What Prepared Private School Families Do Differently.

These four areas are worth a conversation.

01. Make the Grant Work Harder

The match is worth collecting regardless of net worth, but the real value comes after.

Tax-deferred growth on up to $50,000 per child, taxed in their hands, not yours. Funding that room earlier lets it compound longer. If it goes unused, up to $50,000 of that growth (not the contributions) can roll into your own RRSP tax-free, as long as you have the room. It's worth checking whether yours is built to do more than just capture the match.

02. Give in a Way That Counts

If you wrote a cheque to the school this year instead of donating shares, you paid more tax than you needed to.

Donating publicly traded securities directly to the school eliminates the capital gain and still earns a full market value receipt. Selling first triggers the tax before the gift is made. The one rule you can't cross is keeping the gift entirely separate from tuition, or CRA can reduce or disallow the receipt. Before your next gift, confirm which asset you're giving and which registered charity is receiving it.

03. Protect What You're Building

A family trust does more than save tax. It plans your estate and can multiply what your children keep.

Assets in trust sit outside your estate and probate. That means no delay, no public record, and no court process if you're incapacitated, since your trustee keeps things running. Guardianship decides who raises your children. A trust decides how your wealth reaches them, including multiplying the lifetime capital gains exemption on a future private company share sale, potentially sheltering millions in gains. Qualifying takes planning ahead, so it's worth raising before a sale, transition, or incapacity is ever a possibility.

04. Teach Them What You Know

The best money lesson your child will ever learn costs about $20.

Let them lose it to a bad decision while the stakes are small enough not to matter. A theoretical lesson about saving doesn't stick. The memory of standing in a store, wanting something they can't have because of a choice they made three weeks ago, does. That's a cheap lesson at eight and an expensive one at twenty-eight. Every tool that works, whether it's matching, spending accounts, or an allowance tied to chores, exists to make that moment happen early and on purpose, rather than waiting for real life to deliver it once the numbers are big enough to actually hurt.

Ask me for a financial literacy exercise built for your child's exact age. One conversation is usually all it takes to set one up.