Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Our buddy over at the Canadian Capitalist asked the lyrical question about whether WHEN the baby boomers retire, will it cause the financial markets to crash because they will all be sucking their money out of them to live on.

That’s a good question, but here is a better question, are we actually going to retire? The “Baby Boomer” generation and the generation before it may well be the only two generations to retire. My Dad retired, but before that most people died before they reached retirement age. All these baby boomers have all this money put away (or do they? we’ll only know in a few more years) and think they will retire. I am a little more pragmatic, will I retire? I don’t know. I have dreams of retiring NOW while I can really enjoy things, but will I have enough money to retire at 65? Will CPP exist then? Will my pension from my employer still be solvent? Will my debts be low enough that I can retire? Will I be doing something by then that I want to STOP doing? All very good questions to think about.

Don’t assume you will retire, but plan like you want to is all the advice I can give right now.

Call it a coincidence if you like, but I have just received the new Reform Conservative Party of Canada platform from my member of Parliament, and right there emblazoned under the Fiscal Policy is none other than:

“A Conservative Government will create tax fairness for families by eliminating inequities between single and dual income families…”

OK, so back to what this blog is about, real world financial ranting.

For the longest time my wife and I tried to get the kids on an allowance, so that they could learn what money is, how it works and some responsibility, but inevitably, we’d forget for a couple of weeks, try to catch up and eventually just gave up (much to the kids chagrin). Interesting, we were trying to teach the kids responsibility and all it did was show how irresponsible their parents were (now THAT is ironic).

About 6 years ago I was in the TD on one of my yearly visits, getting my bank fees waived for a year, and get them to fix something they had screwed up (I think it was my mortgage that year), when I asked about kids’ bank accounts. My brother sends the girls money every year, and we had got to the point where we didn’t want to just buy them toys with it. The poor woman who’s life I was ruining for the day, said the accounts could be opened then (since the kids had SIN numbers), and the accounts would show up “under” my account on my on line banking.

A day or two later, a light went on in my head. I called the bank on the phone lady (who I now call once a year, because I do most of my banking on line, but couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted). I asked her to set up weekly transfers from my account to my kids accounts, thus assuring that the money was paid every week (whether I remembered or not).

Well, it has worked, the kids get their weekly allowances AND they actually do things like:

• Buy clothes that they really want
• Have somewhere to put their uncle’s money and can then buy what they want
• Buy presents for their friends birthdays (that one shocked me the first time it happened).

So it seems this experiment has worked, chalk one up for me –C8j