Ali Spinner: So something that people should think about is that even if perhaps they think that they don't need to file their taxes, it's always a great idea to still file your taxes even if you think, you know what? I don't think I owe any money to the government this year. The reason being is that if you don't file, there's many benefits that might be available to you that come automatically just from filing a tax return that wouldn't otherwise come. If you don't file as well, there could be certain refund items or certain credits or deductions that you might not realise. But if you file that tax return, you'll make sure that you get them.

Host: What's the first step when it comes to filing your taxes?

Ali Spinner: Certainly the first step is you mentioned it is get Organised, make sure you find all of your information. Something that's excellent that's available is if you are registered with an online account for CRA. My account. The great news is that many of your tax slips are actually uploaded already to the CRA website. So I would encourage everybody to gain access to their CRA online account if they don't already have it. That's a great first place to check to make sure if there's any tax slips there that you weren't realising you had coming to you. That's a great place to check. And then make sure you gather up all of your, your T slips for any income amounts that you have. Certainly items like charitable deductions, medical expenses, the usual pieces of paper.

Host: All right. You talked about credits. So let's talk about a few. What's out there for families or for people who are thinking about having a family? There's a couple of examples out there.

Ali Spinner: Yeah, for sure. There's, there's one particular credit that's new this year that I'd like to talk about, which is the Ontario Fertility Treatment Tax Credit. That's a new one. And it begins as of 2025. So if a family who is who is starting a family or adding to their family incurs fertility treatment costs, the great news is that this year in Ontario, for up to $20,000 of expenses per year, that family, one member of the family. So one of the spouses, or if it's a single parent, just the single parent, can claim up to $20,000 of expenses, which actually translates into a refundable credit of up to $5,000. So it's 25% of the amount spent up to a maximum benefit of $5,000. And I mentioned it's refundable, meaning that even if you didn't have any income and you otherwise wouldn't have access to shelter, this is a refundable credit. The government will send you the money back. Also, that money that you're spending to get this special Ontario credit also counts towards the non refundable medical expense tax credit. So fertility expenses, fertility treatment expenses. Certainly that's something that people, if they're starting a family and spending money there, should be making sure that they're claiming as medical and the Ontario fertility tax treatment credit.

Host: All right. And there's adoption as well.

Ali Spinner: There's absolutely an adoption. There's absolutely, absolutely an adoption tax credit that credit is. It's up to almost $20,000. The the parent of the child would claim it in the year that the adoption is closed. So even if the adoption takes more than one year, you would wait until the adoption is finalised and that's when the credit can be claimed. Again, that's a non-refundable. It's about 20% of a credit, up to $20,000 of expenses that can be claimed by one parent as well. You also mentioned child care expense deductions. That's something very important. If you have children, there's a child care credit that effectively enables if there's a couple so two spouses that enables the lower income spouse to either go back to work to conduct research a few different items of ways to earn money. But the lower income spouse can claim a credit for various child care deduction costs, whether it's daycare, summer day camps, if you have a nanny who's there to help look after children, different types of items, and those credits are quite material. If you have a child who's up to the age of if sorry, I should say if the child is under the age of seven, the amount that you can claim is $8,000 per year per child. If they're up to 15, the amount goes down to 5000 per year. And if you have a child of any age, you qualifies for the disability tax credit. Then the deduction is $11,000 per child. And the nice part about that is it comes off the lower income spouse's highest marginal tax rate. So that can be a material amount of money going back into your pocket.

Host: All right. Let's switch gears a little bit. I want to talk to talk about people working from home. There's a lot of people who are still doing that, but it's not so cut and dry. Give us an idea of what someone who what they can or cannot expense if they're working.

Ali Spinner: That's a very important question because I think there's a lot of confusion and that people assume that they can claim a huge variety of expenses from working from home. So in the last couple of years, there's much more restriction about who can claim work from home expenses and what we can claim. So number one, you have to be actually required to work from home. It can't be. It can't be just an informal situation where you decided to work from home part of the time. It has to be actually a formal requirement that you are working from home. And if you are assuming that you're an employee, I'm talking about an employee here, you can claim a limited amount, an amount limited to, I should say, the the portion of your home that you are using as perhaps a dedicated work environment for your job. You can claim a portion of utilities portion of rent paid if you're renting and certain other expenses. What I do find though, is the amounts that are actually deductible. Once all of the. The multiplication has happened to reduce the amount to just the part of the area that you use to work in, the amount is not as large as perhaps you were expecting, but it still is worthwhile to claim if you're a commissioned sales person, you're commissioned employee. You can also claim a deduction for the portion of property taxes as well.

Host: All right. Let's talk about some other expenses. People perhaps had had a major move, during this, you know, year. Yeah. Can they, expense any of that?

Ali Spinner: Yeah, sure. I'm glad you said major. So the the rule is, is that if you ultimately moved to be at least 40km closer to your place of employment, then you may be able to deduct moving expenses. And the key there is, it has to be a substantial enough move in the direction towards wherever it is that you work from. And there absolutely. There are certain expenses. Again, it's very codified as to what you can and cannot claim. But certainly if you've got a cross-country move or if you've moved from city to city or town to town, you might certainly fit the requirement of moving more than 40km. You can also think about it about children or kids, university students if they are moving far distances to attend university, if they have a job at that location of where they're going to be attending school, they might be able to claim moving expenses for the move off to school from that job that they're holding down while they're in school at that location.

Host: All right. For those who are entrepreneurs, self-employed, I'm talking about the artists, the content creators in this new, day and age. The list of expenses could look a lot different. Absolutely. What is one expense that they should keep in mind before one files?

Ali Spinner: I would say that it's important for them to. It's a bit hard to narrow down to one expense, but I would certainly say they need to think about all of the various expenses that they have related to their business. And you happened to mention content creators, that that's an interesting piece because there might be a blurred line between, well, what's personal and what's business. But certainly I would encourage them to take a hard look at all of their various expenses and determine what was spent and had a business purpose, and make sure they make note of those business purposes with respect to the expenses.

Host: I know time is ticking for a lot of people who have got their papers all scattered on the table, so they're asking deadlines, what are the deadlines? What do we have to keep in mind with those?

Ali Spinner: Okay, so the most important deadline, April 30th in Canada, we do not have extensions or taxes are due on April 30th unless if you're self-employed, you have until June 15th to file your tax return. However any taxes. However yes, any taxes that you owed would still be due on April 30th. So you have to pay the taxes that you would owe April 30th. If you're self-employed, you do have that small extension, if you will, until June 15th to file. One thing I just want to mention is that people often think, oh, I don't have to perhaps pay any taxes during the year. I just pay them all on April 30th. That could be true for somebody who is employed and has source deductions taken off of every paycheque. Perhaps you don't have a balance of tax owing, but you file your tax return if you are self-employed or if you have investment income and you have an instalment requirement. We really do have a pay as you go system and you'd have to pay your personal tax instalments in quarterly instalments in the year that they're earned.

Host: Okay Ali, we are going to leave it there. This was very informative. Thank you very much. Ali Spinner: Thank you for having me.