- Do you pay property taxes? Are you filing for your parents who pays property taxes? Don't forget to check out form ON-BEN and your Ontario Trillium Benefits form! Low income families/individuals can get tax credits for their rent payments and property taxes paid for in 2012. For more information, visit the Ministry of Finance website: http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/credit/oeptc/
- Are you taking post-secondary education? Did you know that you can use your prior year tuition carry-forwards first to reduce your taxes payable to zero before using your current year's tuition tax credits? Doing so means you can have more to transfer to your parents/spouse because the rule is that you must use your tuition tax credits to reduce your tax liability to $0 first, and you can only transfer what you have earned during the 2012 tax year. You cannot transfer what is in your carry-forwards to your parents/spouse. However, I wanted to point this out because the CRA isn't exactly clear about whether you have to use current tuition tax credits to reduce your taxes payable first.
- Did you sell any investments during the 2012 tax year? Make sure you report your capital gains & losses from share trading on Schedule 3. Some brokers do not give you any T-slips for capital gains/losses from share trading, so make sure you don't forget to report it because you didn't get a T-slip. They usually will give you one for mutual funds and dividends from shares you own though. Keep in mind by reporting capital losses you can reduce 2012's capital gains or carry it backwards for up to 3 years, reducing your tax liability.
- Actually the above point leads into this one, did you incur "capital losses" with the capital stock in your TFSA stock trading account? You can't use those to offset your capital gains, so don't do it!
-TT
