Only a small number of them plan on having a traditional retirement
The majority of young adults in Canada believed that retiring by the age of 65 in order to pursue leisure was becoming an outdated concept, a recent survey by financial services firm Wealthsimple found, as reported in an article by BNN Bloomberg.
According to the survey, about 74% of Canadians who were between the ages of 24 and 44 said that retirement by the age of 65 and only pursuing leisure by that time was outdated. This showed that there was a shift in the attitudes of Millennial and Gen Z professionals when it comes to retirement as they believe that personal and professional passions should also be catered to in their adulthood.
Wealthsimple Chief Executive Officer Mike Katchen stated that the shift seen when it comes to the outlook of working professionals towards retirement was impacted not only by the current challenging economic climate.
“It’s a new perspective on the future driven by younger generations. They are looking for flexibility, personalization and control over their future, rather than feeling controlled by conventional wisdom,” said Katchen.
The survey further found that only 7% of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 24 were making plans to have a traditional retirement. It also found that home ownership or employer-sponsored pensions, which had supported previous generations as they went into retirement, were not widely available to the current working generations.
Wealthsimple found that an alarming 60% of Canadians who were in the workforce did not have a workplace pension available to them. About 41% of the respondents who were between the ages of 25 and 44 had admitted that they would want to work toward retirement before they reached the age of 55 so that they can pursue creating a small business as well as passion projects like consulting and not-for-profit work.
In order to gather the data, 1,501 Canadians answered an online survey by Leger, which was commissioned by Wealthsimple.
