“DELAYINGRETIREMENTFORAFEW YEARSIS FINANCIALLY AGOODWAY OFREMEDYINGANYFINANCIAL PROBLEM. IT IS APOWERFULTOOL ”

ally change how Canadians financially deal with their golden years. A Vanier report in June said the financial status of pension-age Canadians has evolved, especially when it comes to debt. The report notes that 12.1% of Canadians over 65 held mortgages in 2012, up from 7.7% in 1999, and the average debt level relating to that mortgage rose by almost $125,000. The report added 14% had a line of credit, while 16% had a car loan and 21% had credit-card debt.

Some of these debts surely relate to the attraction of buying things at lower interest rates, especially when it comes to mortgages, but Spinks says the Canadian family has changed and its relationship to retirement isn’t the same. “You need to put context on all of this,” she says. “We are living longer, healthier lives. People used to save figuring they’d live a certain length of time. for a while, play for a while, have a family, send the kids off and then decide they don’t want to be with the person they’re with for the rest of their life,” she says. “And they are creating different careers, the type of jobs that they could work in until their 80s.”

Spinks adds that current retirementage Canadians may have kids who are still at home, while also having their parents to support. “That’s the reality for many families,” she says. “And what we’re finding is grandparents might have saved for a certain length of time after they retired, but now they’ve depleted all of their income and need help. We’re seeing now a pooling of resources in some families. We are living our own experiment and there is no model to go by. What is the right age to retire? We don’t know that any longer.”

But was there ever a true retirement age? Hamilton says the notion of a defined retirement age, or the concept of retiring in your 50s, as promoted by financial services companies, was never actually the case. The retirement age is actually increasing, perhaps because people need to work longer given the financial shortfalls caused by the crisis of 2008, or because they are healthy and enjoy their jobs. “We don’t know exactly why that is,” Hamilton says. “Some people are delaying their retirement because they like what they’re doing. Some are delaying because they don’t have enough. Others are delaying because their children are still at home. And it is really difficult to interpret it as positive and long lasting.”

And those younger Canadians that Ontario Premier Wynne is so concerned about? Hamilton says no one can predict how the economy might change and hit their financial future, but that’s not a reason to suggest they’ll be any different than their predecessors. “Debt is basically concentrated at the young adult level, with people who bought houses in the last few years,” he says. “That could end badly if we end up in a world where interest rates rise and housing prices fall. It isn’t that we’re bulletproof, and we can be confident that Canadians will be fine. But it is equally true that the conventional wisdom that no one is saving enough and we’re all in trouble may not come to pass either. That will only come to pass if we have a disastrous economic future. If we have a normal future, we’re in better shape than we think.”

One big area that has pension experts’ attention is lower-income groups. Dussault is an advocate for reforming the CPP to provide lower-income Canadians with a greater standard of living after they retire. Currently, about 35% rely on guaranteed income supplement payments, bringing their total income to between $14,000 and $20,000. Though he says that percentage is lower than the early 1970s when almost 60% of Canadian seniors needed GIS, it’s still a significant problem, especially since the top-up rate has been flat and comes straight out of the federal government’s bottom line.

Mintz agrees. There’s a group of Canadians, generally with incomes of between