WHITE PAPER

The Retirement Urgency Gap

Why Having a Plan in Your 40s, 50s, and 60s Is No Longer Optional

Ilan Zor  |  Wealth Advisor, CIBC Wood Gundy  |  May, 2026

Hope Is Not a Retirement Strategy

I spend a lot of time talking to people who are smart, successful, and genuinely busy. They have built careers, raised families, run businesses, and done all the right things by most measures. But when it comes to retirement, a surprising number of them are operating on hope rather than a plan.

That is not a criticism. Life gets in the way. The future feels abstract when you are in the middle of it. And frankly, the financial industry has not always made it easy or comfortable to ask the basic questions without feeling judged or sold to.

This paper is not about judgment. It is about urgency. Because the gap between where most people think they are financially and where they actually are, especially as retirement approaches, is one of the most consequential and least discussed issues in personal finance today.

The cost of not having a plan is not just financial. It is the anxiety of not knowing. And that cost compounds, just like money does.

The Dangerous Comfort of “Doing Fine”

Here is what I hear more than almost anything else in initial conversations: “We’re doing okay. We have some savings, the house has gone up, and we both have decent incomes. We should be fine.”

That statement might be true. But “should be fine” is not a plan. It is an assumption, and assumptions have a poor track record when it comes to retirement.

The problem is not that people are being reckless. The problem is that they are measuring the wrong things. A house that has appreciated is not liquid income in retirement. A healthy RRSP balance looks very different once you model out 25 to 30 years of withdrawals, inflation, healthcare costs, and taxes. And “decent incomes” stop the moment you retire.

What makes this especially difficult is that the consequences are not immediate. You do not feel the gap today. You feel it at 68 when you are making decisions about whether to delay a trip because you are not sure what you can afford, or at 72 when a health event forces a lifestyle change you were not prepared for.

The time to close that gap is not at 65. It is now.

Why Your 40s Are the Most Important Decade

If you are in your 40s, you are in what I consider the most strategically important phase of your financial life. You likely have 20 or more years before a traditional retirement age, which sounds like a long time. It is not.

Those years are the compound growth window. Every dollar you invest now has the most time to work. Every structural decision you make: how you hold assets, how you split income with a spouse, how you protect yourself against the wrong risks, has the longest runway to pay off. Conversely, every year you wait to get organized closes that window a little more.

In your 40s you are also, for most people, at or near peak earning years. You have more capacity to make meaningful contributions than you likely did in your 30s. But lifestyle costs have also grown: kids, mortgage, travel, aging parents, and it is easy to feel like there is never quite enough left over to make a real difference.

That feeling is worth examining carefully. Because often, what looks like a cash flow problem is really a prioritization problem and an optimization problem. It is not just about saving more. It is about saving smarter, structuring better, and making sure your dollars are doing the most work possible.

The 40s are also when I see the biggest divergence between people who end up with real financial freedom and those who end up constrained. The ones who get ahead are not always the highest earners. They are the ones who got clear on what they wanted retirement to look like and reverse-engineered a plan to get there.

The 40s are not too early to plan for retirement. They are the last comfortable time to do it.

The 50s: When Urgency Becomes Real

If your 40s are the opportunity decade, your 50s are when the math starts to matter in a different way. Retirement is no longer abstract. For many people, it is 10 to 15 years away, which is simultaneously closer than it feels and further than you think.

This is the decade where a lot of people try to “catch up.” And that is entirely possible if done deliberately. But catching up requires knowing what you are catching up to. Without a clear target: an actual retirement income number, a clear picture of your assets, liabilities, expected CPP, pension if you have one, and realistic spending assumptions, you are accelerating without knowing where the road ends.

Your 50s are also when some of the biggest financial decisions of your life tend to cluster: kids finishing school and potentially needing support, helping aging parents, peak mortgage pay-down years, potential business sales or succession planning, and career transitions. Each of these can be a significant financial event in either direction, and without a plan, they tend to be reactive rather than strategic.

I also see something in the 50s that I want to name directly: the tendency to anchor on a number. People decide they need a million dollars, or two million, or “enough to live on the interest,” and they focus entirely on hitting that number without thinking through what the number actually needs to do for them. The target matters far less than understanding what income you need, when you need it, and how you will generate it in a tax-efficient way across potentially three decades of retirement.

Your 50s are the decade to get that clarity. Not the 60s.

The 60s: The Transition Is Happening Whether You’re Ready or Not

By the time most people reach their 60s, the questions have shifted from abstract to immediate. When do I retire? Can I afford to? What do I do with my RRSP before 71? When should I take CPP? Should I downsize? What does my income actually look like in year one of retirement, and year fifteen?

These are answerable questions. But they require planning, and ideally planning that started earlier. If you are in your 60s and have not done this work yet, the answer is not panic, it is urgency. There is still meaningful work to be done, and the decisions you make now will have a real impact on the quality and security of your retirement.

One of the most underappreciated issues in the 60s is the sequence of returns risk: the risk that a significant market decline in the early years of retirement, when you are drawing down assets, can permanently impair your portfolio in a way that a decline at any other time would not. This is one of many reasons that arriving at retirement with a plan, an actual drawdown strategy, not just a savings pile, is so important.

I also want to address something that comes up constantly in conversations with people in their 60s: the fear of getting it wrong. Of making a decision about CPP timing, or RRSP conversion, or asset allocation, and then finding out it was not optimal. That fear is understandable. But the greater risk, by far, is not making decisions at all, drifting into retirement without a structure, and then scrambling to course-correct when the margin for error has narrowed considerably.

The 60s are not too late. But they are when the cost of delay becomes most visible.

Retirement is not an event. It is a 25-to-30-year financial project. Treat it like one.

What a Real Plan Actually Looks Like

I want to be specific about this, because the word “plan” gets used a lot and often means very little. A real retirement plan is not a brokerage statement and a vague intention. It is a living document that answers at minimum the following questions:

• What does your retirement income need to cover, year by year, including both essential expenses and the lifestyle you actually want?
• When and how will you draw on each income source: CPP, OAS, pension, RRSP/RRIF, TFSA, non-registered assets, real estate?
• How is your portfolio structured to manage both growth and risk as you transition from accumulation to decumulation?
• What is your tax strategy across retirement? Not just this year, but across the full arc of drawdowns?
• What is your plan for healthcare costs, long-term care, and the financial impact of a major health event?
• What happens to your finances if one spouse dies, or if you need to support a family member unexpectedly?
• What does your estate plan look like, and does it reflect what you actually want?

Most people can answer some of these questions partially. Very few have worked through all of them with any rigor. And the ones that feel least urgent are usually the ones with the highest consequences if ignored.

I am not suggesting this is simple. It requires honest conversations, good information, and usually a professional who can model scenarios and stress-test assumptions. But it is entirely achievable. And the people who do this work consistently tell me that the outcome is not just financial security, it is peace of mind. The kind that lets you live your life today without the background noise of financial uncertainty about tomorrow.

The One Thing I Would Ask You to Do

If you have read this far, something in here likely resonated. Maybe you are in your 40s and you know you have been putting this off. Maybe you are in your 50s and you realize the “we should be fine” story is not actually a plan. Maybe you are in your 60s and you want to make sure you get the next chapter right.

Whatever the case, the one thing I would ask is simple: have the conversation. Not with a salesperson. With an advisor who is willing to look at your full picture honestly, ask the uncomfortable questions, and tell you what they actually see, including the gaps.

The financial industry has a tendency to overcomplicate things in ways that serve the industry more than the client. Good advice is not that complicated. It is honest, it is structured, it is personal, and it starts with understanding what you actually want your life to look like and working backwards from there.

That conversation is what I do. Not because I think everyone needs an advisor for everything, but because I have seen too many times what happens when capable, intelligent people arrive at retirement without a real plan. And I have also seen what is possible when they arrive with one.

The gap between those two outcomes is significant. And closing it starts now.

Ilan Zor  |  Wealth Advisor, CIBC Wood Gundy

If you’d like to have a conversation about where you stand and what a real plan looks like for your situation, I’d welcome the call. No pitch. Just an honest conversation.

416.861.8751  ilan.zor@cibc.com

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