moving to canada

Hi siragu,

I created a new topic as from your post on the Canada forum for better visibility.

You would not need to pay tax but what your friend might be eluding to is the fact that by submitting a tax for that year, you'd get your CRA id created in the system and therefore begin the starting a contribution room for your TFSA (Tax Free Savings Account). That'll be 5,500 / year (amount changed since this  2013 onwards). So if you submitted last year 2014 for 2013, you'd have 11000 contribution room by 2015 this year. You see, any of your investments in Canada (once you're working and live here), will get tax. Even your savings and chequeing account's interest amount get tax. So let's say you have extra cash, you'd want to move it to you TFSA and make investment through there. That way all your earnings from there will not be tax (tax sheltered). see http://www.tfsa.gc.ca/tfsapamphlet-eng.html for more information. Even when you remove your money from TFSA all your earnings won't get tax because it came from the TFSA. However, when you remove any amount, your TFSA contribution room gets reduce for that year. You will get it back by next year though.

Now, your RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan) contribution room on the other hand doesn't get started, until you work here. RRSP on the other hand gets tax once you remove the money out from there.

But you might have to get your SIN (Social Insurance Number) first. Did you get it after you landed? You can't submit a tax if you don't have a SIN# yet. Since you are PR, your SIN# should start with 1.

Thanks for the reply. I intend to move to Canada by the end of 2016 and would file tax for 2016 before April,2017. Is that OK? I could start contributing to tax free account then.

I opened a chequeing account before coming back and the banker opened a tax free saving account as well and set an amount of $ 25 per month to be deposited regularly. yes I got my SIN that time.

Regards
siragu

That sounds great. If your banker has done that, that means you'd already have registered in the fed's system as having your TFSA contribution room for that year. Then my initial assumption would be wrong. By creating your SIN (that should start with 1, you already created your contribution room). So you need not submit your tax forms until and unless you work in Canada itself or work for a Canadian company (but based overseas for a short period of time e.g. 1 mth assignment etc.).