Retiring without a pension? How to generate retirement income in Canada + MORE Jun 1st

It’s a question that challenges conventional thinking: Can you do something and then, somehow, do it again later for the first time? You can if that “first time” involves buying a home.

There are several supports and programs for first-time buyers in Canada, including the Home Buyers’ Plan, the new first home savings account (FHSA)—launched in 2023—and the First-Time Home Buyer Incentive. First-time home buyers may also be eligible for land transfer tax rebates.

Chances are, if you’ve used one of these incentives in the past, you won’t need to a second time. However, there are a variety of reasons you may want to participate in a first-time home buyer program again—and you might just qualify.

“It truly depends on the program you are asking about,” says Denise Laframboise, a mortgage broker with LaframboiseMortgage.ca in Brooklin, Ont. “Each program has its own criteria for [qualifying as a] first-time home buyer. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all across every program and every provincial or municipal incentive…

A silver lining of the pandemic is that work has become more flexible than ever—leading more Canadians to take “workations” or relocate to other countries for weeks or months at a time. It’s more than just a change of scenery. Planned carefully, working abroad can mean seeing the world affordably.

If you’re intrigued by the idea of working very remotely, here’s what you need to know, with financial and lifestyle tips from those who have been doing it since the dawn of digital nomadism. 

Living the digital nomad life: Can you take your job on the road?

Nora Dunn, a content creator and former financial planner, is a long-time nomad. In 2006, she sold everything she owned—including her busy financial planning practice in Toronto—and went travelling. Burnt out from work, she realized she was unwilling to wait until retirement to pursue her lifelong dream of travel. What if, when the time finally came, she couldn’t for some reason? “It felt like a greater cost to me than the cost of selling everything I own,” says Dunn, who shares her adventures and travel tips on her blog, The Professional Hobo…

There once was a time when retirement planning was relatively straightforward for most Canadians. You put in the years at work and then, somewhere around your 65th birthday, your employer and co-workers sent you off into retirement with a small celebration, maybe a gift or two, and a reasonable, predictable pension that would anchor your finances in the years ahead.

Those days are long gone. The number of Canadians covered by some form of pension-savings program at work—from the gold standard of defined benefit (DB) plans to the more recent shared-risk model of group RRSPs—has been in steady decline for decades.

Where did all the employer pension plans go?

Workplace pension plans are in decline as employers wrestle with costs, investment risk (in the case of DB pensions) and the trend toward greater reliance on contract workers. In the 30 years between 1989 and 2019, the percentage of total Canadian employees covered by registered pension plans fell from 43% to 37%, according to the federal Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI)…