Recently, I attended Thriveal’s Deeper Weekend Conference in Greenville, South Carolina and the Intuit Connect 2025 event in Las Vegas. These conferences are for accounting firm owners and professionals in the industry. It was a pleasure to learn and connect with other firm owners across North America and leaders in our industry - Jason Blummer of Thriveal and Ian Vacin of Kabon. We also had the opportunity to learn about leadership and business from legends like Queen Latifah and Brenee Brown. Enjoy this issue where I share some key insights on taxes and personal development including a quick summary on the 2025 Federal budget released this week. Please remember to share this with everyone in your network:

1. Are You Time Poor?

If you live in North America, you likely live a busy life. In fact, it’s a thing of pride to be busy. You’re generally more respected and seen as successful if you’re busy. The question is, why are we so busy? And how does this contribute to our happiness?

The major reason we are so busy is because of work - we’re busy working so we can make a living. We want to make money and sometimes want to make more and more money. And when you combine this with raising a family, it’s not hard to see why we’re so busy. Naturally, we want more time and we want more money. However, time and money are set against each other. It’s so challenging to gain as much of both as we want so we often have to make uneasy choices when it comes to chasing money or creating more quality time. The popular saying, “if you have the money you don’t have the time and if you have the time, you don’t have the money” seems to be true. This time and money trade-offs impact our decisions and ultimately our happiness. In her research, Ashley suggests that we focus more on working and making money and not enough focus on having more and better time. We fail to value time as much as money. As a result, there is an epidemic level of stress, unhappiness and loneliness that many of us struggle with. This is called time poverty.

In her book, she reviews some of the time traps that lead to our time poverty and she suggests practical ways to overcome these traps so we can start making the shift from time poverty to time affluence. She discusses the following six common time traps in her book:

Time trap # 1 - Technology

Time trap # 2 - Money focus

Time trap # 3 - Undervalue time

Time trap # 4 - Busyness as status

Time trap # 5 - Idleness aversion

Time trap # 6 - Yes damn effect

According to Ashley, we all have the power to overcome the time traps we have fallen victim to. Time poverty feels the same for everyone, but time affluence looks different for everyone. It could mean spending fifteen more minutes strumming the guitar instead of scrolling through your phone, or it could be ten minutes of meditation, or a Saturday morning learning how to invest your savings instead of Slacking about work gossip. No matter what time affluence looks like for you, the happiest and most time affluent among us are deliberate with their free time. Working toward time affluence is about recognizing and overcoming the time traps in our lives and intentionally carving out happier and more meaningful moments each day.

I’m learning quite a bit from her book and going over her recommendations on how I can improve how I use my time. I recommend you grab a copy of her book here and start working towards a shift from time poverty to time affluence.

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2. How Tax-Efficient Are You?

One of the undesirable outcomes of earning a lot of income or making a ton of money is taxes. And no matter your position on taxes, one thing that is certain - taxes impact your wealth. The good news is that we all have the opportunity to minimize taxes and achieve financial freedom. This is why I wrote the book, Tax-Efficient Wealth, to provide you with an easy-to-implement blueprint that will enable you to build and grow your wealth in a tax-efficient manner. After reading this book:

• You will have a solid knowledge of the key wealth drivers to build wealth and uncover the money mindset required to win the money game.
• You will have a blueprint and a step-by-step plan to start your journey on building and growing your wealth tax-efficiently.
• You will save taxes, have more money, and have the confidence to shatter all your money worries for life.

If you’re considering ways to be more tax-efficient with your money, I encourage you to book a consultation call with me here where I can provide you some actionable tips and suggest ways we can work together to put you on the tax-efficient path to wealth.

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3. Three Self-Limiting Beliefs That May Be Holding You Back

We all have core beliefs that guide the decisions we make and these beliefs impact us in many ways. Your healthy beliefs serve you well. But, the unrealistic, self-limiting beliefs you hold onto can hold you back from reaching your greatest potential. In an article titled, “The Impact of Limiting Beliefs” by Alissa Finerman, she noted that our brains can produce as many as 50,000 thoughts per day. Ninety-five percent of these thoughts are repeated daily. You decide how you think and what becomes a can or can’t. Your thoughts become your beliefs which, in turn, become your mindset. Your mindset fuels your actions, which create your reality.

Alissa goes on to illustrate the chain effect that your thoughts can have on your life:

Words>>Thoughts>>Beliefs>>Mindset>>Actions>>Results.

It is clear that our belief system has an impact on the results we accomplish in life. Therefore, it’s important to acknowledge your core beliefs and examine which ones might be inaccurate and unproductive so you can take appropriate steps to let go of the beliefs that are limiting your potential. Amy Morin, author of “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do” in an article published on Inc.com classified unhealthy and unproductive core beliefs into the following 3 broad categories:

1. Unhealthy Beliefs About Yourself — This happens when you conclude that you are a loser, a failure, unlikable, or incapable. This belief system will prevent you from doing your best. Even overly optimistic beliefs can be unhealthy. Thinking you’re the best at everything you do or that you are above the rules can be just as dangerous to your well-being as an exaggeratedly negative core belief about yourself.
2. Unhealthy Beliefs About Others — When you believe everyone is against you, untrustworthy, or manipulative, it will be impossible to develop healthy relationships. Similarly, believing everyone can be trusted or that everyone is a kind person can cause you to be taken advantage of or to get into relationships that aren’t good for you.
3. Unhealthy Beliefs About the World — Assuming that you can’t succeed in today’s world or thinking that the world is too dark of a place to ever be happy will take a toll on your life. On the flipside, minimizing social problems and looking at the world through rose-colored glasses isn’t helpful either.

Unfortunately, we all have these unhealthy beliefs to varying degrees. And in many cases, we often think that all of our beliefs are 100 percent accurate. We hold on to them and we end up living irrational and unproductive lives. Read more here.

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4. First-Time Home Buyers’ GST Rebate: Big Relief for New Homes

First-time buyers can soon claim a 100% GST rebate on new homes valued up to $1 million, with partial relief up to $1.5 million. This includes builder purchases, owner-built homes, and co-op housing units. To qualify, buyers must be Canadian residents, 18 or older, and first-time owners who occupy the home as their principal residence.

✅ Tip: If you’re planning a home purchase, consider timing construction or purchase agreements after May 27, 2025 to take advantage of this incentive.

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5. 2025 Federal Budget: Highlights and Takeaways

Earlier this week, the Liberal government presented the 2025 Federal Budget, Canada Strong. The budget lays out the government’s plan to strengthen Canada’s economy and sovereignty in the face of tariffs, geopolitical uncertainty, lagging productivity and weak investment. The budget was built around a narrative of “spending less to invest more,” with a focus on infrastructure spending, nation building projects and incentives with the goal of spurring investment and attracting more capital to boost the Canadian economy. From a tax perspective, it’s disappointing that there were no bold tax initiatives to permanently lower the amount of taxes you and I pay on our personal and business income. However, I applaud these two key tax initiatives in the budget:

• The proposal to temporarily extending the Accelerated Investment Incentive for property acquired on or after November 4, 2025; and
• The proposal to give CRA authority to file tax returns on behalf of eligible individuals with low or fixed incomes and simple, unchanged tax situations, beginning with the 2025 taxation year. This will help lower-income Canadians who often miss out on benefits simply because they don’t file their taxes.

For more details on the Federal budget, you can read the CPA budget summary here.