Vincenzo Marozzi, Investment & Wealth Advisor of RBC Dominion Securities

Vincenzo Marozzi, Investment & Wealth Advisor of RBC Dominion Securities Investment & Wealth Advisor Empowering Professionals to Build Wealth with Tax-Efficient Financial Plans

09/09/2026

Two incorporated doctors. Same income. Same savings rate.

One put $30K into her RRSP.

One left it in the corp.

Ten years later, the difference was $180K in after-tax wealth. Here's the part your advisor probably skipped:

Neither of them was wrong going in.

The answer depends on numbers only one of them ran.

The RRSP-vs-corp decision is the most oversimplified question in Canadian wealth planning. Advisors handing out a universal answer haven't done the math on your specific situation.

Here's the framework I walk clients through:

1. Your personal marginal tax rate now vs. at retirement.
If you're pulling a T4 salary at the top bracket now and expect to draw income at a lower bracket later, the RRSP deduction is worth real money. If you're already paying yourself dividends and plan to keep doing so, the math shifts.

2. How much active business income your CCPC earns.
The small business deduction gives you a low corporate rate on the first $500K of active income. Passive investment income above $50K per year inside the corp starts grinding that limit down. That grind is invisible until you see it on the tax return.

3. Your RRSP room and what created it.
RRSP room only accumulates from T4 salary or bonuses. If you've been paying yourself dividends for years to save on CPP, your room is thin. That's a choice with a cost you don't feel until you try to catch up at 55.

4. What you actually want the money to do.
Corporate savings can fund a buy-sell, an insured retirement plan, or an estate freeze. RRSP savings can't. If the money has a job beyond retirement income, that changes where it should live.

5. The order of withdrawal at retirement.
Two clients can end up with the same portfolio value at 65 and pay a $200K+ difference in lifetime tax depending on the order they draw from RRSP, TFSA, corp, and non-registered accounts.

The doctor who ended up $180K ahead didn't pick the "right" account.

She ran the numbers with someone who understood both sides.

If your advisor's answer to the RRSP-vs-corp question took less than an hour, you got an opinion, not a plan.

09/07/2026

We built this practice for one type of person: successful, busy, and quietly aware that their financial structure isn't keeping up with their income.

You've done the hard part. The business works. The income is real.
The structure underneath it hasn't caught up.

You're incorporated, and nobody has walked you through what the holdco is actually for.

Your RRSP is maxed because someone told you to, and at your bracket it might not be the right move.

Cash sits in the corp earning bank interest, taxed at the highest passive rate, and it bothers you every time the statement comes in.

The will exists. It was drafted before the business had this much in it.

Retirement is coming, and you can't say with confidence what the number is or where the income comes from.

This is who I work with.

Canadian business owners. Incorporated dentists, doctors, pharmacists. Pre-retirees who accumulated real wealth and want the structure to match it.

Here's who I don't work with.

Someone looking for a stock tip. Or trying to time the market. Or moving money around every quarter based on a headline.

If last year's return is your first question, we're not a fit.

When the question is how to keep more of what you've built, pay less tax legally, and know the plan holds when you're not around, we should talk.

The right structure is quiet. Built once, properly, by someone who has seen the tax bill others missed.

09/04/2026

A dentist I know earns $400K a year.

Her corporate account earns the same rate as a savings account.

Roughly 0.5%.

Meanwhile her passive investment income inside the corp is taxed at close to 50%
So the money sits. Barely grows. And gets clipped again the moment it moves.
That's the quiet cost of treating a holding company like a parking lot.

The CRA doesn't punish you for saving inside a CCPC. It punishes you for saving inefficiently.

Three things I look at first with every incorporated client:
1. Where the cash actually lives. For example, a business savings account at 0.5% versus a laddered GIC or money market fund at 4% is a real gap on a $500K balance. That's $17,500 a year, before tax.

2. The $50K passive income line. Cross it and your small business deduction starts grinding down. At $150K of passive income, it's gone. That can cost a professional corporation tens of thousands in extra tax on active income the next year.

3. What comes out, and how. Salary, dividend, or a mix. Plenty of incorporated professionals inherit whatever their accountant set up in year one and never revisit it.

None of this is exotic.

It's the difference between a holding company that compounds and one that just holds.

If your corporate account is sitting in cash earning less than inflation, that's not conservative. That's a decision, and it has a price tag.

09/02/2026

A couple walked in with $2.1M spread across five accounts.

They had no idea which one to touch first.

RRSP. TFSA. Corporate account. Rental income. A small non-registered account on the side.

The portfolio was fine. The sequencing was going to cost them six figures in avoidable tax over their retirement.

Here is the playbook I use for professional couples with a mix of registered, corporate, and personal assets.
1. Map the tax brackets first, not the accounts
Before touching a single dollar, we build a retirement income plan to age 95.
The question is not "what do we own." It is "what tax bracket do we want to sit in at age 68, 72, 75, and 82."

Every withdrawal decision flows from that answer.

2. Fill the low-bracket years with the most expensive money
Between retirement and age 71, most couples have a window where taxable income drops before CPP, OAS, and forced RRSP withdrawals kick in.

That window is where we pull from the RRSP.

Every dollar left in the RRSP past 71 becomes a mandatory RRIF withdrawal at whatever bracket you happen to be in. Usually a higher one.

Draining the RRSP early, at 20 or 24 percent, beats being forced to pull it later at 40 percent plus OAS clawback.

3. Delay CPP and OAS if the numbers support it
Deferring CPP to 70 gives you a 42 percent lifetime bump. OAS deferral adds another 36 percent.

For a couple with corporate assets to bridge the gap, this is often the single most valuable move in the plan.

The catch: it only works if you have other income to live on in the meantime. That is what the corporate account and the early RRSP draws are for.

4. Use the corporate account as a tax-smoothing tool
For incorporated professionals, the corp is not a retirement account. It is a lever.
Capital dividends flow out tax-free. Eligible dividends carry a lower rate than salary. Non-eligible dividends fill in the gaps.

We use the corp to top up income in low years and hold back in high ones.

5. TFSA is the last account you touch
Every year a dollar stays in the TFSA, it grows tax-free and stays out of your estate's tax bill.

We treat it as a late-stage lever. Tax-free income at 85 when a large RRIF withdrawal would otherwise push you into clawback.

Pulling from the TFSA at 65 to fund a trip is one of the most expensive mistakes I see.

6. Model OAS clawback in every scenario
OAS starts getting clawed back at $91,000 of income and disappears around $148,000. For a couple, that is $16,000 a year on the table.

Every draw decision runs through the clawback filter. Sometimes that means smaller RRIF withdrawals and larger capital-dividend payments from the corp. Sometimes it means splitting pension income to keep both spouses under the threshold.

For the couple with $2.1M, sequencing changed their projected lifetime tax bill by $340,000.

Same assets. Same lifestyle. Different order.

The portfolio decision is usually the smallest one in a retirement plan.

The sequencing decision is usually the biggest.

09/01/2026

Your Shell shares grew for years. Your plan did not.

I work with a lot of people who spent their careers at Shell Canada. The shares stacked up quietly, grant after grant, paycheck after paycheck.

Then retirement gets close and the question changes.

A new client came to me recently inside a five year window. Decades of accumulated Shell shares. No plan coordinating how they fit with everything else.

They were proud of the position. They also admitted it kept them up at night, which took a while to say out loud.

Here is roughly how we worked through it.
1. Built the full financial plan first. Before touching a single share.
2. Defined the role those shares actually play. Income, growth, or risk sitting in one company that they are eventually retiring from.
3. Paced the conversion over several years instead of one dramatic sale, spreading the tax impact across time.
4. Designed the retirement income around the result. A paycheck, engineered from what they built.

The shares themselves were never the problem. It was that the position had been standing in for the plan.

Once the plan defined the moves, the all-or-nothing feeling went away. Same money. Completely different sleep.

If your Shell shares have been growing on autopilot for twenty years, do you know what job they are supposed to do in retirement?

For many executives, success can become concentrated in one place. The same company may provide your income, bonus, equi...
08/31/2026

For many executives, success can become concentrated in one place. The same company may provide your income, bonus, equity compensation, and a significant portion of your future wealth.

That's not necessarily a problem, but it is something worth paying attention to.

We've found that some of the most productive planning conversations begin with a simple question: How much of my financial future depends on a single outcome?

As careers progress and equity compensation grows, it's important to periodically step back and evaluate how different pieces of your financial life fit together.

08/29/2026

In ten years, no client has told me they are saving for a number.

They start there. A target for the portfolio, a retirement figure they read somewhere.
But if I keep asking why, the answer changes. It becomes tuition. Hockey fees. A cottage summer they want their kids to remember. Making sure the estate does not land on their family as a mess to clean up.

Underneath the spreadsheet there is almost always a father or a mother who wants to get it right.

I feel that pressure too. The experiences, the activities, the childhood worth remembering. It is heavy some days.

Here is the strange part of my job. I spend my days around estate planning and wealth transfer, which means I sit close to endings more than most people do. You would think that makes the work darker. For me it does the opposite. It reminds me daily not to take any of this for granted.

Because no matter how the day went, when I walk through the door and my kids light up, genuinely, unfiltered, happy I am home, I melt every single time.

That moment is what every plan I build is actually protecting. Having a family is an absolute blessing, and the planning only makes sense in service of it.

Fellow parents, what is the moment your planning is really for?

The plan says the money passes to the kids. The math says the care home gets paid before anyone else does. By 2030 that ...
08/28/2026

The plan says the money passes to the kids. The math says the care home gets paid before anyone else does. By 2030 that line item swallows half of what parents thought they were leaving behind.

I keep coming back to that number because of how estate conversations actually go in my office.

A family sits down. The will is done. The beneficiaries are named. Everyone feels settled.

Then I ask what happens if one spouse needs eight years of care at $9,000 a month.

Silence.

The estate they were picturing was the estate on a good day. Nobody priced the last chapter, because nobody wants to talk about the last chapter. I understand why. It is a hard room to sit in.

But here is what I have noticed with the families who come out fine. They ran the care number early, while there was still time to structure around it. Insurance, corporate assets, withdrawal sequencing, all of it arranged with that cost sitting inside the plan instead of ambushing it.

The inheritance did not shrink because the market failed them. It shrank because the plan pretended a predictable expense was unpredictable.

An inheritance is really just the running total of decisions made ten and twenty years before anyone reads the will.

The families who plan for the stage nobody wants to discuss are the ones whose kids actually receive what was intended.

Has your family run that number yet, or is it still the conversation being saved for later?

08/27/2026

The guy who wins my fantasy league every year plays boring.

He never chases the flashy rookie. He drafts steady starters, sets his lineup, and mostly leaves it alone. The rest of us tinker every week and finish behind him.

Draft night is around the corner and I already know how it ends.

I would love to say I only play for the group chat and the trash talk. That is maybe 80 percent true. The other 20 percent is a guy who misses being on a team and takes a fake one very seriously.

Funny how the boring approach keeps winning and I keep tinkering anyway.
Anyone else guilty of this, or is it just me?

Some life transitions come with more questions than answers.In those moments, it's easy to feel like every decision need...
08/26/2026

Some life transitions come with more questions than answers.

In those moments, it's easy to feel like every decision needs to be made immediately. Often, it doesn't.

One of the purposes of thoughtful planning is to create flexibility when life doesn't go according to plan. To provide options, guidance, and a foundation to lean on when emotions are understandably taking up most of your attention.

You don't have to have everything figured out today. Sometimes the most important thing is simply having the time and space to process what matters most.

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Edmonton, AB
T6W2P6

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+17809358637

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