But they’re failures at saving, and will have to work long past retirement
Don MacDonald
Sun
The leading edge of Canada’s giant baby-boom generation hits 60 this year, and author Gordon Pape fears they aren’t ready for what awaits them.
Pape says baby boomers, as a generation, are spending champions but saving failures.
The result is that many boomers are facing the prospect of reduced lifestyles in retirement or extended working lives long into their golden years, he says.
On a societal level, Pape looks ahead and sees an increasingly large population of retirees whose needs, especially for health care, will be supported by a shrinking workforce.
The good news is that Canada’s public pension system –the Canada Pension Plan and the Quebec Pension Plan –have been put on a sustainable footing for the decades to come thanks to some hefty premium increases in recent years.
But it’s a different story for private corporate pensions. Fewer companies are offering their employees traditional defined-benefit pension plans.
Many of the remaining plans are showing signs of strain thanks to the ravages of the bear market in stocks in the early part of this decade and the low long-term interest rates since then.
“All of these trends, as they come together, say we have to be even more self-sufficient in planning our retirement,” said Pape, whose latest book is The Retirement Time Bomb.
Pape is 70 years old and he has given up trying to persuade 20-year-olds to start planning for their retirement.
But those over 40 had better be sharpening their pencils, he says.
“Anyone who is over 40 should be sitting down and putting together the fundamental outline of where they’re going to be down the road,” he said from his winter home in Fort Myers Beach, Fla.
— Montreal Gazette
© The Vancouver Province 2006