If you're located outside the US and doing work for (or being paid by) a US-based company, you may be asked to provide something called an W8BEN form. This could happen if you are: Working freelance for a US company Selling ebooks through a US seller, e.g., Amazon In a situation where a US entity [...]
Covid-19 changed everything, including changes to taxes for the 2020 tax year. Now that Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is offering a small Work-From-Home (WFH) deduction for salaried people, self-employed Canadians have questions. Specifically, people who have always deducted business-use-of-home (BUH) as part of self-employment and who also have salaried (T4) jobs they did from home [...]
How to avoid owing tax and get a refund instead Q: I work two jobs and I always owe tax at the end of the year. I feel like I'm getting punished for hard work. How do I make it so I get a refund instead of owing tax each year? A: That is a [...]
It’s a little-known fact that when CRA first receives an income tax return and sends the taxpayer a Notice of Assessment, they do little to no review of what is actually in that tax return. Unless your return has been selected for a pre-assessment review, for the most part CRA just goes along with whatever [...]
It's a terrible experience: you go to your tax preparer with your hopes high, and you get handed an income tax bill. It's even worse when your income has dropped in the past year, or was modest or even low. How can you owe tax? The problem is that an income tax bill isn't necessarily [...]
If you have a completed GST-HST worksheet you can easily file your GST-HST return, either by using the figures on the Worksheet and transfering them to a return, or by signing and dating the worksheet itself and mailing it to the Canada Revenue Agency. (If you're not sure what a GST-HST worksheet looks like, you [...]
When you are registered to collect GST or HST and make a sale of goods or services to payer in another province, you must charge the rate of GST or HST according to the rate in the payer's province. For example, if you are a vendor based in Ontario and registered to collect HST, [...]
When two siblings share an inheritance, their best intentions to redistribute the property can backfire and trigger unnecessarily high taxable capital gains. cottage on the lake When their mother died, Troy and Karl were joint beneficiaries of her will and inherited the lakeside cottage she'd lived in for the past 30 years. Troy [...]
Contributing to your RRSP is a great thing, but an RRSP loan isn't always the best way to do it. Around this time of year you’ll start seeing banks promoting the idea of RRSP loans, where you borrow money to make an RRSP contribution. If you have no cash available, and if an RRSP contribution [...]
Contributing to an RRSP is always a great move, right? Not so fast. RRSPs reduce your taxes by sheltering income from tax when you contribute. You will pay the income tax later when you withdraw the funds, which is ideally when they’ve had a few years to grow (tax-free), and when you’re in a lower [...]
