About Loonies & Sense
We're on a mission to give every Canadian the knowledge and tools to make confident financial decisions — without paying thousands for advice that should be accessible to everyone.
Authoritative blog posts. Free personal finance calculators. An AI-assisted financial literacy and planning platform. All built specifically for Canada's tax system, government benefits, and retirement programs.
Marc, aged 5. Already thinking about taxes.
The Founder
I spent over two decades in Canada's financial industry. Not as an advisor — as the person who built the systems advisors and institutions depend on. Although these days, you're more likely to find me on a beach or trail on Vancouver Island.
I've worked as an architect on Bay Street, designing technology infrastructure for some of Canada's largest investment operations. I was part of the team that took a fintech company public. I've built and operated systems at one of the world's largest single-purpose investment funds — managing assets measured in the hundreds of billions. I also spent years as a residential real estate investor — four properties, from condos to a triplex — which taught me more about the messy reality of Canadian personal finance than any institutional role ever did. Evictions, basement waterproofing disasters, tenants who vanished in the night, and the hard lesson that lawyer fees can exceed the cost of just solving the problem.
I started programming at twelve after several years apprenticing with LEGO. I've been building systems since the late 80s. I'm happiest building.
I retired early when my health made the choice for me. I built my own financial plan with spreadsheets and custom code. We had to sell our real estate holdings, and I chose a life with less so I could face my disabilities head-on. When you go through that, you learn very quickly which financial tools actually work and which ones are theatre.
The question that kept coming back was simple: why don't regular Canadians have access to the same calibre of financial tools that institutions take for granted?
That's how Loonies & Sense started.
What We've Built
Most Canadian financial planning tools fall into one of two categories: oversimplified consumer apps that ignore provincial tax differences and government benefit complexity, or institutional-grade software that's locked behind advisor paywalls and licensing fees. There's almost nothing in between.
I built the thing that goes in between.
The platform is a complete financial planning system for Canadian households. A lifecycle engine simulates your financial future month by month — your actual accounts, your actual contribution room, your actual tax situation across every province and territory. It models CPP, OAS, GIS, DB pensions, RRSP drawdown strategies, RRIF minimums, and the tax implications of every withdrawal in every year.
Your plan gets stress-tested against a regime-switching engine modelled on real market events — stagflation, tech crashes, 2008, COVID, rate hikes. Not Monte Carlo with made-up distributions. We can even play back historical events and show you what happens if you retire into the Dotcom era. Being told your plan has a “78% success rate” is meaningless if you don't know what failure looks like, so we show you the story, not the statistic.
The platform tracks every account type Canada has — RRSPs, TFSAs, FHSAs, RESPs, LIRAs, RDSPs, non-registered, pensions, corporate accounts — across multiple institutions. It calculates your insurance gap. It models your estate, including probate fees and intestacy rules by province. It estimates education costs by province and field of study, and projects whether your RESP will actually cover it.
Cash flow gets visualized as a Sankey diagram from gross income through taxes, deductions, and spending categories to savings. You can pick a budget strategy that fits how your brain works and track against it.
And when you have a question at 2am about whether a wheelchair van qualifies as a CRA medical expense, an AI assistant called Loonie pulls from CRA tax folios and runs the calculations against your actual plan data. Not generic advice from a blog post. Real answers built from your real numbers.
The free calculators on the site — seventeen of them, covering everything from CPP/OAS timing optimization to CPP Section 58 survivorship benefits to provincial intestacy law to salary-vs-dividend tax integration with RDTOH and GRIP — those are the front door. The planning platform behind them is the house.
I built every line of it. The planning engine. The calculators. The AI assistant. The learning system with its curated lessons. The blog content. The marketing site. The SEO strategy. The infrastructure. No templates. No white-label software. No co-founders. No venture capital. No marketing team. Just the conviction that Canadians deserve tools this good without paying thousands for the privilege.
We're a BC Benefit Company
Loonies & Sense Digital Inc. is incorporated as a BC Benefit Company. That means financial literacy isn't just our product — it's legally embedded in our corporate structure. We're accountable to our mission of helping Canadians, not just to shareholders.
No ads. No sponsored content. No selling your data. Your financial data is stored in Canadian data centres, encrypted at rest, and locked down by default. We don't ask for your full name or your SIN. We don't need them.
Get In Touch
Questions, feedback, or feature requests? We'd love to hear from you.
Unfortunately, we cannot provide financial advice. But if you have questions about how the platform works, found a bug, or want to suggest a feature — we're all ears.
