Most Financial Advisors Contact Doctors Far Too Rarely
The Quiet Problem With Annual Check-Ins
A large number of healthcare professionals in British Columbia and Ontario report that their financial advisor contacts them once a year, usually around RRSP season, and occasionally when a product renewal comes up. For a salaried employee with a straightforward financial picture, that cadence might be adequate. For an incorporated chiropractor, physiotherapist, or RMT managing clinical income, corporate retained earnings, and a layered tax strategy, it is not nearly enough.
Understanding how often a financial advisor should contact you is not just about feeling valued as a client. It is about whether the advice you receive is timely enough to be useful. Tax planning done in February for the previous year is largely reactive. Salary-dividend decisions made without mid-year cash flow data are educated guesses. The professionals who build wealth most efficiently are the ones who receive proactive, structured contact from advisors who treat their financial plan as a living document, not an annual filing.
This article explains what appropriate advisory contact looks like for healthcare professionals, what tends to go wrong when contact is too infrequent, and how to evaluate whether your current advisor is meeting a standard that actually serves your financial interests.
Key Takeaways
Healthcare professionals with incorporated practices require more frequent advisor contact than the industry's typical once-a-year standard.
Proactive contact from a financial advisor should include mid-year tax reviews, salary-dividend check-ins, insurance coverage assessments, and retirement contribution planning.
Infrequent contact is one of the most common reasons chiropractors, physiotherapists, and RMTs miss tax-saving opportunities and underfund retirement accounts.
Life events such as incorporating, hiring associates, purchasing a clinic, or having children should trigger immediate advisor-initiated contact, not a wait until the next scheduled review.
The right contact frequency depends on your career stage, practice structure, and the complexity of your financial plan.
A financial advisor who specializes in healthcare professionals in BC and Ontario will structure contact around the specific milestones and deadlines that matter most to your profession.
How Often Should a Financial Advisor Contact You: The Real Standard
The question of how often a financial advisor should contact you does not have a single universal answer, but it does have a minimum standard that many advisors fall short of. For healthcare professionals with incorporated practices in BC or Ontario, meaningful advisor contact should occur at least three to four times per year, with additional touchpoints triggered by specific events or deadlines.
The financial calendar for an incorporated healthcare professional is more demanding than most advisors account for. CRA quarterly tax installment deadlines, RRSP contribution cutoffs, corporate year-end planning windows, and TFSA top-up timing all represent moments where timely advice directly translates into money saved or money lost. An advisor who contacts you once annually is, by definition, missing most of those windows.
Athena Financial Inc structures client contact around the actual financial calendar of healthcare professionals in British Columbia and Ontario, not around a generic annual review model. The difference is meaningful because an RMT in Surrey or a physiotherapist in Ottawa has specific deadlines, practice structures, and income patterns that require a more responsive advisory relationship. You can read more about what a tailored planning approach looks like through Athena's financial planning services for incorporated professionals.
What Adequate Contact Actually Looks Like Throughout the Year
A financial advisor serving healthcare professionals should have a structured annual contact rhythm that covers the major planning milestones. The year divides naturally into several distinct phases, each of which carries its own planning priorities.
Early in the calendar year, typically January through March, your advisor should be initiating contact to discuss RRSP contribution decisions before the contribution deadline, review the previous year's income and tax position, and begin projecting the current year's salary-dividend split for incorporated clients. This is also the moment to reassess TFSA contribution room and whether your current savings allocation across accounts is still optimal. A chiropractor in Burnaby with a professional corporation needs this conversation well before the RRSP deadline, not the week of.
Mid-year contact, around June or July, is where many advisors go completely silent, and where the most preventable financial mistakes occur. This is the time to review actual income against projections, adjust corporate salary or dividend distributions if the year is tracking differently than expected, confirm that CRA installment payments are accurate, and flag any changes in practice structure or personal circumstances that affect the plan. For healthcare professionals, understanding how tax installment obligations work mid-year is far more useful than scrambling to catch up in the fall.
The final quarter of the year is a critical planning window that an engaged advisor should initiate proactively. Corporate year-end planning, bonus or dividend timing decisions, year-end TFSA top-ups, and reviewing insurance coverage all belong in this period. By the time December arrives, most of the major decisions that affect your tax year should already be made, not deferred to the following spring.
The Events That Should Trigger Immediate Advisor Contact
Beyond the scheduled rhythm, there are specific life and practice events that should prompt your advisor to reach out proactively, not wait for your next scheduled review. If your advisor only contacts you on a fixed schedule regardless of what is happening in your professional or personal life, that is a significant gap in service.
Practice milestones that warrant immediate advisor contact include incorporating for the first time, hiring your first associate or employee, signing a new clinic lease, purchasing equipment that qualifies for capital cost allowance, or beginning to wind down a practice in preparation for sale or retirement. Each of these events carries tax and planning implications that cannot wait six months for the next scheduled call. A physiotherapist in Toronto who incorporates in May and doesn't hear from their advisor until January has potentially lost an entire fiscal year of corporate tax planning.
Personal milestones carry equal weight. Marriage, divorce, the birth of a child, a significant inheritance, a change in health status, or a decision to purchase a home are all events where financial plans need to be revisited promptly. An advisor who contacts you proactively after major life changes demonstrates that they are monitoring your overall situation, not just your investment portfolio. This is the difference between transactional advisory service and genuine financial planning for healthcare professionals at different career stages.
What Goes Wrong When Contact Is Too Infrequent
The consequences of inadequate advisor contact are rarely dramatic in any single year. They accumulate quietly. The most common outcome is a pattern of missed opportunities rather than visible financial errors, which makes the problem easy to overlook until the cumulative cost becomes apparent.
An RMT in Kelowna who earns $120,000 in a strong clinical year but whose advisor doesn't check in until RRSP season may have already made spending and distribution decisions that were suboptimal from a tax perspective. If the advisor had been in contact mid-year, a salary-dividend adjustment or an accelerated RRSP contribution could have materially reduced the year's tax bill. Instead, the opportunity passed unremarked. Multiplied over a decade of practice, this kind of recurring miss adds up to a substantial amount of wealth that was never built.
Disability and life insurance coverage gaps are another common casualty of infrequent contact. Healthcare professionals' incomes, practice structures, and family obligations change significantly over the course of a career. A disability policy that was appropriate for a solo RMT five years ago may be meaningfully underinsured for the same practitioner who now owns a clinic and carries a commercial lease. Understanding how disability insurance works and whether your current coverage matches your actual financial exposure requires a conversation, not an assumption. That conversation only happens if your advisor initiates it.
Retirement planning suffers perhaps most visibly from infrequent contact. Healthcare professionals often carry the assumption that they will catch up on retirement savings later in their career, and advisors who don't challenge that assumption regularly allow it to persist longer than it should. A physiotherapist in Hamilton who defers serious RRSP and corporate investment contributions through their thirties may find in their mid-forties that the compounding gap is larger than they expected. Early and frequent engagement with a retirement savings strategy is what prevents that scenario.
How to Evaluate Whether Your Current Advisor Is Reaching Out Enough
If you are uncertain whether your current advisory relationship meets an appropriate standard of contact, there are a few straightforward ways to assess it. Start by counting how many times your advisor initiated meaningful contact with you in the past 12 months. A phone call or email that asks how you are doing does not count. Proactive, substantive contact means your advisor reached out with a specific observation, recommendation, or planning item relevant to your financial situation.
Consider also whether your advisor has ever asked you about changes in your practice, your personal life, or your professional goals without you bringing it up first. Advisors who are monitoring your situation proactively tend to ask questions that reflect awareness of your circumstances. Those who are not tend to respond to what you bring to them rather than anticipating what you need.
Ask your advisor directly what their standard contact schedule is for clients at your career stage and with your practice structure. A clear, structured answer indicates a deliberate advisory model. A vague response that emphasizes responsiveness without defining proactive outreach suggests the relationship is more reactive than it should be. Healthcare professionals in BC and Ontario deserve an advisor who can articulate exactly how and when they will be in contact throughout the year, and why that schedule is designed to serve their specific planning needs. Exploring what a proactive financial planning relationship looks like in practice is a reasonable starting point.
If you are a chiropractor, physiotherapist, or RMT in British Columbia or Ontario and you cannot remember the last time your financial advisor reached out to you with something genuinely useful, that is worth addressing. Athena Financial Inc and Ken Feng work with healthcare professionals across both provinces through a contact model designed around the actual demands of clinical practice ownership and incorporated income. You can reach Ken directly by phone or WhatsApp at +1 604 618 7365, or book a complimentary financial assessment at athenainc.ca/free-assessment to understand what more structured advisory contact could mean for your financial plan, and how often a financial advisor should contact you given your specific situation.
Frequently Asked Questions About How Often Should Financial Advisor Contact You
Is once a year enough contact from a financial advisor for an incorporated healthcare professional?
For most incorporated chiropractors, physiotherapists, and RMTs in BC and Ontario, once a year is not enough. Corporate year-end planning, salary-dividend decisions, quarterly tax installments, RRSP contribution timing, and insurance reviews all require attention at different points in the year. A single annual meeting cannot address all of these meaningfully, and decisions made without mid-year data are often less precise than they could be.
What should a financial advisor be contacting me about between annual reviews?
Proactive mid-year contact should cover a review of your actual income versus projections, any adjustments to your salary-dividend split, confirmation that CRA installment payments are on track, and a check on whether any personal or practice changes have affected your plan. Your advisor should also flag upcoming deadlines and any changes to tax rules that affect healthcare professionals in BC or Ontario.
How do I know if my financial advisor is being proactive or just reactive?
A proactive advisor contacts you before deadlines, not after you ask. They raise topics you haven't brought up yourself, such as whether your disability coverage still reflects your current income, or whether your corporate retained earnings are being invested efficiently. A reactive advisor responds competently when you call but does not initiate contact based on your evolving situation.
Should my advisor contact me differently depending on my career stage?
Yes. A new RMT or physiotherapist in Markham or Victoria managing student debt and building a client base has different planning priorities than an incorporated clinic owner in their mid-forties preparing for an eventual practice sale. Contact frequency and content should reflect where you are in your career, what your income structure looks like, and what financial milestones are approaching. An advisor who uses the same contact model for all clients regardless of career stage is not truly personalizing their service.
What does it cost to work with a financial advisor who provides this level of contact?
Advisory models vary. Some advisors charge a flat planning fee, others work on a commission basis, and others use a fee-for-service structure. What matters is whether the value of the contact you receive, in tax savings, better decisions, and avoided mistakes, justifies the cost of the relationship. Athena Financial Inc offers a complimentary financial assessment so you can evaluate the potential value of a more engaged advisory relationship before making any commitment.
Can I request more frequent contact from my existing financial advisor?
You can, and you should if your current contact cadence is not meeting your needs. Be specific about what you are looking for: mid-year income reviews, proactive installment reminders, annual insurance gap assessments, and so on. If your advisor is unable or unwilling to structure contact around those needs, that tells you something important about whether the relationship is the right fit for your situation as a healthcare professional.
Does the complexity of my practice affect how often I should hear from my advisor?
Significantly. An unincorporated RMT in Ontario with a single revenue stream and straightforward expenses has less planning complexity than an incorporated physiotherapist in Vancouver managing associate wages, corporate investments, and a commercial lease. The more complex your financial picture, the more frequently meaningful advisor contact pays for itself through better-timed decisions and fewer missed opportunities.
Conclusion
The standard of once-a-year contact that many healthcare professionals accept from their financial advisors is not a neutral choice. It is a gap that compounds quietly over time, showing up in missed tax planning windows, underinsured income, deferred retirement savings, and decisions made without the right information at the right moment. Healthcare professionals who receive structured, proactive advisory contact throughout the year tend to make better financial decisions at every stage of their career.
The question of how often a financial advisor should contact you has a clear answer for incorporated chiropractors, physiotherapists, and RMTs in BC and Ontario: more often than most currently do, and with a deliberate structure tied to the actual demands of your financial calendar. You have built a skilled clinical practice through disciplined, consistent effort. Your financial plan deserves the same standard of ongoing attention.