Most retired Canadians receive income from two government-sponsored retirement income programs – the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and the Old Age Security (OAS) program.
Newsletter - Page 6 of 31 - Akler Browning LLP
Latest news and regulations from the financial world.
This year, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) will receive and process more than 30 million individual income tax returns for the 2023 tax year. No two of those returns will be identical, as each such return will have its own particular combination of amounts and sources of income reported, and deductions and credits claimed.
For the majority of Canadians, the due date for filing of an individual tax return for the 2023 tax year was Tuesday April 30, 2024. (Self-employed Canadians and their spouses have until Monday June 17, 2024 to get that return filed.)
As everyone knows, buying one’s first home – achieving that elusive first step on to the “property ladder” – has always presented a challenge, and that challenge has rarely been greater than it is now.
Most Canadians rarely have reason to interact with the tax authorities, and for most people, that’s the way they like it. In the vast majority of cases, Canadians file their tax returns each spring, receive their refund or pay any balance of taxes owing, and forget about taxes until filing season rolls around the following year.
Most taxpayers sit down to do their annual tax return, or wait to hear from their tax return preparer, with some degree of trepidation. In most cases taxpayers don’t know, until their return is completed, what the “bottom line” will be, and it’s usually a case of hoping for the best and fearing the worst.
Our tax system is, for the most part, a mystery to individual Canadians. The rules surrounding income tax are complicated and it can seem that for each and every rule there is an equal number of exceptions or qualifications.
No one likes paying taxes, but for taxpayers who live on a fixed income having to pay a a large tax bill can mean real financial hardship – and the majority of Canadians who live on fixed incomes are, of course, those who are over 65 and retired.
For the past two years, Canadians have had to continually adjust their household budgets to accommodate price increases for nearly all goods and services.
Most Canadians don’t turn their attention to their taxes until sometime around the end of March or the beginning of April, in time to complete the return for 2023 ahead of the April 30, 2024 filing deadline.