Years of RESP contributions to an account he never legally controlled

The situation

Devon realized something was wrong at the kitchen table, halfway through a conversation about the separation agreement, when Camille's lawyer's draft referred to 'the subscriber's RESP' as though Devon had no connection to it at all. He had assumed, for six years, that the education savings account he had been contributing to for Camille's daughter Kavya was something he had a stake in. It was not, at least not in the way he thought.

Devon owned a mid-sized construction company in Sudbury, building his business up over two decades from a one-truck operation into a firm with steady municipal and residential contracts. Camille owned a small chain of walk-in clinics across the region. Together their family property, between the business, the clinics, real estate, and investments, sat in the range of two to three million dollars. Devon spoke limited English, having grown up speaking another language at home, and while he managed his business comfortably in English day to day, legal and financial documents written in dense formal language were a different matter, and he had leaned on Camille to explain paperwork like the RESP setup when they married.

Kavya was Camille's daughter from an earlier relationship, twelve years old when Devon and Camille married and eighteen now, with the RESP originally opened years before Devon entered the picture, naming Camille as subscriber. When Devon and Camille married, Devon began contributing substantial amounts to the account annually, understanding it, in good faith, as a family education fund he was helping build for a child he had come to think of as his own. What he had not understood, because no one had walked him through the mechanics of subscriber status in a way that made sense to him, was that only the named subscriber controls an RESP: who can withdraw, redirect, or close it, and who ultimately decides where the money goes.

By the time Devon and Camille separated, Devon had contributed a substantial six-figure sum to an account he had no legal authority over, funded for a child who was not his by birth, in a family structure where the lines of legal entitlement did not match the lines of who had actually paid.

Devon's first instinct, once the realization set in at that kitchen table conversation, was disbelief rather than anger. He had treated Kavya as his own daughter for six years, attended her school events, and thought of the RESP as simply the family's shared plan for her future, the same way the house and the business felt shared even though only some of the paperwork carried both their names. Learning that the account itself told a different legal story than the one he had lived made him question what else in the marriage's finances he might have misunderstood, and it was that uncertainty, as much as the money itself, that brought him to us.

The risk we had to size

The first task was establishing exactly what Devon's contributions meant in family property terms, because RESPs sit in an unusual position under Ontario's Family Law Act. The account itself is not simply property like a bank account or investment portfolio; it is intended for a beneficiary's education, and government incentives attached to it come with their own conditions about withdrawal and repayment if the plan is collapsed early. Devon's contributions, made during the marriage from what was, in significant part, his own business income, had gone into an account legally controlled entirely by Camille as the sole named subscriber.

That mattered because a subscriber can, subject to the RESP promoter's rules, close the plan, withdraw contributions, or change the beneficiary, largely without needing the consent of anyone who contributed money but was never added as a joint subscriber. Devon had no subscriber rights at all. If Camille chose to treat the RESP as entirely hers going forward, Devon's recourse was not to the account itself but to whatever claim he could make that his contributions were part of the broader pool of family property built up during the marriage, to be accounted for in the overall equalization calculation rather than recovered directly from the RESP.

Sizing this risk meant two things at once. First, we had to determine how much Devon had actually contributed, which required pulling years of bank and business records, since some contributions had come from his personal accounts and others directly from the construction company in ways that blurred the line between business and family expenditure. Second, we had to assess how strong a claim Devon had to have those contributions credited to him in the property settlement, given that the money, once inside the RESP, was legally Camille's to control regardless of its source.

There was also a government dimension we had to flag early: government education grants attached to RESP contributions are generally tied to the beneficiary and can be subject to repayment if the plan is collapsed rather than used for education, which meant any strategy involving unwinding the RESP itself carried its own cost that neither Devon nor Camille wanted to trigger, since both cared about Kavya's education continuing uninterrupted regardless of how the marriage ended.

Finally, we had to size the risk that Devon's contributions, having passed partly through his construction company's accounts rather than purely his personal funds, could complicate the valuation of the business itself in the broader property division. If a portion of what looked like company expenditure was actually a personal contribution to the RESP routed for convenience, that needed to be corrected on both sides of the ledger, or Devon risked effectively paying for the same contribution twice: once when it left the business, and again if it were treated purely as a business cost that lowered the company's value used in the settlement.

What we did

1. Arranged a certified interpreter for every substantive meeting. Given the density of the property and RESP issues, we retained a professional interpreter fluent in Devon's first language for all key discussions and document reviews, which let Devon understand the subscriber mechanics fully instead of relying on Camille's earlier informal explanations, and gave the eventual settlement a much stronger footing in his genuine understanding.
2. Reconstructed six years of RESP contribution records. We obtained statements directly from the RESP promoter along with Devon's personal and business banking records, building a clear ledger of exactly how much Devon had contributed, from which source, and in which years, separating personal contributions from any that had passed through the construction company. That ledger became the single reference point both sides used for the rest of the negotiation, instead of arguing from memory.
3. Confirmed Devon held no subscriber rights on the account. We requested the account's subscriber designation directly from the promoter, confirming in writing that Camille was the sole subscriber, which closed off any argument that Devon could act unilaterally on the account and reframed the strategy entirely around the property settlement instead. Getting that confirmation in writing early stopped the file from wasting time chasing a claim to the account itself that the promoter's own records would never support.
4. Assessed the risk of unwinding the RESP. We calculated what would be lost if the RESP were collapsed to force a division, including potential repayment of government grants, and concluded that this path would harm Kavya's education funding without meaningfully improving Devon's position, so we ruled it out early and communicated why to Devon in his own language. Ruling it out quickly kept the negotiation focused on the equalization credit, which was the stronger and less destructive route to recovery.
5. Built a credit claim within the broader equalization. Rather than pursuing the RESP directly, we advanced Devon's contributions as part of the overall accounting of family property built up during the marriage, arguing that his substantial payments into a jointly-intended family asset should be reflected as a credit against Camille's side of the equalization ledger. That reframing gave Devon a real claim to pursue once the account itself proved to be legally closed off to him.
6. Distinguished business-sourced contributions from personal ones. Because some RESP contributions had come through the construction company rather than Devon's personal funds, we had to separately account for how those flows affected the valuation of the business itself, to avoid double-counting the same money as both a business asset and a personal contribution. Getting that separation right protected Devon from effectively paying for the same contribution twice in the final settlement figures.
7. Negotiated an offsetting adjustment rather than direct RESP access. We proposed that Camille retain full subscriber control of the RESP, preserving continuity for Kavya's education, while Devon received an offsetting credit elsewhere in the property division reflecting a portion of what he had contributed. That structure let both parents protect Kavya's education funding while still giving Devon meaningful recognition for years of good-faith payments into the account.
8. Reviewed every proposed term with Devon through the interpreter before signing. Given how the original misunderstanding had arisen from unclear explanations, we made sure Devon reviewed the full settlement, clause by clause, with the interpreter present, so his agreement to the final terms reflected genuine understanding rather than trust placed in someone else's summary. That extra care meant Devon signed knowing exactly what he was gaining, and giving up, instead of relying on a secondhand explanation again.
9. Set out a written record of the reasoning behind the credit. We documented, in plain language and translated for Devon's records, exactly how the offsetting credit had been calculated, so that if questions arose later about the RESP or the business valuation, there would be a clear paper trail explaining the logic rather than a figure without context. That record gives Devon something to point to if the calculation is ever questioned again.

The outcome

Camille agreed to an offsetting credit in Devon's favour within the equalization calculation, reflecting roughly two-thirds of Devon's documented RESP contributions. It was not full recovery, and we were candid with Devon throughout that a full one-to-one credit was unlikely once the business-sourced portion of his contributions was properly separated out and valued as part of the company rather than as a personal gift to the RESP.

The RESP itself stayed exactly as it had always been: Camille's alone to control, with Kavya's education funding preserved without disruption, which both Devon and Camille agreed mattered more than either of their individual positions on the money already contributed. Devon did not gain any ongoing role in decisions about the account, and accepted, once the mechanics were explained clearly through the interpreter, that this had been true since the day the account was opened, long before he understood it.

Devon described the experience afterward as a costly lesson about assuming that funding something meant controlling it. The interpreted meetings, he said, were the first time anyone had actually walked him through what a subscriber designation meant rather than assuming he already knew, and he wished that conversation had happened years earlier, before six figures had gone into an account he had no legal claim to. The settlement limited what he lost; it did not undo the years of contributions made without ever securing a legal stake in return.

For a family property division in the range of two to three million dollars, the RESP credit was a modest piece of the overall settlement, but it carried outsized weight for Devon personally, since it was the one part of the file that directly acknowledged years of steady, good-faith contributions to a child he considered his own. Camille, for her part, kept full control of Kavya's education fund exactly as she always had, and the two of them, despite the difficulty of the separation, managed to keep Kavya's schooling entirely insulated from the dispute over the money behind it.

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