Retained earnings and profit distribution
Deciding what leaves the corporation, in what form, in what year — and what the compounding cost is of getting that wrong for a decade.
A planning practice built for a small number of families.
EverNorth works with incorporated professionals and business owners whose financial lives have outgrown ordinary advice. The practice does not advertise and does not take on clients from search results. New relationships begin the way every existing one did — with an introduction from someone we both know.
How introductions work→EverNorth is built around one situation, and is candid about it.
The work suits incorporated professionals and owners of operating businesses who hold roughly $2.5 million or more in investable assets, or retain $100,000 or more inside the corporation each year. Frequently both.
Below that, the structure this practice builds is more than most people need — and Dave will tell you so directly rather than sell you something smaller.
- Physicians and dentists in professional corporations
- Owners of operating businesses approaching succession
- Lawyers, engineers and independent professionals with no defined pension
Every household here arrived through someone who had already tested the work.
A colleague. A business partner. A physician who has sent a dozen people over the years.
That has a practical consequence. When a new client sits down, Dave already understands the world they operate in, because he has been working inside it with the person who sent them. The conversation starts several years ahead of where it otherwise would.
It also caps the practice. There is no scenario in which this becomes a large firm, and none in which the number of relationships exceeds the attention each one requires.
What the planning actually covers
Retirement without a pension
Building a durable income structure for people who have to construct one themselves, including PPP and IPP arrangements where the corporation supports it.
Insurance as structure
Coverage designed as part of a corporate and estate architecture, rather than sold as a product against a projection.
Estate, succession and transfer
Wills, powers of attorney, beneficiary structures and the intergenerational mechanics that decide whether the plan survives you.
Coordination
Your accountant, your lawyer and your portfolio manager working from the same plan rather than three partial ones.
EverNorth provides financial planning. It does not manage investment portfolios, provide investment or tax advice, or sell securities.
Most plans are an annual event. This one runs continuously.
A conventional review happens once a year, and everything that moved in between is discovered at the meeting — usually too late to do much about it. EverNorth is built the other way round. The plan is instrumented, and it watches itself.
Gaps surface before they cost you
Unsigned estate documents, unused pension contribution room, a maturing certificate, a policy approaching a renewal date. These are tracked against your plan continuously and raised when there is still time to act, rather than noted after the fact.
The corporation and the household are modelled as one system
Salary and dividend mix, retained earnings, pension room, and personal tax position move together. Deciding any one of them in isolation is where most of the avoidable cost in an incorporated professional’s financial life comes from.
Decisions are modelled, not asserted
When a recommendation is made, you see the alternative alongside it and what choosing it would cost over the years it compounds. You should never have to take a planning recommendation on faith.
Every meeting is prepared before you arrive
Your file is reviewed, the relevant questions identified, and the issues worth raising at that particular moment surfaced in advance. No meeting starts with you re-explaining your own situation.
One plan, not four opinions
Your accountant, your lawyer and your portfolio manager each see a fragment. The planning role is to hold the whole picture and make certain all of them are working from the same one.
Modelling illustrates the structure of a decision. It is not a projection of investment returns, and it does not replace advice from your accountant or lawyer.
The KAIZEN Financial Planning Process™
Kaizen is Japanese for constant, never-ending improvement. It describes a plan that is revisited, corrected and sharpened every year — not one delivered once and filed.
Seven stages, one continuous relationship→
Thirty years in the business. Not all of it on this side of the desk.
Dave started in financial services in 1993 and spent years inside the institutions that build and distribute financial products — CIBC Renaissance, RBC Dominion Securities, Manulife Securities — before building a practice that keeps planning separate from selling them.
More about Dave→If someone suggested you speak with Dave
Write to him and mention their name. He will reply personally, usually the same day, and be direct about whether the fit is right.