Optiml’s Most Powerful Release Yet: Full Corporate & Estate Planning for Canadian Business Owners

For just over a year, Optiml has helped Canadians optimize retirement income, taxes, and estate planning across personal accounts like RRSPs, TFSAs, and non-registered investments. But for business owners with corporations, holding companies, family trusts, private investments, and real estate, the full picture has always been far more complex.

Today, that changes.

Optiml’s newest release brings corporate structures directly into your financial plan. You can now model:

• Family Trusts
• Holding Companies (HoldCos)
• Operating Companies (OpCos)
• Corporate real estate, investments, insurance, and private equity
• Shareholder loans
• Dividend flow through the entire structure
• Complete estate tax implications across all entities

This is the most advanced business-owner planning engine available to Canadians, and it's now a seamless part of Optiml.

Build Your Real Corporate Structure Inside Optiml

Add Your Family Trust

You can now add a Family Trust to your plan and designate beneficiaries with any ownership split, not just 50/50. Optiml simulates:

• Trust asset ownership
• Frozen values for estate planning
• 21-year deemed disposition rules
• Dividend or cash flow distributions to beneficiaries

Add a Holding Company Inside the Trust

Once your trust is created, you can add a HoldCo beneath it, mirroring common Canadian corporate structures. Optiml models:

• How the HoldCo pays dividends to one or more individuals
• How assets inside the HoldCo grow and generate income
• Corporate taxes and personal tax integration

Inside the HoldCo: Add All Your Corporate Assets

Your HoldCo can now include every asset type commonly owned by business owners:

• Operating Companies
• Corporate real estate
• Investment funds
• Cash accounts
• Private equity holdings
• Life insurance policies with CSV
• Shareholder loans (owed or received)

Operating Companies: Business Income, Growth & Custom Dividends

Each OpCo can now be modeled independently. You can simulate:

• Annual business income (with future changes as you wind down)
• Growth in company value
• Manual dividend payouts from OpCo to HoldCo
• Sale of the business—including LCGE eligibility

Importantly, you no longer need to “sell” an OpCo to stop business income. You can simply reduce income after a chosen year, perfect for phased retirements.

Control Dividend Flow at Every Level

One of the most powerful parts of this release is that you now control how money moves through your entire structure:

• Drain cash from your OpCo and move it up to the HoldCo
• Payout dividends from the HoldCo to individuals—at any ownership split
• Let Optiml optimize dividends from HoldCo → individuals to minimize lifetime taxes
• Simulate different payout strategies for retirement or estate goals

Life Insurance Inside Corporate Structures

Business owners often use whole life policies for tax and estate purposes. Optiml now supports:

• Cash Surrender Value (CSV) that grows over time
• Optional policy cancellation to access cash—flowing into the HoldCo
• Death benefit payouts inside the HoldCo
• Credit to the Capital Dividend Account (CDA)

Shareholder Loans: Now Fully Simulated

Shareholder loans now behave exactly like they do in real life:

• OpCo → HoldCo loans are repaid when cash is available
• HoldCo → Individual loans are repaid over time
• If your HoldCo can’t meet its expenses, Optiml automatically recommends loans from the individual

These recommendations adjust your personal cashflow automatically, giving you a realistic financial view.

The New Business Income Page: A Complete View of Corporate Cashflow

The new Business Income page is one of the most impactful additions. It visualizes:

• Business income generated inside each OpCo
• Dividends flowing into the HoldCo
• HoldCo dividends paid to beneficiaries
• How corporate income supports your lifestyle and long-term goals

Estate Planning Now Covers Your Entire Corporate Structure

Optiml now models estate taxes across:

• Family Trusts (including freeze value and 21-year rollover rules)
• HoldCos
• OpCos
• Real estate
• Private equity
• Insurance

You’ll see exactly how each asset is taxed, what passes to heirs, and whether your estate has enough liquidity—or needs additional planning.

Why This Update Matters

If you're a business owner, your corporation is one of the most important parts of your financial life. For many Canadians, it is:

• Their primary source of retirement income
• Their largest estate asset
• A vehicle for tax planning and wealth transfer

For the first time, you can now model all of this in one place—accurately, clearly, and automatically.

The Future of Business Owner Planning Starts Here

This release transforms Optiml from a retirement optimizer into a complete corporate + estate planning engine. Whether you’re transitioning out of your business, planning for generational wealth transfer, or simply trying to understand how dividends support your retirement, Optiml now gives you the full picture.

It’s a massive step forward and we’re just getting started.