Beneficiary designation audit
We review all registered account beneficiaries — RRSP, RRIF, TFSA, employer plans — to identify outdated designations that could route assets contrary to your wishes.
Estate Planning
Has your estate plan kept pace with your life?
Stonehmint aligns your financial accounts with your estate intentions — coordinating beneficiary designations, spousal rollovers, and charitable goals into one clear framework.
Estate planning from the financial side
Estate planning sits at the intersection of financial strategy, family dynamics, and legal documentation. Stonehmint handles the financial dimensions — ensuring your registered accounts carry correct and current beneficiary designations, that your RRSP or RRIF assets roll over to a spouse tax-efficiently, and that any charitable intentions are structured to provide a meaningful tax benefit to your estate. We work alongside your notary or lawyer and do not draft legal documents ourselves; our contribution is to ensure the financial architecture matches the intentions expressed in those documents, so there are no gaps between your will and your account statements.
Key areas of the estate review
Financial coordination that turns good intentions into clean outcomes.
Spousal rollover structuring
We confirm that registered assets are structured to transfer to a surviving spouse on a tax-deferred basis, protecting the estate from an avoidable and significant tax liability at death.
Charitable giving strategy
We model the tax benefit of donating securities or naming a charity as a partial RRIF beneficiary, so your philanthropic goals create a meaningful estate-tax offset.
Coordination with legal team
We prepare a summary document your notary can use to ensure the legal documents reflect the financial account structure — reducing the risk of conflicting instructions.
“After my husband passed, we discovered his RRSP still named his ex-wife as beneficiary — a 20-year-old oversight that caused enormous legal stress. Stonehmint now audits our accounts every year so that situation cannot happen to my children.”
— Suzanne B., retired nurse, Québec City
The limits of our estate work
Stonehmint is not a law firm. We do not prepare wills, powers of attorney, or testamentary trusts. For those documents you will need a notary or estate lawyer, and we strongly recommend you have one. Our role is to ensure the financial accounts you hold are consistent with the legal documents your advisors prepare — and to alert you when they are not. Estate law in Québec operates under the Civil Code, which differs from common-law provinces; we are familiar with the financial implications of those distinctions, but legal interpretation remains with your qualified legal counsel.
Is your estate financially consistent with your will?
A Stonehmint estate review takes stock of what you hold and how it is titled — so you can correct anything that does not match your intentions.
Book an Estate Review