As of December 31, 2023
Our team of professionals understands how to help you achieve your financial goals. It’s a combination of disciplined portfolio management, comprehensive planning, and personalized client service that puts your interests first.
LEARN MOREOur service goes well beyond investing, as we work with you to establish savings goals, plan for your retirement or other milestones, and help with all of your important financial decisions.
We use a traditional indexed approach that offers the broadest diversification while keeping your costs and taxes as low as possible.
Read MoreYour portfolio is just a tool for reaching your financial goals. We focus on your personal objectives, whether that’s building a savings plan, paying off debt, or drawing down your nest egg in retirement.
Read MoreOur team is dedicated to attentive service. We respond to your emails and calls promptly, and we handle your paperwork and other administrative tasks efficiently and painlessly.
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PWL Capital’s Bender, Bender & Bortolotti team will work hard to ensure you reach your financial goals by combining disciplined portfolio management, ongoing planning, and a commitment to attentive service.
We have the answers. Check our FAQs for common questions. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, reach out to us and we will be happy to respond.
In order to keep our fees low and our service level high, we have a minimum portfolio size of $1 million per household.
We waive this minimum for children of our existing clients.
Yes, all routine financial planning services are included in our management fees. However, if you need specialized assistance from external advisors—such as an estate planning lawyer or an accountant—those costs would be payable directly by you.
Because our service includes asset location, tax-loss harvesting, and other related strategies, holding ETF investments externally can lead to tax-reporting errors. It also makes it much harder for us to add value as full-service investment managers and planners.
If you prefer to actively manage part of your portfolio in pursuit of market-beating returns, we are not a good fit for you.
Most of our clients choose to entrust us with all of their investment assets because they understand the benefits of a low-cost, passive index strategy, and they appreciate that holding external accounts makes it more difficult for us to assist them with their planning.
No, our service includes integrated investment management and financial planning for an ongoing fee. If you are interested in working with a fee-only planner, we can recommend some professionals who offer this service.
We no longer offer our DIY Investor Service. We found that investors often faced challenges managing their portfolios independently after our engagement ended. Indeed, many of those who used our DIY service have since come on board as managed clients, as they recognized the value of our ongoing portfolio management and financial planning.
We continue to provide many helpful (and free!) online resources for DIY investors, including blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos.
To ensure we provide attentive client service, all of our advisors limit the number of households they work with. While we strive to accommodate your preferences, the advisor you want may not be available. If that’s the case, we will match you with an advisor who aligns well with your needs.
Our advisors follow the same investment philosophy and financial planning process, so you will be in good hands with all of our team members.
While we can include DFA mutual funds if desired, we prefer low-cost broad market ETFs. These offer greater flexibility for implementing our tax strategies.
Once you have decided to work with us, we start by opening your new accounts with our brokerage, National Bank Independent Network (NBIN). We prepare the transfer request forms for your signatures, and then we send them to your current financial institution.
Most securities can be transferred in-kind, which means you don’t necessarily need to sell the holdings first.
Transfers typically take about two weeks, though this can vary significantly based on where the assets are held. We track all account transfers closely and ensure they happen as quickly as possible.
Yes! Provide us with a statement showing the transfer fees, and we’ll reimburse those costs in your new accounts.
While we encourage diversification, we understand it may be more tax-efficient to defer the capital gains on individual stocks. Your advisor will help you develop a plan to gradually reduce your exposure to individual stocks in a tax-efficient way.
Comprehensive tax reporting is one of our team’s top priorities. During tax season, our team gathers all of the slips and reports related to your investments and delivers them to you in a single package. This eliminates the risk of missing any items.
We can also work directly with your accountant to answer any tax-related questions or provide any information they need when preparing your returns.
We take your privacy and confidentiality seriously. During the onboarding process we provide you with a secure link for sharing your documents. Once you are a client, you can securely share confidential information through our client portal, the PWL Wealth Centre.
Our clients’ assets are held by a third-party custodian, National Bank Independent Network (NBIN), a division of National Bank Financial Inc. (NBF), a wholly owned subsidiary of National Bank of Canada (NBC).
NBIN is responsible for maintaining accurate records of your holdings, settling trades, preparing accounts statements and reporting tax information to the government.
In the unlikely event of PWL’s insolvency, your assets would remain under the safekeeping of NBIN and the firm’s creditors would have no claim on your assets.
Both PWL Capital and NBIN are members of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF), which provides protection for clients if the firm becomes insolvent, subject to certain limits.
If you decide you would like to end our relationship, you can move your accounts to another brokerage at any time. In most cases, you can transfer the holdings in-kind without tax consequences. One exception may be GICs, which some brokerages will not accept as in-kind transfers.
Please note that NBIN charges a transfer-out fee of $150 plus taxes per account.
PWL Capital’s Bender, Bender & Bortolotti team will work hard to ensure you reach your financial goals by combining disciplined portfolio management, ongoing planning, and a commitment to attentive service.
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