Kwame & Priya

The Situation

Kwame is a physician running his practice through a professional corporation. Priya is a partner at a law firm, also incorporated. Combined, they earn well into six figures — and they’ve been saving and investing steadily for a decade.

But they came in with a problem most high earners recognize when it’s named for them: complexity without coordination. Everything existed in silos.

• A whole life policy sold to Kwame 12 years ago that no longer fit his situation
• No will for either of them (two young children)
• No strategy connecting their corporations’ retained earnings to their personal retirement
• RRSP and TFSA accounts that had been invested without any relationship to their corporate accounts
• No plan for what happens to either practice in the event of death or disability

What They Were Trying to Figure Out

Kwame and Priya weren’t worried about money. They were worried about not having thought through the right questions. A colleague of Kwame’s had died suddenly at 51. It clarified things.

Their questions were existential before they were financial: What happens if one of us dies? What happens to the kids? Is what we’re doing coordinated, or are we just accumulating and hoping it works out?

What We Did

We started with the estate gap — the difference between what they had in place and what their family would actually need if either of them died or became disabled tomorrow. The gap was significant. The existing whole life policy was part of the problem, not the solution: it was expensive, inflexible, and the cash value wasn’t being leveraged in any useful way.

We restructured the coverage. Term insurance for both to close the estate gap for the next 20 years while the portfolio grows. The whole life policy was reviewed for surrender value and replaced with a more appropriate permanent structure at a fraction of the premium.

The corporate bridge strategy addressed how retained earnings inside the professional corporations would eventually move into personal retirement accounts in a tax-efficient sequence — using a combination of capital dividend account access, salary/dividend optimization, and holding company structure.

Estate documents — wills, powers of attorney, beneficiary designations — were coordinated with an estate lawyer we referred and work closely with.

The Outcome

Kwame and Priya now have a coordinated plan that covers their estate, their corporations, their retirement, and the 20-year bridge between where they are and where they want to be. The insurance restructuring alone reduced their annual premium outlay by over $8,000 while materially increasing their coverage.

More importantly, they have answers to the questions that were keeping them up at night.