Thursday, January 6, 2011

MOST CANADIANS DON'T PLAN TO RETIRE: SURVEY

What used to be called retirement will be just another day at the office for more than a third of Canadians, who say they'll need to keep working to pay the bills, a survey suggests.

The survey conducted by Harris/Decima on behalf of Scotiabank indicates nearly 70 per cent of Canadians plan to work after retirement.

People cited different reasons for staying in the workforce.

Seventy-two per cent said they want to remain mentally active, and 57 per cent want to stay socially active. Thirty-eight per cent of those surveyed said they'll be working out of financial necessity.

Five per cent of respondents said they are counting on a lottery win to see them through their retirement years.
Three-quarters of those who plan to retire fully from the workforce said they have been saving for about 15 years. More than half of these people said they have saved less than $20,000 in the past five years.

"While there's no magic number that Canadians should be aiming for when saving for retirement, it's important that Canadians are realistic about how they plan to spend their retirement and how much it will cost," said Gillian Riley of Scotiabank.

The Harris/Decima poll consisted of 1,011 online surveys completed between Oct. 14 and 25, the results of which were then weighted by region, age and gender. The results do not have a traditional "margin of error" because respondents were drawn from a pool of existing Harris/Decima panel members and thus not based on a probability sample.


Harris/Decima poll
10/14/2010 and 10/25/2010
Reported by CBC.ca
01/04/2011

2 comments:

BEYOND RISK said...

Financial Planning is not a top priority in the Canadian curriculum.

BEYOND RISK said...

Financial Retirement Planning is not on the radar of most Canadians. It has been done for employees by their corporate employers for decades through corporate defined benefit plans......and then the benefit ended over 20 years ago. Employees are now on their own.....unprepared......with little access to pofessional financial advisors who can serve in a fiduciary capacity on behalf of their clients.