Adam Malcolm - IG Wealth Management

28/09/2026

Nobody has ever sat down across from me and opened with "I want to maximise my risk-adjusted return." (hey, that's my job!)

They say they want their kids to be all right. They want to stop worrying. They want what they have built to matter.

Thursday is a session about that. You write, I facilitate, and you leave with your own priorities on paper rather than mine.

The Wealth Classroom, session two. Thursday, October 1, 6:00 PM at the University Club of Toronto. Bring a pen.

Registration is open: https://tinyurl.com/44bzyu9p

Adam Malcolm, CFP, MFA-P · Senior Wealth Advisor · IG Wealth Management Inc., Mutual Fund Division, a member of CIRO and the Canadian Investor Protection Fund. The plan shown is a hypothetical illustration, not a real client and not a projection of anyone's results.

18/09/2026

You can have the plan handled — income sorted, savings on rails, the lumps under a rule — and still not be sure what the whole thing is in service of.

That's session two of the Wealth Classroom. September was about mechanics; October is about purpose. It's a working session, so bring a pen. What you enjoy, who matters most, what gives your life meaning, and what you still hope to accomplish. Then we organise money around three things — living well now, giving to the people you love, and sharing with the wider community.

You leave with your own priorities in your own handwriting. And with the question I eventually ask every client: do you want to be the richest person in the graveyard?

Thursday, October 1, 6:00 PM at the University Club of Toronto. $31 with a welcome drink. You do not need to have been at session one.

Grab a seat: https://tinyurl.com/44bzyu9p
Can't make it? The writing goes out every other Thursday: https://tinyurl.com/4zyewfwy

Adam Malcolm, CFP, MFA-P · Senior Wealth Advisor · IG Wealth Management Inc., Mutual Fund Division, a member of CIRO and the Canadian Investor Protection Fund. The plan shown is a hypothetical illustration, not a real client and not a projection of anyone's results.

14/09/2026

The most useful thing I do with clients isn't the advice. It's turning the screen around to make them co-collaborators.

Thursday I am opening a complete sample plan in front of a room and walking it start to finish.

Principles first, quickly. Then the actual software, the actual cash flow, the numbers moving as we change them.

Three rules, applied to a hypothetical couple whose income arrives in five different shapes across a year: a smooth monthly savings goal, a standing policy for the lumps that aren't smooth, and permission to spend the rest. Then the arithmetic of a working life — illustrated, with the assumptions on screen.

The Wealth Classroom, session one. Thursday, September 17, 6:00 PM, University Club of Toronto. $31 with a welcome drink.

Registration is open: https://tinyurl.com/ycyfrw32

Adam Malcolm, CFP, MFA-P · Senior Wealth Advisor · IG Wealth Management Inc., Mutual Fund Division, a member of CIRO and the Canadian Investor Protection Fund. The plan shown is a hypothetical illustration, not a real client and not a projection of anyone's results.

10/09/2026

Ever wondered what happens if you sell property you lived in at one point and rented at another?

You may assume you pay the gain just on the years you rented it… but nope!

Just like any good CRA rule the answer is math, as I noticed in one Reddit thread.

03/09/2026

Sometimes you gotta do it live.

Every financial seminar I sat through early on taught me principles I couldn't do anything with on Monday morning.

From September 17 I am teaching a monthly series at the University Club of Toronto called the Wealth Classroom. The planning principles I actually use, then straight into the guts of a complete sample plan to see how they apply to a real life.

One standing rule for every session: no fund, no manager, no product. Banned — my rule, not the compliance department's.

Session one? September 17 — Lumpy money, part one. For anyone whose income arrives as salary plus a bonus plus a draw plus dividends plus an April refund plus, plus, plus…

Session two? October 1 — What is your money for? A working session. Bring a pen. (more on that later!)

Both at 6:00 PM, 380 University Avenue, $31 with a welcome drink.

Grab a seat: https://tinyurl.com/ycyfrw32
Not in Toronto? The writing goes out every other Thursday: https://tinyurl.com/4zyewfwy

Adam Malcolm, CFP, MFA-P · Senior Wealth Advisor · IG Wealth Management Inc., Mutual Fund Division, a member of CIRO and the Canadian Investor Protection Fund. The plan shown is a hypothetical illustration, not a real client and not a projection of anyone's results.

27/08/2026

Three things a good plan should let you stop thinking about.

I asked a client last month what changed for her after a year of working together.

She thought about it for a while. Then she said, "I think about money less."

I asked what that meant.

She said, "I used to check three different bank accounts before I'd buy concert tickets. I used to lie awake doing rough math on what we'd have at sixty-five. I used to feel a small wave of guilt every time I gave to the food bank because I didn't know if we could afford it."

Three things she had been carrying that the plan now carries instead.

The bank balance question, because we built the cashflow structure that handles it. The retirement number question, because we modelled it forward and revisit it twice a year. The giving question, because the giving is in the plan now, on purpose, with a budget that doesn't compete with the rest of life.

This is what integrated planning is for.

The Strategic Generosity Blueprint™ is the framework we use to hold all ten of the wealth drivers as one coherent plan. Retirement, tax, insurance, credit, estate, business, philanthropy, education, health, investments. All ten, working together, in a single plan.

When the plan holds those things, you stop having to.

That's the shift. That's the work.

If something on this list is still living in your head instead of in your plan, that's a worthwhile conversation.

When the plan holds it, you stop having to.

26/08/2026

Nobody plans to end up in a dispute with the CRA. And almost nobody knows what happens if they do.

On September 16 at noon, I'm interviewing Kendal Steele, tax litigator at LN Law, live for thirty minutes. I have no litigation background, and that's the point: I'm asking the five questions you need the answers on, just like any client would. That includes the one most people have never heard of: the economic entity audit. If you have an operating company and a holding company, that question alone is worth the half hour.

No slides. Ten minutes for your questions. A hard finish at 12:30.

Free registration: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/when-the-cra-comes-calling-tickets-1997910849132?aff=AFB1&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=lnlaw-sept16

This session is education, not financial or tax advice.

25/08/2026

What we do in the first 30 minutes, even when it isn't a fit.

This is a posture, not a sales pitch.

Every now and then I meet with someone who, after a real conversation, isn't a fit for the practice. Different stage. Different need. Sometimes a different set of goals altogether.

When that happens, my job isn't to find a way to onboard them anyway. My job is to do real work in the time we have, then route them toward the right next step.

Open up a planning conversation. Map the financial picture as it stands. Surface the question they didn't know to ask. Point them toward the people, places, or platforms that actually serve where they are.

It's how I was taught to do this work.

And here is the strange and consistent pattern. The people I refer out, more often than not, send people my way later. Sometimes years later. Sometimes the next week.

You can't engineer that with a script. You can only get it by doing real work in the only meeting most people remember, which is the first one.

If you've ever been pitched a financial product that didn't fit your life and walked away feeling like you'd been sold to, you know exactly what we're not doing here.

The first conversation has to earn the second. If it doesn't, no plan ever will.

Worth a conversation, fit or not.

21/08/2026

Back to school is a family money conversation. Most families miss it.

The pencils get bought. The textbooks get ordered. The schedule goes up on the fridge.

The conversation that doesn't happen, in the families I work with, is the one about money.

Not pocket money. Not allowance. The real one. What does this household earn, and where does it go, and what are we choosing as a family. What does saving look like. What does giving look like. What does enough look like.

I've watched families with substantial wealth send their kids to university without ever having said any of that out loud.

The kids inherit the silence. Then they inherit the money. Then they inherit the questions no one ever modelled how to answer.

A few research points worth knowing.

Roughly 70% of all estate plans fail - full-stop - by the second generation. The leading cause, according to long-running research by The Williams Group tracking more than three thousand families across two decades, is the breakdown of family trust and communication. Not investments.

What works, in the families that defy the pattern, is shockingly simple. They talked.

Back to school is one of the few moments each year where the rhythm of the family changes enough that a new conversation can fit. A walk after dinner. A morning at the cottage before the day starts. The drive to dropping off at residence.

You don't need a script. You need to start.

The conversation matters more than the document.

20/08/2026

In 2019 I was tending bar between auditions, trying to make it as an opera singer.

Someone asks me some version of the same question every few weeks now: how did you get from there to here?

Usually I have 10 seconds to answer that... but today I have a bit longer.

There are three moments in it.

The first was reading a book called The Millionaire Teacher and realizing financial freedom wasn't only for artists who got a big break.

The second was Friday, March 13, 2020. My partner and I were laid off on the same day, and that afternoon our landlord called asking when we could move out. Overnight we went from two good incomes to zero, and possibly nowhere to live. The emergency fund I'd built without fully knowing why bought us four months — that was the week I stopped thinking of cash as something that just sits there.

The third was a restaurant patio in June 2020. I was recommending w**e to a family, mentioned I was trying to get into wealth management, and the husband reached into his jacket and handed me a business card... for IG Wealth Management.

What I couldn't see at the time is that the arts had already trained me for this work. On stage you have to listen to the person in front of you and respond to what they're actually doing, not to what you rehearsed.

That turns out to be the most important part of this job too.

A lot of you have joined since I first wrote this down, so I'm sending it round again.

If we haven't properly met yet, this is the version worth reading 👇

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-high-notes-high-impact-adam-malcolm-mfa-p-cfp-ris-cu1tc/

Or..