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By David Fagan CPA, CA “I wish I had met you twenty years ago.” It is one of the greatest compliments a client has ever given me. He was nearing the end of a successful career, and we had only been working together for a few years. In that relatively short period of time, we had helped frame and align his path to wealth creation in a way that finally made sense to him. He could see the strength of the plan. He understood the system. More importantly, he could see what might h

By David Fagan CPA, CA Most business owners spend years learning how to build a successful company. They learn how to attract customers, manage employees, make payroll and produce profit. But very few are taught what to do when the business begins producing more money than the family needs to live - That is when a business owner must begin developing a second skill: They must learn how to become an investor. Why incorporate? When clients ask whether they should inco

By David Fagan CPA, CA Expectations are powerful frequencies - invisible signals that shape how others see themselves. In leadership, the difference between elevation and relegation often starts with a single thought: what do we truly expect of those around us? My childhood was filled with play. We spent endless hours outside - road hockey on the street, basketball in driveways, and backyard baseball again and again. There was always a game happening, and always a mix of tale

By David Fagan CPA, CA Sports can teach us so much about life. And if you have kids, I’d encourage you to get them involved early – whether in team sports or individual ones. The lessons you pick up at a young age carry into everything else, including business and investing. Pulickel Prasad wrote a wonderful book called What I Learned from Darwin About Investing. It made me wonder what I’ve learned from the beautiful game of golf. Over the years, golf has quietly become one o

Why business owners should learn to manage capital before they need to. By David Fagan, CPA, CA One of the most important investment lessons I ever learned came from a client who sold her family business. For more than forty years, she and her husband had built a successful company. It was their livelihood, and the financial world they understood best. Eventually, they sold the company and received a multi-million-dollar payout. From the outside, it looked like the ideal outc

In this episode of the Investor’s Podcast, Stig Brodersen and David Fagan explain why indexing remains one of the most effective investment strategies for most people. The conversation examines common mistakes investors make when evaluating performance and managing risk, and offers practical insights into asset allocation, rebalancing, and setting realistic expectations. David also highlights the long-term impact of even small differences in investment returns, explaining how

In this episode of The Investor’s Podcast, Stig Brodersen sits down with David Fagan to explore the powerful link between entrepreneurship and investing. Drawing on his experience as both a business owner and an investor, David shares insights on risk, capital allocation, dividends, and lessons entrepreneurs can apply to public markets. The conversation also delves into personal growth, daily habits, financial independence, relationships, and the realities of going into busin

In this episode of The Investor’s Podcast, Clay Finck sits down with David Fagan to discuss the key lessons from Don Keough’s book, The Ten Commandments of Business Failure. Drawing on Keough’s experience helping lead Coca-Cola through decades of exceptional growth, the conversation explores the habits and mindsets that can hold businesses back. The discussion covers avoiding risk, becoming inflexible, and relying too heavily on experts. David also shares his entrepreneurial

In this episode of Millennial Investing by The Investor's Podcast, Kyle Grieve and David Fagan explore the timeless principles behind building lasting wealth. From the role of luck and risk in investing to the hidden power of compounding knowledge, habits, and savings, the conversation highlights why simple investing strategies often outperform more complex ones. David also shares insights on financial flexibility, the psychology of wealth, and why long-term success is more a

Don Keough, the late former CEO of Coca-Cola, was once asked why so many businesses in the United States failed in the first half of the 20th century, and what companies could do to succeed. His reply was classic: he couldn’t offer a guaranteed formula for creating winners, but he could promise that if you followed his advice, you’d be guaranteed to lose and become a highly successful loser. That off-the-cuff response eventually became the basis for the only book he ever wrot

Start saving today, let compounding do the heavy lifting, and arrive at financial freedom decades ahead of schedule. I’m offering you a one-way ticket to the easiest duplication you’ll ever get in your career. But here’s the catch: the departure is today. If you miss it, you’ll still reach the destination eventually, just years later, at a much higher cost. In true Duplicate Me MD fashion, today’s advice is about duplicating your income. Not by working more hours or chasing

Build financial systems that run themselves so you can focus on patients, not paperwork. Meet Dr. Old School. When she launched her own practice, she did what most doctors do: kept her receipts in a drawer, sent spreadsheets to her accountant once a year, and hoped nothing got missed. For a while, it worked. Then one Friday afternoon, she opened a brown CRA envelope and found a 10% payroll penalty staring back at her. She had missed three months of payroll remittances over th

Whole life insurance inside a Canadian corporation can be a useful planning tool, but only when it is used for the right purpose, at the right time, and with the right capital. The issue is not whether whole life insurance works in theory. The issue is whether it works better than simpler alternatives once growth rate, opportunity cost, liquidity, and long-term friction are fully considered. Insurance first. Investment second. Despite how it is often marketed, this sequencing

The world has a natural rhythm. When we remove noise, clutter, and unnecessary complication, clarity appears. We see what matters. We see what lasts. Simplicity isn’t the absence of effort – it’s alignment. It can become a pillar, a guiding operating system for how we work, decide, and lead. Like a seagull soaring with the wind, life – and work – gets easier when we move with the currents instead of against them. As an accountant, I’ve spent my career inside complex systems.

By David Fagan Most people spend their whole lives earning money and saving for retirement - but very few spend even an hour a year checking how well that money is actually working for them. That gap between earning and overseeing is one of the biggest financial blind spots people have. Your investments might be the second-largest financial engine in your life - yet most people rarely check whether that engine is running properly. This article is about fixing that. It’s about

Setting up your medical practice comes with a lot of decisions – what to name it, where to locate it, and most importantly, how to make sure the CRA doesn’t end up sitting in your waiting room flipping through your files. There’s no shortage of tax advice floating around, but here’s the simple version: claim what’s reasonable, skip what’s ridiculous, and when in doubt, ask your accountant before you expense it. Because as funny as some of these stories are, audits aren’t. The