Canadian Financial DIY: Bad Stuff: Harmonized Sales Tax and Sprott Clampdown on Questrade Trailer Fee Rebates

Wednesday, 23 September 2009

Bad Stuff: Harmonized Sales Tax and Sprott Clampdown on Questrade Trailer Fee Rebates

There has been a nose-to-nose yelling match going on between the mutual fund industry and the Ontario government about the extra costs that will result from the Harmonized Sales Tax. But that's not all the HST will affect.

Financial author of No Hype–The Straight Goods on Investing Your Money and speaker Gail Bebee sent along a good commentary, excerpted below, about several other consequences that will hurt individual investors. Grrr!

"There are many investing-related services that are currently subject to the Goods and Services Tax (GST), but not provincial sales tax (PST). These services will probably be subject to the HST, a combined PST/GST tax that effectively increases their cost by 7% in BC and 8% in Ontario. Here is a partial list of services that will likely be impacted:

1. RRSP, RESP or RRIF administration

2. Setting up and holding your mortgage in your self-directed RRSP

3. Transferring securities to another institution

4. Mutual fund and portfolio management

5. Financial, tax and estate planning

6. Changing the beneficiary in an RRSP, RESP or RRIF

7. Searching records and providing copies of account statements.

Concludes Bebee, “Investors should lobby their investment dealers for price reductions to compensate for the pending HST increase. Businesses can afford to drop prices because the new tax regime will significantly reduce business costs.”

For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact:

Gail Bebee

Canada’s Independent Voice on Personal Finance

Tel: 416-733-0221 gbebee@gailbebee.com"

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Another frustrating development comes from Sprott Mutual Funds for clients of Questrade. Questrade PR person Lynn Suderman sent along the following blurb with which I can only concur. (Note, I do have an account with Questrade but don't own any Sprott funds)

"As you may recall, Questrade launched a Mutual Fund Maximizer service (with trailer fee rebates) in January. As of yesterday, September 16^th, Sprott Asset Management decided to block the purchase of any Sprott fund by Questrade clients and will no longer be paying the trailer fee rebate. Why? We’re not entirely sure – their reasons are vague. No other mutual fund company is blocking sales of funds or trailer fee rebates.

Attached is a bit of background on the issue. Questrade will be pursuing all available avenues to reinstate Sprott funds and Sprott trailer rebates to our clients. In the meanwhile, I thought you may be interested in this turn of events. Note that Jonathan Chevreau wrote about it in his blog today:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/wealthyboomer/archive/2009/09/17/sprott-blocks-trailer-fee-rebates-to-questrade-clients.aspx

I’m hoping to encourage people to lodge complaints with Sprott, the Competition Bureau, OSC, etc – see if we can get this overturned!

This is part of the email sent to our clients who own Sprott:

If you would like to show your support for Questrade and our trailer fee rebate program, we invite you to contact Sprott and the regulatory bodies that oversee our industry. Their contact information is below. Please remember to copy (cc) your letter and emails to marketing@questrade.com.