StatCan survey of Canadians offers revealing snapshots of expectations pre- and post-retirement
New data from Statistics Canada gives a fresh look into how Canadian retirees view their financial situations.
The federal statistical agency polled a group of Canadians approaching retirement in 2014 to learn more about their financial plans for retirement.
The fifth wave of the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) provides updated financial information on that same group of Canadians, who had retired by the time of the follow-up survey in 2020.
The survey found just over two-thirds (67.5%) of those individuals anticipated that their retirement income would be sufficient or superior to their needs for comfortably maintaining their way of living in 2014.
In 2020, 81.6% of those individuals found they had enough income in retirement to adequately pay their living expenditures.
The optimism about predicted retirement income was depressed among people who identified as being from a racialized group, had ever had a handicap, and had at least a high school degree.
Two out of every five people (40.4%) who identify as members of a racialized group did not anticipate that their retirement income would be sufficient to maintain their pre-retirement level of living.
Meanwhile, 56.0% of those in this category who had retired found that their retirement income was enough.
Those who had ever had a handicap (72.4%) and those with only a high school degree (73.5%), on the other hand, reported that their retirement income easily met their living needs.
These percentages were higher by 17.1 and 23.2 percentage points, respectively, than they had anticipated.
Overall, 30.3% of respondents with a high school diploma or less and 39.9% of those who had ever experienced a handicap thought that their principal source of retirement income would come from personal retirement funds or a business pension plan.
Despite other research showing a retirement wealth gap between men and women, both groups in the StatCan survey had comparable results. Two-thirds of non-retired men (68.5%) and women (66.4%) felt they were retirement-ready in 2014.
In 2020, 81.0% of women and 82.2% of men said they had enough money in retirement to adequately pay their living expenditures.
In 2020, income from a pension plan at work or a retirement savings plan was received by 44.2% of those who had ever experienced a handicap and 41.2% of those with only a high school diploma or less.
Both percentages were lower than the averages for individuals without disabilities (54.7%) and those with tertiary education (58.0%).
