[uw.cs.grad] The Taxman Cometh for NSERC Award Recipients

kim@watsup.waterloo.edu (T. Kim Nguyen) (08/24/89)

All you grad students out there...!  Especially those of you receiving
nice big scholarships like OGS or NSERC...  I have a question that's
just burning to get out:

How does one reduce one's net taxable income to an acceptable level
(ie. $0) if one receives a sizeable scholarship?  From what I can tell
and from a quick phone call to Revenue Canada, scholarship money does
not qualify as "pensionable", so you cannot use that money when
calculating how much you can contribute to, say, your RRSP.  This
makes little sense to me.  After all, is the !@#$@ country giving you
money or is it just going to take it all (well, partially) back?
What's the point of saying that NSERC awards are for $13.5k when
they're actually 30% less than that???

Can one contribute to some sort of pension plan to reduce the tax
burden?  
--
T. Kim Nguyen 				  kim@watsup.waterloo.{edu|cdn}
					        kim@watsup.uwaterloo.ca
			    {uunet|utzoo|utai|decvax}watmath!watsup!kim
Systems Design Engineering  --  University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada