Quote:
Originally Posted by Sylvanfan
Furthermore, only two in 10 employees in the private sector have a company pension to help pay for expenses in their golden years. At the same time, the number of retirees is expected to swell as more baby boomers reach retirement age.
Thats been a problem for me. Working as a draftsman, which I admit now was a terrible career choice...I had one year out of 14 where an employer did anything to give me incentive to save for retirement. I actually had a written contract for 5% of your income RRSP matching to a maximum amount of $3500 a year. Well the first year they did it...the second year the economy was going bad and although they had money they pulled the program and folded the company the next year because two guys with massive ego's couldn't reach any type of agreement. So in 14 years of working for private companies...I've had my employers give me $3500 to help with retirement.
Maybe if there was more incentives from governments for private companies to set up more RRSP matching or something to get people to build their own pension it may help out. I'd be a lot less discouraged about investing if I was getting some help. I might make the effort to try and stretch my annual RRSP contributions from 13k a year to 16 if I knew it would net me another 4 from my employer. As is stressing over this...I will end up dead when I'm 65.
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I think another thing you need to take a look at is: What are you doing with the money once it goes into your RRSP? Do you have a good balance of cash, funds, stocks, bonds, etc?
The reason I ask is that if you've got the majority of your money tied up in a GIC (for example) you won't make much even at maturity. Its obviously a safer bet than stocks, but if you educate yourself on good quality buys you can get your RRSP portfolio to far outperform the low-risk options.