Aug 11: BEST FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE

August 11, 2025

Retirement `dashboard’ would make planning income from multiple sources easier: CD Howe

Those of us who have punched our last timeclock know that our retirement income comes from multiple sources – unlike our working days, when there was only one paycheque.

This makes retirement planning much more complicated.

Fortunately, reports Wealth Professional, the C.D. Howe Institute has come up with an idea to help untangle multi-stream income planning – a “national pension dashboard.”

“With the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans, many Canadians are left with a fragmented picture of their retirement savings, especially as accounts are scattered across financial institutions,” the article begins.

In other words, instead of having one pension from a defined benefit plan, folks may have small chunks of money growing away in several defined contribution/registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) pots.

This, the team at C.D. Howe notes, means that “few people have a clear sense of how their savings will translate into sustainable income, fueling anxiety about financial security.”

Enter the idea of a national, digital pension dashboard.

“A national pension dashboard could be a game changer by bringing together all retirement savings and entitlements into one digital platform where users would be able to see their Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security, workplace pensions, RRSPs, and other savings,” the article tells us.

Similar tools are already in place in “Australia, Sweden and the Netherlands,” the article adds.

“How can Canadians make optimal decisions if they don’t have a straightforward way to see how savings and entitlements translate into monthly income?” asks senior fellow Kathryn Bush, a member of the C.D. Howe Institute Pension Policy Council and former chair of the Association for Canadian Pension Management’s National Policy Committee, in the Wealth Professional article. “We need a modern and accessible tool that gives them an accurate picture of their expected retirement income – without needing to be an expert,” she continues.

While there are tools provided by the Canada Revenue Agency to give estimates of your federal government retirement benefits, these tools “require manual input and don’t consolidate data from all sources,” the article adds.

The dashboard, the article adds, might have additional benefits – such as reuniting members with lost pots of retirement savings from a long-ago job, or the opposite – connecting pension plans with long-lost members.

Bush tells Wealth Professional that the dashboard could be built using a “real-time data retrieval model” linking to existing systems, rather than building a massive new centralized database.

“A pension dashboard that is cost-effective, secure, and accessible could be life changing,” Bush tells Wealth Professional. “Canadians need a clear roadmap for retirement – and the time to build it is now.” 

If you, like many of us, have little bits and pieces of pension savings in separate RRSP accounts, there’s an easy way to stitch your savings quilt together. The Saskatchewan Pension Plan allows you to transfer any amount into SPP from other non-locked-in RRSPs. This will simplify your life in retirement, as you’ll cut down on the number of sources of income you’ll receive.

SPP does also offer a stand-alone calculator to help you get a better picture of the future value of your account. The Wealth Calculator offers an easy way to produce an estimate.

Check out SPP today!

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Wealth Professional

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