Younger and older Canadians crunched by housing, retirement, debt: experts
If retirement feels like an out of reach financial goal, you aren’t alone.
A recent report from Deloitte Canada found only 14 per cent of near retirees can expect comfortable golden years. This study looked at Canadians aged 55 to 64 and found those who likely won’t need to rely on things like the Canada Pension Plan after 65 have more than $900,000 in financial assets and likely own their home outright.
But Paul Kershaw, founder of the think tank Generation Squeeze, told The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson that the situation is even more dire for young people.
“I do increasingly worry about the pressures that they will face later on in their aspirations to retire, because the reality is that for young folks today, hard work doesn’t pay off like it used to,” he said.
Kershaw says there are a wide range of pressures faced by younger generations that make life overall less affordable than it was for their older peers.
“They will go to post-secondary more, pay more for the privilege to land jobs that actually often are paying less after adjusting for inflation. And then we all know they are facing dramatically higher housing prices that increasingly lock them out of ownership and their consolation prize is lousy rising rents,” he said. “And all of that means that so much harder to save for retirement down the road.”
With a typical retirement age of 65 and average life expectancy of 81, Kershaw says that the struggle of the younger generations means more fiscal challenges for retirement programs.
“There are just three working age residents to pay for every retiree. And that’s adding some risks to what can we do to protect that security for our retired loved ones. But it’s also putting a lot of pressure on younger
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