Financial expectations of retired Canadians

In 2014, a group of non-retired Canadians were asked about their financial expectations for retirement. New data from the fifth wave (2020) of the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) reveals how this same group of Canadians—now retired—is doing financially. In 2014, just over two-thirds (67.5%) of these people expected their retirement income to be adequate or more than adequate to comfortably maintain their standard of living. Now retired in 2020, 81.6% found that their retirement income was sufficient to comfortably cover their living expenses.

Similar results were observed for both men and women. In 2014, approximately two-thirds of non-retired men (68.5%) and women (66.4%) expected an adequate or more than adequate retirement income. In 2020, 82.2% of men and 81.0% of women declared their retirement income to be sufficient in comfortably covering their living expenses.

Individuals who belonged to a racialized group, who had ever had a disability or who had a high school education or less were not as optimistic about their expected retirement income. Of individuals belonging to a racialized group, two in five (40.4%) did not expect their retirement income to be adequate to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living. However, once retired, 56.0% of people in this group found that their retirement income was sufficient. In comparison, 83.8% of people in the non-racialized group found their retirement income to be sufficient. Meanwhile, nearly three-quarters of people who had ever had a disability (72.4%) and people who had a high school education or less (73.5%) found that their retirement income comfortably covered their living expenses. These proportions surpassed their expectations by 17.1 and 23.2 percentage points, respectively.