^InsightsSeven Reasons to Give While You’re Alive

Most wealth in this country transfers the same way. All at once, at death, on a date nobody chose. For the majority of families that is not a decision anyone made. It is what happens when no decision gets made.

The alternative is already widespread. More than a third of first-time homebuyers in British Columbia now receive family help with a down payment, and the average gift here is over $200,000, nearly double what it was five years ago. Money is moving between generations during life, at scale. It is just rarely documented, rarely timed, and almost never coordinated with the estate plan it will eventually collide with.

Done deliberately, giving earlier produces better outcomes on almost every measure that matters. Here are seven reasons why, and four ways it goes wrong.

1. The money is worth more to them now
   A 38-year-old with two young kids and a Vancouver mortgage can do things with $250,000 that a 64-year-old with a paid-off house cannot. A down payment. Tuition. A business. Time bought back. Capital delivered when it is needed is worth several times the same capital delivered at the reading of a will.
   
2. You get to see what happens
   A $200,000 gift at 40 tells you a great deal about how a $4 million inheritance at 65 will go. If what you see concerns you, you have twenty years to change the plan. Families who transfer everything at death get one attempt and are not around for it.
   
3. It skips probate entirely
   BC charges roughly 1.4% on estate value above $50,000, with no upper limit. A $6 million estate pays about $83,000 before any legal or executor costs. Anything given away during your life never enters that calculation, which is why gifting belongs in the same conversation as your estate plan rather than beside it.
   
4. You can shift investment income to a lower bracket at 3%
   The rate the government sets for family loans has sat at 3% since mid-2025. Lend to a spouse or a family trust at that rate and everything the money earns above 3% is taxed in their hands rather than yours at 53.5%. Lock it in now and it holds for the life of the loan. One condition: the interest has to actually be paid, every year, by January 30. Miss it once and the structure unwinds permanently.
   
5. Business owners can multiply the capital gains exemption
   Each family member can shelter about $1.275 million of gain on a qualifying business sale. Structured properly in advance, that exemption can be spread across a spouse and adult children, worth roughly $340,000 of tax each. It takes two years of clean preparation and cannot be arranged once a sale is on the table, which is the whole argument for treating succession as a multi-year project.
   
6. In BC, a gift cannot be contested the way a will can
   Here a will can be challenged by a spouse or a child, including an adult child who is doing perfectly well. Assets you gave away during your life are not part of the estate, so they are not exposed. One honest caveat: courts do look at what you gave and to whom. Lopsided treatment is what starts fights. Gifts made openly and explained rarely do.
   
7. It replaces a document with a conversation
   Children who understand why the plan looks the way it does behave differently from children who find out in a lawyer’s office. The explanation is the part that protects the family. A will cannot deliver it.

Four things that will trip you up

1. Giving away what you turn out to need
   This comes before everything else. Test your plan against a long-term care event, a bad market in your first five years of retirement, and living to 95. What survives all three is what is genuinely spare. Gifts cannot be undone, and asking for money back is the conversation that damages families.
   
2. Giving the wrong asset
   Cash is clean. Property is not. Give away a cottage, a rental, or a stock position held for decades and the tax system treats it as though you sold it that day, taxing the full accrued gain at up to 26.75% in BC with no sale proceeds to pay it. There is a common argument that this still beats the larger bill your estate would face later, but that bill is decades away, and discounted to today’s dollars the advantage on slowly appreciating property mostly disappears. Which asset you give is a tax planning decision, not an afterthought.
   
3. Giving to the wrong person
   Give to a spouse or to a child under 18 and the tax comes back to you anyway. Only gifts to adult children are clean. This is the single most common mistake people make on their own.
   
4. Not putting it in writing, at the time
   Courts start from the assumption that money moved to an adult child is being held for the parent, not given away. A bank form will not overcome that; a signed letter stating plainly that this is a gift will. Worth noting too that in BC a gift to your child stays theirs if their relationship ends, but the growth on it does not. That is fixable, but only beforehand.

Wealth that moves during your lifetime is wealth you can direct, explain, and correct. Wealth that moves at death is a legal event you will not attend.
The starting point is not a gifting strategy. It is a clear answer to how much is genuinely surplus. Everything else follows from that number. Let’s talk.

Related reading
· The Care Transition: Planning the Later-Life Move Before It Plans You
· Complying With the New Trust Reporting Rules: What You Must Do
· Term vs Whole Life Insurance: Which Is Right for You?

Sources

·  CIBC Capital Markets, Benjamin Tal and Katherine Judge, gifted down payment analysis (via Globe and Mail coverage)
·  Canada Revenue Agency, prescribed interest rates, fourth calendar quarter 2026
·  KPMG, Combined Top Marginal Tax Rates for Individuals, 2026; EY, Tax Rates: British Columbia 2026
·  CRA indexation adjustment tables, 2026 (lifetime capital gains exemption, $1,275,000)
·  Province of British Columbia, Probate Fee Act fee schedule
·  Income Tax Act, ss. 69(1), 74.1, 74.2, 110.6
·  Wills, Estates and Succession Act (BC), s. 60
·  Pecore v. Pecore, 2007 SCC 17
·  Family Law Act (BC), s. 85