True Patriot Love - July 13, 2026


What Does Retirement In Canada Look Like？


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

179.99

Word count

1,793

Sentence count

17

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Jim and Mike talk about how long it takes to live a comfortable life in retirement and how much money you should have saved to live that lifestyle in retirement. According to financial analysts, you would need to have $1.5M saved to retire at age 80.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 so i i just jotted down a couple of things that i think is retirement in our minds okay
00:00:05.120 a condo in arizona a cruise every winter a motor home a cottage annual trips to europe
00:00:11.120 helping the kids with down payments new cars every few years golf memberships restaurant dinners
00:00:16.960 30 years of leisure and joy okay well so to do that mike according to all the financial analysts
00:00:24.080 in Canada, you would probably need to have approximately $1.5 million saved to live that
00:00:30.120 kind of lifestyle in retirement. Hi, this is TPL Media. I am Mike. That's Jim right there. We do
00:00:39.440 shows together. And today, Jim, have we been asking the wrong question? I mean, I've been
00:00:45.300 hearing for years that Canadians are never going to be able to retire. We can't retire until we're
00:00:49.640 80 and that we're going to be working and working our whole lives away but i wonder if this is true
00:00:55.320 today we're talking about how long are you going to have to work uh being a canadian thanks for
00:01:00.600 talking about this jim who by the way i think you're probably about 30 years from retirement
00:01:05.080 yourself no i think there's there's two questions that we're going to talk about today have to
00:01:10.840 retire want to retire um because i mean if you're a teacher in ontario the ontario teacher pension
00:01:18.380 plan they have factor 85 so if you become a teacher in a school in ontario in your late 20s
00:01:23.820 by your mid 50s you can retire with a full pension right right and the chances are you're probably
00:01:28.940 going to live another 25 30 years and so you can either fully retire or then go into semi-retirement
00:01:35.820 after because you have a teacher's pension and you can do other things so it's a it's a question
00:01:40.940 a lot of us have i by my own mission i did not make a lot of money in my 20s as i struggled
00:01:46.860 so i kind of still need to work but i also like to work and i want to work so that's a perspective
00:01:53.500 that's a perspective and i know people in certain professions and other jobs whether it's you know
00:01:59.580 white collar or blue collar or the trades or whatever they do they enjoy it they enjoy working
00:02:04.940 they enjoy the passion they enjoy being needed and having that thing to wake up to every day i think
00:02:10.060 my dad retired at 56 from what was then ontario hydro with a hydro with a great uh pension and uh
00:02:17.580 then uh found another passion in life in volunteering and still at 87 years old every
00:02:23.180 day i mean every day seven days a week because he loves it so much it seems that uh he's there
00:02:29.340 at the food bank volunteering uh i think it's a matter of perspective again it's you're right
00:02:34.300 it's two things in my opinion it's two things it's uh the balance sheet not the age yes and it's the
00:02:41.660 the desire uh to work or not to work and unfortunately if you don't want to work and
00:02:48.300 the balance sheet doesn't work out you're going to be unhappy and that's a reality but you know jim
00:02:54.540 and i hate to do this but i think that we do this often as you know as humans we say something we
00:03:01.820 repeat it we believe it you can't unring these bells sometimes that we ring and when we keep
00:03:07.820 saying you're gonna have to work till you're 80 really it says i don't make enough money to put
00:03:13.180 money aside or you were a little irresponsible and didn't make the effort to put money aside
00:03:19.820 and i by my own admission in my 20s i was not smart with money you bought that corvette i did
00:03:26.540 i couldn't afford it i had an okay car um you baller yeah uh credit card debt it was until my
00:03:34.300 30s till i started to be educated and started to get smart about money and more responsible with
00:03:39.340 money now i know people like at 22 23 are already good savers and are well on their way to financial
00:03:45.980 stability we're all different and there's a few other things at play here some people don't like
00:03:50.780 their job but go to it every day because they need to and there's other people that you know what i'm
00:03:55.180 I'm not making maybe as much as a teacher or a firefighter,
00:03:58.560 but I like doing it, and I'm going to keep doing it
00:04:00.620 because they enjoy it.
00:04:02.460 I think that there is something to be said for the empathy
00:04:06.020 that I have for people that don't want to work. 0.97
00:04:08.140 Absolutely.
00:04:08.700 Absolutely need to work to keep food on their table
00:04:11.160 because with Canada Pension and whatever support they get
00:04:15.780 from the government post-work is not enough to keep them eating
00:04:19.880 and in a comfortable place after having worked their whole life.
00:04:22.860 I think some consideration needs to be made on that front.
00:04:25.180 uh but then there's this other side of it you know we went through um do you remember what
00:04:32.680 retirement was like for your grandparents and my father my grandfather uh my dad's side was a
00:04:39.860 meat inspector Canada Packers in Halifax and I believe he worked until his early 60s like
00:04:46.780 that 62 65 okay and then he retired from Canada Packers and he had this opulent retirement where
00:04:53.360 it was luxury he was traveling and he was on a sailboat no no no no what was his retirement like
00:04:58.240 describe it it was pretty basic you know he had um left germany after world war one before world
00:05:05.280 war ii and he was ashamed what germany did in the world war ii and vowed he'd never go back
00:05:11.280 but then my parents my dad's last european posting was in large germany they come back to canada he
00:05:17.920 tells his father my grandfather no germany's a great place now they're they're friends with us
00:05:22.720 now it's a beautiful country so he went back to germany a few times to see family even though he
00:05:27.440 hadn't been back in 45 years right and spent time with my sister and i and other grandkids and you
00:05:36.400 know he had a little garden he putted around him yeah he had some monumental moments yes but he
00:05:41.200 filled his time with wholesome absolutely modest living very much so he was i mean he grew up with
00:05:47.920 nothing and so they he didn't know what being immodest was with money that wasn't part of his
00:05:54.800 thinking so now people of that era imagine showing your your grandfather a commercial for freedom 55
00:06:00.940 yeah yeah i mean he would probably not my grandmother much like you yeah she worked for
00:06:08.260 a canada revenue agency yeah until she was 65 and she retired uh when you retire uh as a civil
00:06:14.920 servant this country if you continue on 65 years old she did not have an opulent we had a great
00:06:21.540 life together with my grandmother my grandmother retired i remember her working i remember her
00:06:26.360 retired she lived into her 90s and she was able to live a modest lifestyle and be near all of us
00:06:35.320 but was she happy 100 we had a great time and mike i think that's a key thing sometimes people
00:06:42.040 feel i need this this and this and i need to go here here and here to be happy but there's a lot
00:06:47.320 of people here in canada who think i don't i just need simple things maybe one trip a year
00:06:53.400 to see some things i've always wanted to see and maybe do some volunteering and i i don't have an
00:06:59.800 extravagant lifestyle and and i think a lot of people live a modest lifestyle in canada and
00:07:05.880 are very happy doing it you know retirement as a pensioner is a fairly new thing in civilization
00:07:12.680 absolutely there but i think we're still adapting to it a little bit and and also you know let's be
00:07:19.080 honest uh what what is in our mind is retirement has been sold to us through the financial arms of
00:07:26.360 commercial uh and and for the last 30 40 years right it's been pounded into our heads you know
00:07:32.040 invest have rrsps retirement savings plans are everything in to us now tfsas yeah uh so i i just
00:07:41.000 jotted down a couple of things that i think is retirement in our minds okay a condo in arizona
00:07:46.760 a cruise every winter a motor home a cottage annual trips to europe helping the kids with
00:07:52.200 down payments new cars every few years golf memberships restaurant dinners 30 years of
00:07:58.200 leisure and joy okay well so to do that mike according to all the financial analysts in
00:08:04.360 canada you would probably need to have approximately 1.5 million dollars saved to
00:08:09.800 live that kind of lifestyle in retirement well not many canadians will retire with an investment
00:08:15.800 portfolio of around 1.5 million dollars i won't and i think a lot of canadians won't well we made
00:08:21.880 this transition during the boomer era i hate i hate picking on boomers am i a boomer by the way
00:08:27.080 no no we're past that we're gen x oh i don't even like us so having said that the boomers went out
00:08:32.600 there they bought homes for for 60 16 17 000 they later sold for 1.6 1.7 million dollars
00:08:41.400 financial geniuses but they had uh we witnessed as youth and young adults our parents experienced
00:08:49.560 this upswing of financial abundance and i think that what happened we redefined retirement
00:08:57.080 was financial abundance and not financial independence and here's the other thing too
00:09:02.920 the boomer generation most jobs back then had a pension some sort of pension so you'd have your
00:09:10.320 work pension your cpp and now your old age security so you had three income streams
00:09:15.360 post-retirement most jobs now in canada do not have a pension or a retirement plan they simply
00:09:21.260 don't there's a lot of self-employed people or companies small medium-sized companies that they
00:09:27.120 give you this this and this but a pension plan is not part of it so you're on your own and that is
00:09:31.680 why the government workers provincial or federal a teacher a first responder they're the most solid
00:09:38.700 pensions in canada when you think about it right because most jobs most careers don't have pensions
00:09:44.480 now i know trades people like the carpenters union electricians union they have through that
00:09:49.460 through the unions they have a good pension plan as well well you know and it's interesting we just
00:09:53.700 had a really great conversation with uh our colleague here paul micucci