When Summer Creates Space to Think

Summer is our favourite season at Spring! This may seem counterintuitive, given our name. However, since planning is the game here, Spring Planning means thinking about this glorious season, the only Summer 2026 of our lives, all through spring.

Not only do we love all the glorious sunshine, local festivals, late nights, and bright stars of summer, we also love what happens in our minds during this season. The different pace allows each of us to think just a little more. Tax deadlines are behind us. Children are finishing school. Vacations are taking shape. For a brief moment, life feels a little less reactive.

Somewhere between a long weekend, a lake dock, and a sandy beach, questions start to surface.

“Are we actually ready for retirement?”

“How much can we safely spend?”

“Should we take money from our RRSPs or my corporation this year… or both?”

“When should we start CPP?”

“What happens if markets don’t cooperate?”

“What do I do when my family trust turns 21?”

“Are my kids ready to inherit?”

We love helping to answer these questions, and to support the next stages that come after the answers. The “next stages” part is often a surprise to people before they get there.

Despite what many believe, financial planning is not a single moment in time. Way back in the day, when we first started, we thought it might be. We thought that we could provide a great financial plan and things would be set in stone.

What we found is that financial planning is the first season, the spring. It’s where we set goals, build strategies, and imagine that amazing summer season. In summer, we breathe those learnings in, and start to get to know what life looks like now that we are here. And after summer? Another season begins.

While most of the heavy lifting on our end does happen in that first great financial plan, the reality is that your life changes, and the world changes around you. For many people the focus is on a singular moment, a shift into the next stage. This could mean starting a business, shifting it to a new owner, having children, launching them into adulthood, stepping back from full-time work whether fully or partially, and much more.

After the change occurs, the truth is that planning doesn’t stop. It may be a little smaller, a little more focused. The big, initial plan gives you the entire picture, with all the stops along the way. As you approach each stop, more questions arise.

While your plan gives you the order of operations and all the sources of income, there are nuances that you can only explore in the moment when you are experiencing this year’s income and this year’s expenses and this year’s taxes. Your financial plan gave you the playbook but now… you have to actually run the play.

That’s why, in sports (which we honestly know very little about so please forgive any misconceptions), athletes still have a coach. Yes, you know that you’re supposed to tackle this player, or that you need to get on base, or that the next move is the triple axel. Your coach helps you overcome blind spots, optimize your training, and perform consistently under pressure. Your coach supports your nutrition goals and your rest.

At Spring, we know that the hard work for you comes after the plan is received. We know that the next steps – doing the thing – are actually harder than knowing what things are to be done. It’s why athletes get paid more and are more celebrated than the coaches. Coaches are necessary and valuable, but it’s the athlete doing the work.

In our annual income planning sessions with ongoing clients, which generally occur in the time between October and early January, we narrow in on the current year, and next year. We focus on perfecting your triple axel – which might be making a slight adjustment to your RRIF withdrawal, or a small tweak to that dividend, or an unexpected contribution to an RRSP that you thought you’d never use again but it works really well this year.

Athletes experience slow downs and injuries as well. Maybe the market didn’t do what we really wanted it to do (we remember 2022!) and that means your coach prescribes a little rest and a little change in your eating plan. Perhaps this means we pull your income from a slightly different place, in slightly different amounts than expected. Or we delay that renovation for a little bit, even though it’s absolutely necessary and definitely will happen, because a rest and reset is necessary today.

Someone we have worked with for years has called this coaching “where the rubber hits the road”. It’s where planning meets reality, and adjustments are made to stay on track and to deal with new information. All the work we’ve done to create your overarching financial plan is intense and vital. It becomes meaningful when it connects to the life the plan was always meant to support – the one you designed. The one you keep redesigning as you learn more about yourself and your life. That never, ever ends, because you’re a person who grows and changes, who lives in a world that grows and changes.

Every year, our income planning calendar fills well before fall arrives. Not because the calculations take months, but because thoughtful planning requires time. Time to gather information, coordinate with accountants, lawyers, and investment professionals, explore different scenarios, and think through trade-offs without feeling rushed. The clients who tend to get the most value from the process aren’t necessarily the ones with the most complex financial lives. They’re the ones who give themselves enough space to make intentional decisions.

At its core, income planning is about confidence. Confidence that you can spend money on the things that matter. Confidence that your retirement income can support the life you want to live. Confidence that the decisions you’re making today are aligned with the future you’re trying to build.

We spent our spring season planning for an amazing summer 2026. In summer, we are of course planning for fall and winter. If you want clarity about where you are today, and how best to perform your triple axel or get on the next base, now is the time to start the conversation and plan ahead for the fall season. The best decisions rarely happen at the last minute, and a little bit of planning this season can make your next season a lot more fun.

Your Spring Planning Team

Practice Notes:

Summer is a season we take seriously at Spring. To give our team time to recharge, reconnect with family, and enjoy everything a Canadian summer has to offer, we once again have Summer Fridays in place. Our office will work reduced hours on Fridays throughout the summer, with the team returning refreshed and ready to support clients each week.

Many members of our team will also be taking vacation time in late July and early August. We believe that doing our best work requires balance, and stepping away periodically helps us bring fresh energy, perspective, and focus to the planning conversations that matter most. Fall tends to be incredibly busy as we close out the year, so we want to be ready for you!

If you’re thinking about booking a meeting, we encourage you to reach out to us at info@springplans.ca soon so we can make sure we secure time and space for you.

Have more questions? Drop us a note at info@springplans.ca.

Spring in the News:

Your Spring team is part of a group of financial planners in BC who have spoken out to the provincial government regarding the restructuring of the property tax deferral program. Global News interviewed Julia as part of their story on the subject and you can watch that right here.

Julia co-emceed the Family Enterprise Canada Symposium in Vancouver for the 4th year in a row. Here’s a picture of Julia, her co-emcee Marc-Alexandre Barbe, and the Family Enterprise Canada team after the event.

Please check out our media page here for videos, podcasts, interviews and more.

Planning News Digest:

What is this “technical recession” that Canada is apparently in? CBC news reports on it here.

You may have heard about “prediction markets”, but what does that term mean? The Globe & Mail gets into a Q&A about this high-risk, speculative system that was banned by multiple regulators at various times in Canada. Read all about it here.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days and personal finance is one of the areas where people are asking AI for support. At the moment, it’s worth remembering that AI doesn’t have great answers – and here’s an article about how often it’s wrong.

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