Will your retirement date be a surprise?

Sun Life Financial assistant vice-president Kevin Press has penned a retirement planning article carrying a provocative headline: “Your retirement date will probably be a surprise.”

Published at brighterlife.ca, Press cited the most recent survey of Sun Life’s Canadian Unretirement Index and its startling finding that only 31% (fewer than a third) of Canadian retirees said they stopped work on the date they had actually planned. This attracted a fair bit of social media commentary, including my own predictable quip attributed to deceased Beatle John Lennon in his final album: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

At one level, Press is of course correct. The precise date of retirement isn’t always a variable under one’s complete personal control. In these days of corporate cost-cutting, there’s little guarantee that one’s employment in a particular firm will last to the exact and convenient day of your projected retirement. One in four said they left their jobs because an employer decided that was the way it was going to be. The decision was forced by the employer for 10% of those surveyed, while another 15% took their employers up on their offers of early retirement.

But even if they love you and are willing to throw frequent raises and bonuses your way, your health may not co-operate. Sun Life found a whopping 29% reported their work lives ended prematurely because of “personal health or medical reasons.” Another 2% left not because of their own health but because of the deteriorating health of a loved one for which they had to care. Adding 14% more who experienced unexpectedly early retirement for other “unspecified” reasons, that’s 69% who did not finish their career as they had originally planned or expected.

This is all interesting data but should not be viewed as a particularly disturbing trend. Retirement planning is as much an art as an exact science and any financial planner will tell you that, even if employers and health are in your favour, there are many variables that will change the exact finish line. Stock markets will vary, as will interest rates, currencies and other factors. Even the related concept I call “Findependence Day” is a moving target: if markets go on a tear the last few years before your planned departure from the workplace, your liberation from work may happen a few years earlier than it might otherwise have been. If markets languish in an extended bear market, you’ll probably decide to hang in there a few extra years, again assuming robust health and a willing employer.

In fact, a Sun Life ebook authored by Press quantified this in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Based on the traditional retirement age of 65, Sun Life surveyed Canadians as to what they thought they’d be doing at age 66. In 2008, 51% thought they’d be retired by that age, and in 2009, 55% thought so. This plummeted to just 28% in 2010 and has hovered between 27% and 30% in the subsequent years to 2013.

At the same time, the percentage who thought they’d still be working full time at 66 rose from just 16% in 2008 to 27% in 2013. Two-thirds of those expecting to be working past 65 said they‘ll do so because they “need to” financially. By 2010, the average age at which Canadians expected to retire had jumped from 64 (in 2009) to 68 by 2010 and 69 in 2011. As confidence has returned, this average expected retirement age has since fallen back to 66.

Press’s ebook can be found here, and includes links to several calculators that should make your rough retirement date less of a surprise.

Jonathan Chevreau is editor-at-large at MoneySense. He blogs at findependenceday.com and here.

About Jonathan Chevreau

As MoneySense’s Investing-Editor-at-Large, he is also author of Findependence Day and co-author of Victory Lap Retirement. Reach him at [email protected], where he is the founder of Financial Independence Hub.

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