During the election campaign, Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised to double the annual contribution limit for your tax-free savings account (TFSA) after the federal budget is balanced, which the government expects to do by 2015.

(I recently wrote a special bulletin about how the election results could affect your investments. Click here to read this special bulletin and add your comments.)

The …read more »

Every Wednesday, we publish our “Investor Toolkit” series on TSI Network. Whether you’re a new or experienced investor, these weekly updates are designed to give you specific investment advice. Each Investor Toolkit update gives you a fundamental piece of investment strategy, and shows you how you can put it into practice right away.

Tip of the week: “How to make …read more »

Every Wednesday, we publish our “Investor Toolkit” series on TSI Network. Whether you’re a new or experienced investor, these weekly updates are designed to give you specific advice on successful investing, including tax shelters. Each Investor Toolkit update gives you a fundamental piece of investment strategy, and shows you how you can put it into practice right away.

Tip of …read more »

In just under two months, on January 1, 2011, you will gain an additional $5,000 of contribution room in your tax free savings account (TFSA).

The federal government first made tax free savings accounts (TFSAs) available to investors in January 2009. These accounts let you earn investment income — including interest, dividends and capital gains — tax free. You could contribute …read more »

The Canada Revenue Agency recently advised more than 70,000 Canadians that they must pay penalties for over-contributing to their tax free savings accounts in 2009.

You can make tax-free withdrawals from your TFSA at any time. You can put the money back in, as well, but the main limitation here is that you have to wait until the next calendar year …read more »

Every year, you gain an additional $5,000 of contribution room in your tax free savings account (TFSA). That means you have $10,000 of contribution room in 2010, rising to $15,000 in 2011, $20,000 in 2012 and so on. You also get to carry forward unused contribution room from previous years.

Tax-free savings accounts let you earn investment income — including interest, …read more »

It’s particularly easy for investors to make costly mistakes during the year-end tax-loss selling season. That’s because the lure of a lower tax bill can be a temptation to dump high-quality stocks that are near the end of a downturn, and are set to move back up.

A similar pitfall exists during the end-of-the-year rush to take advantage of certain …read more »

The federal government first made tax free savings accounts (TFSAs) available to investors in January 2009. These accounts let you earn investment income — including interest, dividends and capital gains — tax free. However, you could only contribute $5,000 in 2009 to start your tax free savings account.

Every year, you gain an additional $5,000 of contribution room (indexed to inflation …read more »

Investors continue to look for ways to profit from rising commodity prices. Some are considering a unique kind of tax shelter: flow-through funds.

Flow-through funds mainly invest in flow-through shares issued by junior mining and oil companies. The companies spend the money they receive for these shares on mineral exploration and development, which carries certain tax benefits, in the form of …read more »

TFSAs let you earn investment income — including interest, dividends and capital gains — tax free.

You could only invest $5,000 this year to start your TFSA. However, you gain an additional $5,000 of contribution room (indexed to inflation and rounded to the nearest $500 on a yearly basis) every year, plus you get to carry forward unused contribution room from …read more »