Kelowna dentist with practice debt and a seven-figure goodwill value. Coverage protects the loan and the goodwill; the corporate structure funds it; and the eventual CDA credit points the surplus home.
The law partnership
Partners fund their agreement with corporately owned policies — a death triggers a funded buyout, not a valuation fight between the firm and an estate.
The consultant approaching exit
A Toronto consultant, five years from winding down, redirects surplus into a 10-pay whole life design — fully funded before retirement, growing tax-advantaged after it, and CDA-ready for the estate.
Professional-corporation planning, answered plainly.
Can my professional corporation own my life insurance?+
Is my association plan enough?+
What should I do with retained earnings I don't need personally?+
How much critical illness coverage does a practice need?+
Does incorporation change disability planning too?+
Advice for incorporated professionals, across three provinces.
Tanya serves physicians, dentists, lawyers, accountants, realtors, and consultants throughout Alberta — including Edmonton, Calgary, Grande Prairie, and Red Deer — across British Columbia, including Vancouver, Victoria, Kelowna, and Surrey, and throughout Ontario, including Toronto, Ottawa, Mississauga, and Hamilton.
Make the corporation earn its keep.
One review of your coverage, your funding source, and your retained earnings — with your accountant welcome on the call.