Tompkins Insurance Services
Life Insurance & Estate Planning For Affluent Families.
Life Insurance & Estate Planning For Affluent Families.
ESTATE PLANNING GUIDELatest Insights
Estate Planning Guide
Latest Insights
This is
what we do.
Tompkins Insurance Services aids Canada’s most accomplished business families in protecting and transitioning their wealth, while also managing their estates in a tax-efficient way. We’ve been solely focused on this since 1990.
We support business families with sound estate planning.
Estate planning is a process undertaken during life to determine what happens to the person’s estate when they die – specifically, how their wealth is transferred to their family while paying minimum tax. Effective estate planning uses tax strategies – along with wills and trusts – in an effort to minimize tax liabilities at death and achieve the family’s desired distribution of wealth and property in an efficient way.
We help families connect the role of life insurance with their estate plan.
A properly structured life insurance plan – permanent policies such as whole life and universal life – provides the funding to the estate or holding company for various needs: meeting estate tax liabilities, funding obligations, providing funds for loss of income, enhancing the inter-generational transfer of wealth, and others. Life insurance provides a less costly and more tax-efficient option for meeting these needs than other strategies.
We use life insurance to support cost-efficient transitions in family-owned enterprises.
If the intention is to transfer an investment holding company or family business to the next generation, there will likely be a significant capital gains tax due at the death of the owner. The options to pay this tax liability are to either use cash, sell assets, borrow – or use life insurance, which is typically the least costly option. Insurance is a tax-efficient pre-funding method to meet a known future tax liability at the exact time the funds are required.
We’re a trusted, reliable resource to families and their professional advisors.
Our sole focus is life insurance and estate planning for affluent families. Over the years, we’ve compiled this expertise into an online easy-to-understand library of sorts – a reliable go-to resource for families and advisors to access at any time.
To learn more about estate planning and life insurance visit Insurance & Estate Planning Fundamentals.
This is how we do it.
Trust & collaboration
Working with affluent families requires building trust with their professional advisors and truly collaborating in the client’s best interest. We’ve learned that working closely with lawyers, accountants, tax specialists and family office professionals always puts the client first – and leads to a better result.
Expertise & Creativity
Our clients and their advisors have come to rely on us to objectively demonstrate the economics of various life insurance products and funding approaches to meet the family’s estate planning needs. With a focus on life insurance and estate planning – and only these areas – we help assess the optimum life insurance solutions, while also ensuring that both the family and its advisors are thoroughly informed on the options available in the marketplace.
Independent Advice
As an independent firm, Tompkins Insurance Services can access the entire life insurance marketplace for solutions that best meet the estate planning needs of our clients. Our underwriting team conducts a thorough analysis among the most competitive and highly-rated insurers to optimize the pricing of each client’s life insurance portfolio. The result? Both the family and the advisory team can be confident in our objective recommendations.
Exemplary Service
Large life insurance portfolios require a level of ongoing attention to detail that experienced professional advisors appreciate. With more than 25 years of experience in handling life insurance cases of all sizes and complexity, including amounts in excess of $100 million, each of our clients receives the personalized service they expect and deserve. Our team coordinates all aspects of the insurance application, including any medical and financial underwriting requirements. All issues arising in the future – including banking and beneficiary changes, plan design changes and annual reviews – are handled with speed, thoroughness and efficiency.
