From Saver to Spender: Navigating the Retirement Mindset Shift

It's time to retire the notion that frugality is forever

Apr 29, 2025

5 min

Let’s start with a familiar—and slightly ridiculous—scene: a retired couple with $750,000 safely tucked away in investments, quietly nibbling no-name tuna on toast while muttering, “We just can’t afford steak anymore.”

Sound absurd? Sadly, it’s not fiction. Despite having ample savings, many retirees live with perpetual financial anxiety, clinging to their nest egg as if it were their last roll of toilet paper during a pandemic. Meanwhile, they try to survive solely on government pensions, making life unnecessarily stressful and, let’s face it, a bit joyless.

I've wrestled with this as someone who entered retirement earlier than expected. Years in finance taught me how to budget, invest, and plan, but transitioning from saving to spending required a whole new mindset. I learned quickly that being financially “prepared” doesn’t mean you’re emotionally or psychologically ready to spend.

So, what’s going on here?

The Hypothesis: Individuals Prefer Spending Income Rather Than Saving

Retirees prefer spending income (pensions or annuities) rather than withdrawing from savings or investment accounts. This isn’t just a quirky behavioural trend—it’s a deeply ingrained bias, and neuroscience supports it.

Research by Michael S. Finke, a professor at The American College and noted researcher in retirement economics, revealed that retirees tend to spend most of their guaranteed income but only withdraw about half of their savings. In his words: “Retirees spend lifetime income, not savings.” The implication is clear: it’s not about how much money you have but how it feels to use it. This is partly due to what behavioral economists call “mental accounting.” We categorize our money into imaginary buckets: income is for spending, and savings are for safekeeping. Unfortunately, this can lead to financially irrational and highly risk-averse behaviors, such as eating cat food while having six figures in a TFSA.

The Neuroscience of Spending Fear

Add a little neuroscience, and the story deepens. As we age, changes in the brain, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, can affect how we assess risk and manage uncertainty. This can lead to:

• Increased loss aversion: We more acutely feel the pain of spending or loss.

• Decision paralysis: We delay or avoid withdrawals, even when reasonable.

• Heightened anxiety about the future: We fear running out more than we enjoy spending in the present.

This Fear of Running Out (FORO), which I’ve written about in a previous post, keeps many retirees in a defensive crouch, emotionally hoarding their savings rather than using them to enrich the years they worked so hard to reach.

It’s no wonder money stress impacts us so deeply—our brains are wired that way. From an evolutionary perspective, our minds are designed to fear scarcity because running out of resources once posed a real danger. When we perceive that threat today, whether it’s a dip in our investments or rising grocery bills, our brain shifts into fight-or-flight mode and begins releasing cortisol—the stress hormone that heightens our anxiety.

Then our amygdala, that little alarm system in our brain designed to protect us from danger, can’t differentiate between a financial crisis and a sabre-toothed tiger. So, it reacts similarly, nudging us toward quick, often irrational decisions. Sometimes that means freezing and doing nothing; other times, it leads to panicking and regretful choices. Understanding how our brains function under financial stress allows us to step back, breathe, and make better, calmer decisions—ones that serve us, not scare us.

Retirement can be wonderfully freeing—no more commutes, no more meetings—but let’s be honest: it also comes with a significant shift in financial responsibility. Without that steady paycheck, it’s completely normal to feel uneasy about how you'll manage your money, especially when unexpected expenses arise.

Sure, there are mindset tools and mental prep strategies that can help ease that existential “What now?” feeling before retirement. But let’s be specific—here are the real, concrete financial stressors that keep many retirees awake at night:

• Not Enough Income: One of the biggest fears? Your savings won’t stretch far enough to support the life you want—or handle surprises.

• Healthcare Costs: As we age, medical expenses climb. It’s not just the big stuff, either. Even prescriptions and dental bills can blow a hole in your budget.

• Market Ups and Downs: A stock market dip can uniquely affect retirees. Observing your investments fluctuate can cause genuine anxiety regarding your income, especially in today’s “trade war” environment.

• Inflation: We all feel it. The gradual rise of higher prices erodes your purchasing power, making that carefully saved nest egg feel less secure.

• Living Longer Than Planned: It's both a blessing and a challenge. If you're healthy and living well into your 90s (and many do), the big question becomes: will your money last as long as you do?

Here’s the good news: when you acknowledge these risks and build a plan around them, you exchange fear for control. And with power comes clarity, confidence, and significantly less stress. That’s when you can truly enjoy retirement—on your terms.

How to Flip the Script: Make Savings Feel Like Income

So, how can retirees overcome this psychological hurdle?

Here are 3 powerful strategies:

1. Create Artificial Income Streams

Turn a portion of your savings into predictable, automatic income. This could mean:

• Setting up regular monthly withdrawals from an RRIF

• Purchasing an annuity

• Utilizing a bucket strategy, in which one portion of savings is maintained in a cash-like account to replicate a paycheck

When money shows up like a salary, you’re more likely to feel permission to spend it.

2. Use Home Equity as a Back-Up Income Source

A secured line of credit (HELOC) or a reverse mortgage can serve as a “Plan B” or income buffer. Knowing that the funds are available can alleviate anxiety, whether you use them or not.

3. Involve Family in Income Planning

Sometimes, the best way to reframe a spending decision is through conversation. Adult children or trusted advisors can help develop a spending strategy that feels both secure and reasonable.

Families can be invaluable in helping you design:

• Emergency funding plans for unexpected expenses like healthcare

• Gifting strategies (Want to help the kids or grandkids? Do it while you’re alive to see the joy!)

• Income simulations replacing a regular paycheck

Open conversations can also help uncover mismatched expectations. For instance, some older adults worry that spending their savings will leave less of an inheritance for their children, which might cause disappointment. But in many cases, their children would much rather see their parents use that money to care for themselves and enjoy their retirement years.

The great irony of retirement? The hardest part isn’t building wealth; it’s allowing yourself to enjoy it.

So, let’s retire the notion that frugality is forever. Replace the guilt of spending with the confidence of an income strategy. And if you're facing your savings with trepidation, remember: cat food may be a pantry staple for your pet, but it’s no reward for 40 years of hard work.

Retirement isn't merely a financial phase—it’s a shift in mindset. That shift begins when we stop hoarding and start living.

Connect with:

Sue Pimento

Founder | CEO

Writer, author & presenter focused on financial literacy and retirement strategies. I advocate for the health, wealth & purpose for retirees

Pension ReformInterest RatesHome EquityMortgagesReverse Mortgages

Find Experts

Aug 12, 2026

9 min

The Tipping Point: How Gratitude Grew into a Guilt Trip (and How to Get Off It)

My dog Dottie is, and I say this with love, a con artist in a fur coat. She has trained me to hand over a treat every time she sits, spins, or simply exists in my general direction, those big brown eyes fixed on me. If I hesitate even three seconds, she tilts her head and stares at me as if I have personally bankrupted her. I always fold. It turns out that I am not the only sucker for this routine. These days, entire industries have figured out that if you make a person stand there long enough while a screen stares back at them, they will fold too. Except instead of a milk bone, they want eighteen to twenty-two percent of your bill, and instead of a good girl, you get a receipt. Welcome to modern tipping culture, where a simple thank-you has somehow become a math test administered under duress, with a cashier watching as you decide, and somewhere behind the screen, a very deliberate mind has already worked out exactly how to nudge your answer higher. A Short History of Guilt with Percentages Tipping began as a compliment, not a demand. Historians trace it to a Tudor England custom called a vail, in which a noble slipped an extra coin to a servant for going above and beyond (Blueprint Financial, 2024). North America initially wanted nothing to do with it, meeting tipping's arrival in the late 1800s with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for chain letters. Americans who travelled to Europe came home grumbling about being nickeled and dimed by porters and waitstaff, and in 1884 the New York Times ran an editorial calling English-style tipping downright un-American (Mentzer, 2013). Between 1909 and 1915, six American states banned tipping outright, but it did not work. Tipping also has a less charming cousin: bribery, extra money paid in advance for special treatment, a jump on the waitlist, or a better table, not a reward for service already rendered. That is also roughly where the phrase "nickel and dimed" comes from, back when tipping meant tossing a server the smallest coins in your pocket. These days, the phrase seems to describe the opposite, a whole system of small additions that always land in the business's favour. Researchers who study why people tip find that the reasons run deeper than economics. One ethnographic study of servers and diners in Vancouver found that people tip for good service, to follow the social norm, out of sympathy, to signal status, or to lock in a preference for next time. Tipping has never been just a transaction; it has always been part performance and part quiet social contract, which is probably why opting out feels so uncomfortable. Then Tipping Went on a Growth Spurt Fifteen percent used to be the polite standard and twenty percent was for showing off. That range has crept steadily upward. Canadians now commonly tip eighteen to twenty percent at restaurants, bars and at hair salons. Even coffee shops and fast-food counters are edging toward five to fifteen percent as digital prompts normalize the ask (Blueprint Financial, 2024). Nearly two thirds of Canadians say they feel pressured to tip more than they used to, and the share tipping twenty percent or higher has more than doubled in under a decade (Blueprint Financial, 2024). In the US food industry alone, tipping adds up to an estimated forty-seven billion dollars a year (Azar, 2011), proof that this habit is not shrinking on its own. The Power of Suggestion (and the Screen That Stares Back) Once you know the tactics at play, it becomes easier to push back without guilt. The first is plain old anchoring. When a screen offers eighteen, twenty, and twenty-five percent as your only real options, your brain quietly narrows its sense of what is normal to fit that range, even if fifteen felt generous a few years ago. The second is assumptive closing, a sales trick in which, instead of asking whether you would like to tip, the screen assumes you already said yes and only asks how much, with the highest number often listed first or made visually larger. The third is technology itself, which makes the ask frictionless in places it never used to be, a tap and a swivel where someone just handed you a bag. And the fourth is old-fashioned shaming, the discomfort of picking a lower number while the cashier watches your thumb hover over the screen. If this sounds suspiciously like how Dottie gets her treats, that is because it is the same playbook. Offer a limited set of flattering options, stand there expectantly, and let the silence do the persuading. Research shows this tip-screen genuinely works, boosting tips by fifteen to thirty percent compared with a plain jar on the counter, largely because people gravitate to the middle option and nobody wants to look cheap in front of an audience (GlobalTill, 2026). One Toronto bakery owner told CBC that customers get visibly upset just being asked, even with signs posted that tips are not expected (CBC, 2022). University of Saskatchewan professor Marc Mentzer called the whole system a human rights catastrophe we are simply stuck with (CBC, 2022). None of these four tactics are about rewarding good service. They are behavioural design, and once named, they lose a surprising amount of power over you. Then the Pandemic Showed Up and Ruined Math for Everyone It is worth remembering why this all accelerated, because the original impulse was genuinely kind. When the pandemic hit, restaurant workers were being laid off and dining rooms were closed. Tipping generously was in solidarity, meant as temporary help during a crisis. Except it did not stay temporary, and that part was not really an accident either. Once businesses saw customers would tolerate a higher default tip during a crisis, many kept it in place long after. What began as compassion got hardwired into the software as the new normal, with no memo ever announcing that the emergency measure was now permanent. And Then Delivery Apps Moved the Tip Jar to Before Dinner Even Arrives Just as the tip screen had already rewired one part of the routine, delivery apps quietly rewired another. With services like Uber Eats and Skip the Dishes, you are asked to tip before your food has even left the restaurant, a bit like tipping a movie based on the trailer. The gratuity is baked into checkout, so what used to be a reward for good service becomes a pre-negotiated cost of doing business from your couch. Drivers often rely on that upfront tip because base pay per delivery is thin, meaning customers are subsidizing wages before a single doorbell rings, tipping blind. Wait, What? Are We Tipping the Government Too? If the delivery app section left you feeling like every corner of a transaction has been quietly monetized, buckle up, because there is one more layer nobody warns you about. Tipping etiquette has always technically called for calculating your percentage on the pre-tax total, but the machine does not know or care about etiquette. It simply applies a percentage to whatever total is on the screen, tax already included. So, the moment you tap one of those preset percentage buttons, you are effectively handing your server a tip on the government's cut of the meal too, not just on your food. The good news is the money itself still goes straight to the server, not to the government (phew). A flat twenty percent tip, calculated the way the machine calculates it, works out closer to twenty-two percent in provinces with a combined sales tax around thirteen percent, a touch less where the tax rate is lower, once the tax already baked into that total gets factored in (ouch). Let that marinate for a second. You went in planning to leave twenty and walked out having left twenty-two. When There Was No Service to Begin With And then there is the increasingly common experience of being asked to tip somewhere where no actual service happened. The dry cleaners. Seriously? You hand over a bag of shirts, come back two days later, and someone hands you the same shirts on a hanger, and now there is a tip screen. Insert the mother of all eye rolls. Nobody brought anything to a table; nobody checked on you twice. The job was already priced into what you paid. This is the moment tipping stops being gratitude and starts being a business outsourcing payroll onto customers who never agreed to it. Let's Talk About What This Does to Seniors This part matters to me personally, since I spend my days helping retirees stretch every dollar with intention. Tipping fatigue hits seniors differently and being asked to add another eighteen to twenty-two percent to everyday errands can feel less like generosity and more like an unplanned pop quiz. I have heard from clients who now avoid certain errands or choose a drive-through, specifically to sidestep the awkward prompt. Seventy-three percent of Canadians already believe tipping lets employers get away with underpaying staff, and fifty-nine percent would rather see fair wages built into prices than keep gambling on tip guilt (Blueprint Financial, 2024). If tipping anxiety is nudging older adults toward staying home instead of enjoying a coffee with a friend, this so-called social norm is quietly chipping away at connection, not what any of us want for our golden years. This is not strictly a seniors’ problem either. Many people across every age group now quietly admit to choosing pickup over dine-in, skipping a small business altogether, or simply going out less, purely to avoid the awkward math of a screen and an audience. The difference for seniors is that the squeeze lands on top of a fixed income and a lifetime of budgeting habits that never had to account for an eighteen percent surcharge for saying yes to a friend's invitation. Maybe It Is Time for a Cash Tip Movement Here is an idea worth trying and sharing with your friends. The next time the screen swivels toward you, select no tip (usually tucked into the custom tip section rather than sitting out with the percentage buttons), pay the bill, and leave whatever cash tip you want directly on the table or in the jar afterward. To be clear, this is not about skipping the tip; it is about choosing how and when you deliver it. The server still gets paid fairly, just without a screen and an audience deciding for you. That one move sidesteps the anchoring, the assumptive question, the audience, and the algorithm quietly nudging the suggested amount upward. You decide the amount in private, hand it over with a genuine thank you, and walk out having tipped exactly what you meant to, power fully intact. If anyone asks why you skipped the prompt, just smile and say you do not tip machines; you tip people. This is also a great excuse to talk about it with your people. Ask your friends what they tip and why and figure out together where you all want to draw the line. Strength in numbers works on tipping the same way it works on everything else. Taking Back the Tipping Wheel A couple of practical notes before the cheat sheet below. Most screens that appear to offer only percentages hide a custom tip option that lets you enter zero or a flat dollar amount. It is worth finding, since a flat five dollars does not creep upward the way twenty percent does as prices rise. What to Tip, By Service Tipping Around the World Check Please! At the end of the day, tipping culture can feel like a money furnace, quietly burning through your paycheque, one percentage point at a time, while insisting the whole thing was your idea. And when the topic is your own money and your own life, also known around here as YMYL, letting action absorb anxiety beats letting anxiety run the show every time. Decide your numbers ahead of time, carry a bit of cash, ask a friend what they think, and stop apologizing for wanting a system that rewards real effort rather than clever design. Dottie has never apologized for expecting a treat, and to be fair, she earns hers. A screen swivelling toward you over a bagel has not. Tipping began as a genuine thank-you for genuine effort, so keep it simple. Decide your number before the screen decides it for you and save the big percentages for those who earned them. Next time that screen stares you down for twenty-two percent, channel your inner Dottie: sit, stay, and reward only the performance that deserves it. Don't Retire…ReWire! Sue My Book is Now Available for Pre-Order I hope you will consider pre-ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for you, a friend or loved one. It's available September 29, 2026 published by ECW Press - You can now order at Indigo or Amazon. And if you love supporting Canadian booksellers, please also check with your local independent bookstore. Most can easily order it for you.

Aug 5, 2026

6 min

A Closer Look at Index Funds in Retirement

Someone in their early sixties slides a statement across the kitchen table. Balanced portfolio. Broad index funds. Low annual fees. They did everything the industry told them to do, in the order the industry prescribed. Then they ask the question that has nothing to do with the statement: "Will it last?" I call that FORO. Fear Of Running Out. People tell me it's just nerves. It isn't. Here's what I think is really happening. An index fund is a very good machine for one job: growing money over thirty years. It assumes you have time. It assumes you're buying, not selling. It assumes you don't much care what's inside, as long as the number goes up. Every one of those assumptions stops being true the day you retire. Why do index funds treat expensive stocks as growth stocks? Campbell Harvey teaches finance at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. This spring, he published a paper with four colleagues in the Financial Analysts Journal that tackles something so basic that most of us never think about it. (Source: Arnott, Brightman, Harvey, Nguyen & Shakernia, "Fundamental Growth," Financial Analysts Journal, 2026.) Almost every index fund is built on one idea: if a stock is expensive, the company must be growing rapidly. Harvey's finding is that this is often wrong. A stock can be expensive because it's popular. But popularity and growth are two different things. If you want proof that price and business performance can go their separate ways, think back to 2021. GameStop. AMC. Stocks that shot up on Reddit forums, with very little of the chatter based on earnings reports. Think back to 2021. GameStop. AMC. Share prices shot straight up because people online decided they should. Not because those companies were selling more of anything. Now consider how index funds work across every retirement account. A stock becomes popular, its price rises, and the fund buys more of it, not because the business improved, but because the price went up. How concentrated is the S&P/TSX Composite? Everything above is American. Here's the Canadian version, eh? The main Canadian index is not a broad mix of the world's best businesses. It's dominated by banks, mining and oil. Those three groups make up close to 70% of the index. Banks alone account for about 31%. According to the iShares Core S&P/TSX Capped Composite, the ten biggest holdings are roughly 38% of the whole thing, with Royal Bank at the top. In fact, close to half the weight of the index is made up of just financials and energy. I'm not saying anything negative about those companies. I'm saying you own them, whether you picked them or not, in amounts you didn't choose, for reasons that have nothing to do with what you need at age 72. That's been a fine bet for long stretches. It's also a narrow one. And narrow feels very different at 65 than it did at 35, because at 65 you no longer have the thing that makes a bad market survivable. Time. Why does a market drop cost a 65-year-old more than a 35-year-old? Let’s illustrate this with an example. Two people own the same fund. One is 35 and still contributing, while the other is 65 and withdrawing. Both are dealing with $6,000 this year. A unit of the fund costs $100. Then the market drops 20%, and a unit costs $80. The 35-year-old puts in $6,000. Before the drop, that money bought 60 units. Now it buys 75. Fifteen units he didn't pay for. The 65-year-old needs $6,000 to live on. Before the drop, she'd have sold 60 units to get it. Now she must sell 75. Fifteen units she'll never get back. Then the market recovers. Units return to $100. His 15 extra units are worth $1,500 more than he paid for them. Her 15 units were sold at the bottom. They aren't there to recover. Same fund. Same market. Same $6,000. The only difference is the direction the money was moving. That's why a retiree needs to look inside the fund, whereas a 35-year-old mostly doesn't. RRIF minimum withdrawals: why Canadian retirees are forced to sell In Canada, we've set a rule. When your RRSP becomes a RRIF, you must withdraw a minimum amount each year. The rate starts at 5.28% at age 71 and increases each year after that. (Source: Canada Revenue Agency, prescribed RRIF minimum withdrawal factors.) So, a Canadian retiree can be forced to sell in a bad year, from a narrow index based on a definition of growth that a Duke University business professor has just called flawed. Three problems stacked on top of each other. None of them show up on the statement. This is exactly the point I made with EY Canada in The Canadian Retirement Evolution, published in July (Source: EY Canada, 2026). FORO isn't a personal failing. It's a design gap. We built a system to save money, then asked it to pay people reliably for thirty years. It was never built for that. And the biggest thing most Canadians over 55 own isn't in the index at all. It's the house. About 70% of the coming wealth transfer in this country sits in real estate, and more than 85% of seniors say they want to stay in their homes (Source: EY Canada, The Canadian Retirement Evolution, 2026). Asset-rich, cash-poor, and treating their largest asset as off-limits. 5 questions to ask your advisor about your index funds I'm not telling you to sell anything. I can't. I don't know your health, your pension, your taxes, or your nerves. But here's what I'd want answered before my next meeting with an advisor. What are the ten biggest things I actually own? Not the fund name. The holdings. Do my funds overlap? Three funds that all own the same five banks isn't three bets. It's one. What happens if I must withdraw in a bad year? Is my "growth" fund measuring actual growth, or just price? Where does my home equity fit into all this? Ask. A good advisor will be glad you did. If you get a pie chart and a pat on the back, ask again. One last point from Professor Harvey. More than half of all invested money now sits in funds that buy automatically. He thinks it could reach 80% within ten years. (Source: Duke University Fuqua School of Business, 2026.) When enough money buys without looking, price stops being a judgment and becomes a reflex. But retirees are the least able to afford someone else's reflex. Here's the plain truth beneath all the jargon: nobody swapped out your equipment when the game changed. You're still holding a golf club on a pickleball court. Momentum is still wearing a cardigan. Your funds still can't tell the difference between expensive and growing. And most retirement plans still hand you a seatbelt when what you need is a crash-proof suit. Nobody in the industry is racing to fix this for you. So I will. Consider this the first chapter, not the last word. It's time to take back our retirements and reset. Don't Retire…ReWire! Sue My Book is Now Available for Pre-Order I hope you will consider pre-ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for you, a friend or loved one. It's available September 29, 2026 published by ECW Press - You can now order at Indigo or Amazon. And if you love supporting Canadian booksellers, please also check with your local independent bookstore. Most can easily order it for you. References: All figures verified 4 August 2026 Important: This article is general information and commentary only and does not constitute financial, mortgage, tax, legal, or investment advice. Before making decisions about your retirement or home equity, consult qualified liscensed professionals who can assess your personal circumstances.

Jul 29, 2026

6 min

There's No Such Thing as the Average Canadian Retiree. There Are Three.

You've seen the photo. Silver-haired couple on a sailboat, or walking on a beach at golden hour, laughing about nothing in particular. It's on the cover of every retirement brochure ever printed. It's what "the average Canadian retiree" looks like. In thirty years of banking, I never met that couple. I met a widow in her seventies deciding between a dental crown and her property taxes. I met a couple in their sixties quietly draining their RRSPs to keep a grandchild in university. And yes, I met people with sailboats, though they weren't asking me about retirement income. They were asking about estate freezes and charitable foundations. Three conversations. Three completely different Canadians. And after three decades of having them, most recently as a vice president at one of Canada's Schedule I banks, I've come to believe our biggest retirement problem isn't that Canadians plan badly. It's that we keep designing for an "average retiree" who doesn't exist. In The Canadian Retirement Evolution, a report newly published by EY that I was proud to co-author, I make the case for seeing Canadian retirees as three distinct groups. 1) Retirees in Need (roughly 30%) Nearly one-third of Canadian retirees are living close to the edge. Limited pension income, modest personal savings, and rising living costs define their retirement. Adding to the pressure, retirement debt is becoming the new reality. According to Royal LePage, 29% of Canadians who are recently retired or approaching retirement expect to continue making mortgage payments on their primary residence. For many Canadians, debt has become a permanent companion, extending well into what should be their most financially secure years. Perhaps the most troubling reality is this. Most people in this group have never received professional financial advice. The Canadians who need planning the most are often the Canadians the financial planning industry reaches the least. That should concern every financial institution, advisor and policymaker in this country. When retirement arrives with too little income, too much debt and no plan, the result is not just financial stress. It is anxiety, reduced independence and difficult choices that no Canadian should have to make after a lifetime of work. 2) Retirees Seeking Stability (roughly 60%) This is the majority of Canadian retirees, and the group that the sailboat photo completely misses. They are not financially struggling, but neither are they financially free. They have enough to retire, but not enough to stop worrying. What they want is simple. They want to maintain the lifestyle they spent forty years building. They want confidence that their money will last as long as they do. They want a retirement plan that offers stability and predictability. And they want the freedom to help the people they love, whether that's contributing to a grandchild's education, helping with a first home, or lending a hand when life throws one of their children an unexpected curveball. That is where retirement becomes complicated. Retirement has changed dramatically over the past three decades, but much of the advice Canadians receive has not. The result is a growing gap between today's retirement realities and yesterday's retirement plans. Every dollar shared with family is one less dollar available to fund their own future. Every unexpected expense raises the same unsettling question: Will I still have enough? This group lives in the space between abundance and anxiety. They have assets, but not always confidence. They have choices, but every choice comes with trade-offs. They don't need a miracle. They need a plan that provides stability, predictability, and the confidence to enjoy the retirement they worked so hard to earn without constantly wondering if today's decisions will become tomorrow's regrets. 3) Affluent Retirees (roughly 10%) The remaining ten percent focuses on sophisticated wealth management: transferring wealth to the next generation, structuring estates to minimize taxes, and giving philanthropically. These are good problems to have, served by an entire industry built to solve them. And that's the uncomfortable truth hiding in the framework: most of our retirement advice, most of our products, and most of our planning tools were designed with this group in mind. Retirement Fear Has a Name In 1990, more than 70% of Canadian workplace pension plans were defined benefit plans, providing predictable, guaranteed lifetime income. By 2022, that figure had fallen to just 37%. In the span of a single working generation, we quietly shifted the risk of outliving retirement savings from institutions to individuals. The anxiety created by that shift is something I encountered in thousands of conversations with Canadians throughout my lending career, long before I had a name for it. I call it FORO, the Fear of Running Out. In the EY report, we describe it this way: "Fear of running out (FORO) reflects a structural gap in retirement system design, not a failure of individual planning. Most retirement frameworks were built for accumulation rather than sustainable income in later life." That is the heart of the challenge. Canada's retirement system does an excellent job of helping people save, but far less to help them transform those savings into sustainable, predictable income throughout retirement. It is little wonder that so many Canadians approach retirement with uncertainty rather than confidence. The Elephant in the Living Room One final reality deserves far more attention. Canada is in the midst of one of the largest intergenerational wealth transfers in its history. Much of that wealth is tied up in residential real estate, owned by Canadians who consistently say they want to remain in their homes for as long as possible. That creates an important contradiction. The largest asset held by most Canadian households is also one of the least integrated into mainstream retirement planning. We encourage Canadians to build home equity for decades, then often ignore it when they need income the most. If retirement planning is meant to consider every available resource, why do we continue to overlook the largest one? Resolving that question has become the focus of my research and my forthcoming book, Your Retirement Reset: How to Convert Home Equity into Financial Security (ECW Press, September 2026). But that discussion extends beyond the scope of this article. For now, it is enough to recognize the disconnect. Retirement has changed. Canadians' balance sheets have changed. It may be time for retirement planning to change as well. A Retirement System Designed for Everyone The EY report reminds us that retirement is more than a financial milestone. It is one of life's most significant transitions, and every Canadian deserves to approach it with confidence, dignity and choice. That outcome will not be achieved with a retirement system designed around a single, hypothetical retiree. Canadians retire with different financial realities, different goals and different challenges. A retirement system that recognizes only one path will continue to leave too many people behind. Designing for the three retirement realities outlined in this paper is not simply good policy. It is good business. Financial institutions that tailor products, advice and education to meet the needs of all three groups will be better positioned to serve Canada's fastest-growing demographic. Policymakers who encourage that evolution will help create a retirement system that reflects the way Canadians actually live today, not the way they lived thirty years ago. The question is no longer whether retirement has changed. It has. The question is whether our retirement system will evolve quickly enough to meet Canadians where they are. Don't Retire... Re-Wire! Sue My Book is Now Available for Pre-Order I hope you will consider pre-ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for you, a friend or loved one. It's available September 29, 2026 published by ECW Press - You can now order at Indigo or Amazon. And if you love supporting Canadian booksellers, please also check with your local independent bookstore. Most can easily order it for you.

View all posts