Joint accounts

On this site, all Joint accounts refer to accounts held jointly with a spouse with the right of survivorship. Their treatment is in line with the CRA rules for those accounts.

You are asked to specify the proportion of your ownership of the account (that is, your net deposits, divided by all net deposits).

In the TIME MACHINE, the yearly taxes due from each spouse will be proportional to their account deposit history (minus their withdrawal history).

At the passing of a spouse, the account will be inherited by the widow(er), tax-free. The assets will be deemed to have been sold and bought back at their adjusted cost base. Joint accounts are exempted from the 'deemed disposition at fair market value' rule, which applies to accounts not held jointly. The rule will begin to be applied to the account, however, at the passing of the second spouse.

Because of the attribution rules or other reasons, you may want to restrict who can contribute to or withdraw from the Joint account. You can specify that here and the TIME MACHINE will enforce those restrictions.

For example, to simplify tax filing due to the attribution rules, it may be beneficial to maintain a separate non-registered account for each spouse, yet still have the accounts held jointly to avoid probate. In that case, you would set your account with the current proportion that you contributed to the account to 100%. You would also set the account to allow deposits from you only. This way you will always be 100% responsible for the taxable income from that account. Similarly, for your spouse's non-registered and joint account, you would set the current proportion that you contributed to the account to 0%, and only allow your spouse to make any further contributions in the TIME MACHINE. This way they would then always be responsible for 100% of the taxable income on their account.

You may also want to restrict who can make withdrawals from the account in the TIME MACHINE and this is set up similarly as the contribution restriction.