Are we witnessing the end of retirement?

CLIP You’re listening to a frequency podcast network production in association with CityNews.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings You are likely listening to this on a Monday in December in most of this country. It’s cold in all of the country, it’s dark. The weekend might’ve been nice, but it’s over. It’s back to work. And you may on days like this dream of the day that you retire, when you wake up, glance at the clock and the dark and the cold and roll over and go cozily back to sleep. You may think that it’s about this time of year when you retire that you’ll be headed to where it’s not cold at all and you’ll stay there till April or so if you’ve dreamed about all that. That’s great. I have two. It’s fun to dream, but I would ask you two things. First, considering the cost of living the unpredictable economy, the world in turmoil, and if you’re younger, the decline in stable employment with retirement programs at the same time as lifespans keep increasing, do you really think you’ll actually be able to retire like that? Second, considering everything that we are learning about what actually keeps us healthy and engaged as we age? Even if you could, are you sure you want to? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Catherin Bradbury is a Toronto-based journalist, a regular and longtime contributor to major Canadian media. She’s the author of the Bright Side published by Penguin Random House in 2021. She writes a column called The Three Quarter Life Crisis for the Toronto Star, where I gather she worked until she retired, and then any great athlete came outer retirement, couldn’t leave the game alone. Hello, Catherin.

Cathrin Bradbury: I love that description. Hello, how are you?

Jordan: I am doing well. I want to talk to you about why you came out of retirement. I gather it wasn’t to chase one last championship ring. So tell me about your retirement and what you thought it would be and what it is.

Cathrin Bradbury: Well, my last job was actually at the CBC and it was a pretty big job. I’ve usually been a boss in media and you know what the news cycle is like. Everybody knows what the news cycle has been like for the last few years. And so just before I retired it was like Ukraine, a nuclear threat and atmospheric rivers covid and the stormy of the capitol. It was the most insane news cycle of my career. So I really wasn’t sorry to be leaving all of that. And I guess what I expected was something like my father had before me, that generation who produced my generation, the boomers, I expected the social contract to keep up its end of the bargain. I had paid huge chunks of my salary, my whole 40 year career into my government pension funds and worked pension funds. And that’s not what happened.

Jordan: What happened, I mean, a lot of stuff happened over the past few years and we’ll get to that, but what happened to you?

Cathrin Bradbury: Well, I was one of the huge number of Canadians who retired during covid, and if you cast your mind back in my bank account, my money was multiplying like guppies. It was just crazy. The interest rates were so low, of course you weren’t spending any money. We were all sitting in lockdown. And so I had a kind of false sense of what I was retiring with. If you talk to Canadians now, Canadians believe they need 1.7 million to retire, which is a lot of money. And so I retired into a scenario where my interest rates doubled almost overnight. I have a big mortgage on my house and everything just costs so much more and I was really having trouble making ends meet.

Jordan: And so you’re no longer quite fully retired.

Cathrin Bradbury: I’m no longer quite fully retired. And it turns out what I found in my article was that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing for my health and my longevity because people who retire into nothing tend to get sicker and live less long.

Jordan: You mentioned a lot of Canadians retired during Covid. Are we in a wave of retirements right now? Generally, how do today’s numbers compare to the past or to the future?

Cathrin Bradbury: Yeah, so about a thousand people are retiring every day in Canada right now, Canada. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of people moving through the system. We’re the largest generation in Canadian history, in world history to move into retirement and you sort of get distracted just by the sheer numbers of us moving through the system. So that’s one thing. There’s a lot of us. And the other thing is we’re going to live a long time. I used to think longevity was a good thing. That’s great. I’m going to live till I’m 94, but it isn’t necessarily, I mean, if you want to really think about how long you potentially could live, the oldest lived Canadian was 117 years old. So if you want to plan for how long you could live, that’s the outside number 117. And for somebody retiring at 60, that’s like 50 years to plan for and save for. That’s a very long paid vacation. At the end of your work career,

Jordan: I’m trying to get a handle on how quickly the situation around retirement has changed. And this might sound weird, but can you maybe just explain the concept of retirement to us? This is a relatively recent invention.

Cathrin Bradbury: It is. It is. Yeah. So it was Otto Vn Bismarck in 1881 who decided that Germans after a life of work deserved to be supported by the government. And so he set up a retirement age for people’s retirement benefits to kick in when they were 70 years old. Well, at the time that he did that, it made them look good, but most Germans died at 40. That was the average life expectancy. So it was a political move, but not actually of any use whatsoever. It similarly in Canada when we created our retirement pension plan that happened in 1965, it sounded like a great thing, and it happened in 1965 and it kicked in when you turned 65, but at that time, the average life expectancy of male Canadians who made up the bulk of the workforce was 68. So yeah, that’s a big difference between that and 50 years or 40 years or even 30 years.

Jordan: Well, how quickly and how radically, I guess, has life expectancy increased? And I mean, covid aside, I know it caused a blip. Does it show any signs of slowing down? How much more can we realistically expect it to keep going up?

Cathrin Bradbury: I don’t know. There’s all these movements now about living forever and remember that whole success. Did you watch succession, that succession plot?

Jordan: Explain it for us, for people who haven’t.

Cathrin Bradbury: Well, I barely, I can’t not going to explain it. Well, it seemed like it was a joke fair. It was one of their plans to help people live forever. But actually it’s a real movement out there. A lot of people are investing millions upon millions of dollars in this belief that we don’t have to die. We don’t have to die for 200 years. So there’s a hope out there in the extreme fringes of things, the very rich extreme fringes that longevity could keep increasing and increasing and increasing right now. It was such a crazy idea. I mean, life expectancy was 40 in 1881 and then 68 and 1965, and now it’s for men 80. And for women 84, that’s increasing a lot all the time, right? What’s it going to be for our kids? I don’t know, a hundred, 110,

Jordan: Assuming we don’t burn up the entire world by then, but that’s a topic for another podcast. In terms of the funds and retirement plans, as you mentioned, the Canada pension plan that were set up to provide for elderly Canadians in their retirement, how are they holding up to this, both the wave of retirements you mentioned that we’ve been in for a while as the boomers leave the workforce and also to the fact that somebody who retired say at the turn of the millennium is potentially probably still alive and getting a paycheck.

Cathrin Bradbury: One of the things that I found in the research for this article in walrus is that Canadians are among the most financially illiterate country in the world. So that’s kind of surprising.

Jordan: I’m doing a personal finance podcast right now, and as I learn myself, I find that it tracks

Cathrin Bradbury: Well and I have often thought, why don’t we teach financial literacy to kids in school? Why don’t we have conversations about money? Why don’t we do that? It’s more useful than woodworking. Well, God, that dates me. I’m sure woodworking has been taught for centuries, but people research shows this. People are pretty good at planning for the short term and not so bad at planning for the medium term, but they’re very bad at planning for the long term. We just can’t do it. We’re too optimistic. You can’t picture yourself at 94 frail and living in a home. The mind doesn’t go there. So I do think that you’ve got a financially not terribly literate group of Canadians who are not terribly clear about what they really need, who do some planning, but not enough planning. It means that you end up, you don’t know how long you’re going to live. You don’t know what the interest rates are going to be. You don’t know what the stock markets are going to do. You don’t know what inflation rates are. So it’s just a massive journey of insecurity is one of the experts I talked to s said,

Jordan: As the life expectancy continues to increase and the economy is as volatile as it is right now, the first one I guess is just what’s happening to people right now. I mean, you are a prime example of it, but there are people who are probably, I guess right now back where you were in 2021 where they’re like, well, you know what? I’ve worked a long life. I’m looking forward to getting out of this. And now they’re looking around and I’m asking, what are they doing? What’s happening to them?

Cathrin Bradbury: One of the big surprises of this piece when I started out is that I didn’t talk to a single person who was actually retired, even though they were all retired, people were either working as volunteers or their inner rebel had come out and they were fighting for climate change or indigenous rights, or they had gone back to work and gone back to work in dramatically different fields than they had worked in their whole lives. One guy I talked to was a bank manager at TD for 35 years or 30 years, and he is working in a funeral home now and he loves it. And so I want people to hear that it’s not all dark. People aren’t necessarily forced to go back to work, although there are some Canadians who are in that position, but a lot of Canadians choose to go back to work because they want some kind of engagement. They want to have a reason to connect with people. They don’t want pressure. They don’t want the big job anymore. Another guy was a union organizer at Dow Chemical, and he’s delivering flowers in his seventies and he loves it. He says, there’s nothing better than people opening the door and you’ve got a bouquet of flowers. They all smile at you very different from his previous job. So I think an answer to your question, what people are doing is actually going back to work for all kinds of different reasons. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a way to keep engaged. It’s a way to stay healthy. It’s actually a way to live longer.

Jordan: You’ve touched on this a couple of times, so I’ll ask you for more detail on that. What do we know? What does science tell us about what’s best to do as we age in order to keep fit, stay healthy, et cetera? And does that involve, does it change, I guess, if it involves paid work, perhaps stressful work like your previous job or delivering flowers to people?

Cathrin Bradbury: Yeah, well, there’ve been a lot of studies done on what helps people live longer like a lot. There’s a Netflix series on right now about the blue zones, what’s it called? The Secrets of a Long Life. And we’ve known for a long time that the biggies for shortening your life are smoking, obesity and drinking. But what the studies have been finding for the past 10 or 15 years is that there’s a fourth factor there, and that’s a lack of purpose, and it is as huge indicator of an earlier death as the other three are. So a lack of purpose is as damaging to your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. That’s a pretty big finding, and I think we all know in all of our fields, people who are just so driven at work, the doctors, the media, people, probably athletes, and then you stop and you don’t have anything to do, and you hear these stories and then they drop dead a month later. And what the studies are saying is that if you go from that to nothing, you go from that to, I guess I’ll shovel the snow or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just sit here. That’s going to shorten your life. So what we know is that whatever that looks like, having some kind of engagement that keeps you occupied and interested in the people in the world around you, that’s very important thing to have in your life when you retire or stop working in the place that you used to work.

Jordan: And if more and more people are either A, realizing that and choosing to remain in the workforce or B, simply can’t afford to retire in the current economy, how is the workforce adapting to that to as life expectancy grows older and older folks around in those positions? You borrow again from succession and you call them graze in your piece. How’s the workforce treating them?

Cathrin Bradbury: Well, first of all, the lot of Canadians fought against mandatory retirement and won. So you can not be forced to retire by Canadian law. It’s against the law. So if you want it to work, keep working in your job till you’re 90 years old or keep working. Nobody can say you can’t do that. But ageism at work is much more subtle than saying Get out. There’s a kind of, I know as a boss there’s a kind of red circling that goes on. You start to look at the people who are over 55 wondering, oh, their pensions topped up, so maybe let’s have a sort of nudging conversation with them, or you stop to send people on training programs or one guy in the finance business, a really intense, he had a really intense job in New York, and he said when he turned 55, they hired another guy in his twenties or early thirties to do exactly the job he was doing, and they sat him right beside him. And he said, when I was 55, my desk was 36 inches wide, and by the time I was 60, it was 24 inches wide. And I looked around me and I thought, okay, it’s time to move on. This is as clear a signal as it gets that my value is shrinking for this company. But the problem with that is that he went on and he started a real estate career, which he’s been doing for seven years, incredibly successful. So he took all that energy and drive and work ethic, and he took it to something else instead of finding a way to feed it back into the business he was in. And I don’t think that isn’t to say that the people who stay on and work should stay in the big jobs and the top jobs and stop the next generation from coming up. I personally don’t believe that’s what should happen, but we have this very stark idea. You’re either in or you’re out. Catherin’s a vp, and so she’s got, we can’t possibly talk to her about doing something other or lesser, so she’s either in this job or she has to get out of the company. And a lot of the people I talked to said, we should really be thinking about changing that up. If it’s going to go on for another 30 years instead of 10 or 15, how could that look? What other types of rules would you like to add within the company? A lot of countries are doing this Scotland’s way ahead of the curve on it, these legacy sort of 60 year legacy career path. They start to talk to people in their twenties about where they envision they want to be in their career when they’re 70. And I think we have to have start to really try and have those conversations with ourselves and with the places we were

Jordan: So far. We’ve discussed this from a very white collar perspective. I want to talk about people who A, are in the position that they can’t afford to retire, but B also may have spent decades working a job that is physically really rough and is going to only get tougher as they get older. What solutions are there given the current economic climate and how well-equipped pension plans and so on are for them other than just simply telling ’em to raise the retirement age and you’ve got to keep working,

Cathrin Bradbury: You’ve got to keep working. And I’m just going to say right here that I didn’t talk to Canadians for this article who simply had to keep working. I didn’t. That was outside the purview of this piece. And I think it’s a really important story, and I think it’s another story, but it is a problem, people having to work. One of the places that has a huge problem is Japan and Korea. So they have the oldest populations in the world and people are working into their sixties, seventies, and eighties because their pension programs are so terrible, much worse than ours, just terrible poverty pension programs that they have to work. Now, the benefit for society is that in Japan and also in Canada, we have a million job vacancies right now. There are a lot of jobs that people on the up don’t want to do. And so in Japan, people in their seventies and eighties are doing things like grocery delivery and greeters at stores and that kind of thing. Yes, they are continuing to work because they have to, but they’re also filling a need, a vacancy where the country desperately needs workers.

Jordan: What kind of solutions could we find in Canada to making sure that people, assuming that they’re retiring when they want to, and that they’re lucky enough to do that, that they can feel confident retiring and don’t have the sort of same feeling that you just did, which is like, oh, this is going to be great. I’m going to relax, and then all of a sudden it’s like, I don’t know if I have enough money. Do we have the ability to do that?

Cathrin Bradbury: I ended up after this writing this piece, or at the end of writing the piece, I came up with what I called my personal retirement manifesto, and I talked to a lot of people, a lot of experts in Canada and a lot of retirees, and it was three things. One is this idea of a legacy career path and what that looks like and really starting to have this conversation as a country. So what does it look like if people are moving from a 40 year career to a 60 year career and how do we make that work for the people coming up behind them? How do we make that work for the people who are going to work longer? There aren’t answers to that question, but when we put in place, we made it illegal to say people had to retire. The conversation sort of stopped there. Nobody said, well, what’s that going to look like? How’s that going to work? How’s that actually going to work in the workplace? So that’s one is to really think about what a legacy career path looks like and to start to have those conversations. And the second one is this idea of staged retirement or phased retirement. So I think we want to move from something that is people working mostly full-time to mostly not full-time. And that could take place over a year, over two years, over four years maybe. So you gradually phase people out of work. Now that’s difficult as hell to manage. I know as a manager, so what I got to manage all these part-time schedules and people are shifting jobs is a minefield, but I think that it’s something that is worth talking about. So this idea of phased retirement, so you’ve got the legacy retirement, you’ve got the phased retirement. And then the third thing I think is that retirement is just a bad word because it doesn’t actually define what’s happening anymore. It’s an outmoded word. We should retire retirement. I originally talked about the unretired, like the undead, but I think it’s more like we should just call people workers as long as they’re working.

Jordan: What would you say now, not only from your own point of view and your own experience, but incorporating everything you’ve learned in the course of researching this article to people who are listening right now who are professionals in their thirties and forties, and they’ve been presumably paying into CPP and buying into work pension plans, but as you pointed out earlier, may have not thought much beyond that. What would you tell them?

Cathrin Bradbury: Gee, that’s a good question. I mean, my son is 32 and my daughter is 30 and they get irritated with me when I talk about being disappointed in my retirement pension. My son just says, well, I don’t have that. I won’t have that. It doesn’t exist for me. And I think that’s the reality for a lot of people in their thirties in the workforce. They’re not paying into company retirement plans often. A lot of people are doing the kind of work where there just isn’t any kind of pension set up. So I think let’s go back to that financial literacy conversation, and I’d encourage people to really look at their financial situation, try and do the long-term planning, not the short-term and the medium, but the long-term. What does it look like? What are they going to need? Again, my son would say, I’m going to need to work in forever, and I’m not sure if that’s the case or not, but I think that kind of financial literacy and looking way out as far as you can into the future and trying to see what your life looks like and what you could start to do now.

Jordan: Catherin, thank you so much for this. It’s been a fascinating conversation and I wish you all the best in your quasi retirement.

Cathrin Bradbury: Thank you so much. That was a good conversation.

Jordan: Catherin Bradbury, former journalist, then retired journalist now sort of journalist again, and that’s the way we’re all going to do it one day. That was The Big Story. For more from us, you can head to The Big Story podcast.ca. You can of course find us on Twitter at The Big Story fpn. If you’d like to suggest a topic for this podcast or even a financial topic for our Sister spinoff podcast in this economy, you can do so by emailing us hello at The Big Story podcast.ca or by calling us and sending a voicemail 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5. The Big Story is available in absolutely every podcast player, and if it’s in yours and you haven’t clicked subscribe or follow or whatever it is it wants you to do yet, please do and consider also rating this show or leaving us a review. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow and every day because I’ll never retire.