Frederick Vettese has written good books for Canadians who are retired or near retirement.  His latest, The Rule of 30, is for Canadians still more than a decade from retirement.  He observes that your ability to save for retirement varies over time, so it doesn’t make sense to try to save some fixed percentage of your income throughout your working life.  He lays out a set of rules for how much you should save using what he calls “The Rule of 30.” Vettese’s Rule of 30 is that Canadians should save 30% of their income toward retirement minus mortgage payments or rent and “extraordinary, short-term, necessary expenses, like daycare.”  The idea is for young people to save less when they’re under the pressure of child care costs and housing payments.  The author goes through a number of simulations to test how his rule would perform in different circumstances.  He is careful to base these simulations on reasonable assumptions. My approach is to count anything ...

I’ve seen some complaining that government benefits (like CPP) aren’t keeping up with inflation the way they are supposed to.  Some people have substantive complaints about how the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is calculated, but others are simply unaware of how CPI changes get applied. News reports generally just compare today’s CPI to what it was a year ago.  Lately, we’ve seen some big jumps in inflation.  People see that these inflation increases are larger than the CPI adjustments to their government benefits.  However, for government benefits and other CPI-indexed figures, the government averages CPI numbers from November of one year to the end of October of the following year.   A CPI adjustment that takes place in January is based on CPI figures from 14 months earlier to 2 months earlier (and how much that average increased over the previous year’s average).  This creates about an 8-month delay in applying CPI increases. So, assuming inflation moderate...