Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for June 11th, 2009

Back to Stats Canada for another very interesting statistic, there are more Canadians in pensions as of January 1, 2008. This is a surprising number, but also an old number.

As of January 1, 2008, membership in registered pension plans (RPPs) in Canada amounted to 5.9 million, an increase of more than 140,000, or 2.4%, from the previous year.

Given the difficulties of a few large private pension programs (Nortel, GM, and Ford to name a few), my guess would be the number from January 1, 2008 to now is a big drop.  The whole business of private firms with pensions is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, given the liability this represents to these firms (Air Canada is talking about their pensions, AGAIN, as an example).

Will the defined benefit pension in the private sector be going in the same direction as the North American Auto Industry? Not sure, but it does show that the benefits package for today’s employee is changing.

Will the worker of today be able to retire? I keep asking this question, I think the answer is simple, the age of retirement is going to change from 65 to an older age (70 or 75).

Cell Phone News

With Rogers and Fido both confirming that they will have the new iPhone 3G S available the day they are available in the U.S. , which is interesting, if not a little expensive. The new iPhone has some interesting new features, but is still far too rich for my blood.

A more interesting report by TechCrunch (based on a report by Juniper Research) states that cheap phone set sales will be up by 22% by 2014 or over 700 Million units per year. That is even more interesting, more consumers are simply buying cheap phones (especially all over the world), instead of buying “Smart Phones”. I am not surprised by this data, but it is very interesting.

Cheap Phone Sales Graph