Services essential to your financial life

Because people are living longer today, the possibility of going 30 years without a pay cheque takes careful planning and disciplined investing. We can help you with every phase of planning for your retirement. During your working years, the accumulation phase, we’ll develop and monitor a wealth accumulation plan based on your specific goals and objectives. As you approach retirement, the pre-retirement phase, we’ll assist you with critical decisions regarding retirement plan options, government social security programs, and tax planning. Then once you are retired, we will determine tax-efficient income and wealth transfer strategies designed to help you in retirement.

Whether it’s providing income for a spouse, educating children or grandchildren, or leaving money to your favourite charity, proper estate planning can help ensure that your assets accumulated over your lifetime are preserved for the use you have intended. We can offer financial strategies designed to efficiently manage the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next, and mitigate related tax issues.

Philanthropy can bring personal satisfaction, enabling you to support causes and organizations that matter most to you. It can result in significant tax advantages, as well – including income tax deductions, reduction of capital gains taxes, and lower estate taxes. We can help tailor a charitable giving plan for you that can include a charitable trust, donor advised fund, private family foundation, community foundation or outright gift.

Financial planning is not an investment product, but rather an ongoing process designed to help you achieve your goals by making smart decisions. It begins by evaluating your current financial situation, identifying and clarifying your goals, and then creating the appropriate plan for pursuing them. We look at planning through a wide lens and develop strategies designed to pursue your short- and long-term goals.

Mitigating the risk of market volatility is as important as growing your wealth. Our asset allocation and risk management strategies are designed with one important objective in mind: To provide stability to your portfolio and protect it during times of market turbulence. Specifically, this may include integrating insurance into your investment strategy to safeguard against critical illness, liability and other unforeseen events.

We take a tax-sensitive approach to financial planning and work with you and your accounting and legal advisors to help minimize the impact of taxes. By developing and implementing strategies designed to lessen or shift current and future tax liabilities, we can help improve your prospects for meeting your financial objectives. In addition to impacting your life today, prudent tax planning can play a large role in the amount of wealth you will be able to someday transfer to your heirs.

While we are familiar with the tax provisions of the issues presented herein, as financial advisors of Raymond James, we are not qualified to render advice on tax or legal matters. You should discuss tax or legal matters with the appropriate professional.

At Raymond James, we pride ourselves on our commitment to placing clients’ needs first and we have developed a number of safeguards to ensure the protection of client assets held at our firm.

Clients entrust Raymond James with their investments for a number of key reasons: We have strong corporate backing; we follow security safekeeping measures; we implement investment safeguards; we offer industry-wide investor protection; and we adhere to strict industry standards.

Raymond James offers all of our clients the added protection of modern security holding practices. Nearly all of the securities we hold on behalf of our clients in North America are held at the same regulated depositories used by Canada’s major banks and investment dealers: the Canadian Depository for Securities (CDS) and the Depository Trust Company (DTC) in the U.S. When physical certificates are deposited with us for safekeeping, we use the vault of a chartered bank to hold them in safe custody for you. This is standard practice for investment firms. This system minimizes the possibility of certificates being destroyed, lost or stolen, so it is the safest way for your securities to be held.

We safeguard our clients’ fully paid and excess margin securities by segregating them from securities related to our corporate investing activities. This is standard practice for investment firms and a regulatory requirement set out by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), our primary regulator. This safeguard measure helps to ensure clients’ investments are not subject to any risks related to an investment dealer’s business activities.

Our technological systems are monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for signs of tampering or unauthorized activity. We employ the use of encryption, virtual private networks, penetration/vulnerability testing, and the latest firewall and antivirus technology. Email monitoring is also utilized for regulatory and compliance purposes in order to protect our clients. We also maintain strict controls to limit and monitor employee access to our systems. Our information technology professionals constantly research and develop enhancements to keep us at the vanguard of data security. A team of independent auditors reviews our technological systems quarterly.

At Raymond James, you receive the protection provided by our firm’s membership in the Canadian Investor Protection Fund. The Canadian Investor Protection Fund provides coverage of the cash and securities we hold on your behalf, for a maximum loss of $1 million for combined types of accounts. This level of protection is standard within the industry. For coverage calculation purposes under this plan, certain types of accounts are combined. For example, taxable investment accounts would be combined and covered to a maximum of $1 million; a Registered Retirement Savings Plan held by the same individual would be covered as a separate account to a maximum of $1 million. It is important to note that coverage is provided against losses arising only from Member Firm insolvency issues; it does not cover market-driven investment losses. For further details on Canadian Investor Protection Fund coverage, ask your financial advisor for a copy of the CIPF brochure or visit its website at www.cipf.ca

Raymond James operates within the strictly regulated Canadian securities industry. Standards set by the Canadian Securities Administrators and Canadian Investor Protection Fund are monitored and enforced by IIROC. In addition to the requirement to segregate client securities, IIROC requires us to maintain adequate risk-adjusted capital to cover our business-specific risks, keep comprehensive and accurate records, employ appropriate procedures for handling securities, and carry sufficient fidelity bond insurance. IIROC monitors our compliance with these requirements through independent audits conducted regularly by external auditors and by IIROC examiners.