I am obsessed with net worth and money. In a good way.
It of course does not define who you are — just look at all the jackasses who are super rich and aren’t decent human beings because they think their money protects them. In a certain way, I will concede that they are right — they can buy their way out of being a human, but at what cost?
Anyway, back to the point of this post — NET WORTH.
Here are all my net worth roundups by the way if you are interested; I do them monthly & yearly.
I also track my net worth, budgeting, spending and money LIFE here with The Budgeting Tool.
I always read about net worth for Americans but there is nothing about Canadians, so I thought I’d mosey on over and create some charts so you can see what it all looks like:
Source: StatsCan
As you can see, the average net worth by age for Canadians peaks at their peak earning years from 55 to 65, and then goes down as they start to head into retirement. Perhaps early retirement in there as well.
Source: StatsCan
I have to also say that in retirement you also need less money than you think. No more expenditures on style, fashion (no really, I am expecting it so that is why I am enjoying all the style & shopping now in my 30s!), and traveling gets harder.
You aren’t really able to walk as far or as long as when you were younger, so honestly, you won’t have as much energy for a lot of these grand plans in retirement.
Enough about that.
This is how it breaks down by province:
ALBERTA
BRITISH COLUMBIA
MANITOBA
NEW BRUNSWICK
NEWFOUNDLAND
ONTARIO
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND (PEI)
SASKATCHEWAN
NOVA SCOTIA
And looking at major cities, it looks like this:
MONTREAL, QC
QUEBEC CITY, QC
TORONTO, ON
VANCOUVER, BC
WINNIPEG, MB
CALGARY, AB
EDMONTON, AB
TWO OBSERVATIONS
The bigger cities and provinces have higher net worths
Stands to reason. Montreal, Toronto, these are all bigger cities that make more money, and have higher salaries.
In the less-populated provinces, you also see lower net worths overall.
I would have thought with MORE people there would be lower salaries as there is more competition, but it sort of makes sense the other way as well — it attracts companies, executives and higher net worths if it is a bigger city like Toronto or Vancouver.
And yet….
Montreal surprised me at $900,000 as their net worth peak
$900,000 was the biggest average net worth in that peak earning age range for salaries. I thought it would be higher, closer to a million.
But we are closer to Winnipeg’s net worth, which I find to be a smaller more mid-sized city.
Montreal has a population of 1.75 million people, and Winnipeg is at 700,000 or less than half of that.
Just strange. I wonder why that is.
Is it accounting for the fact that French is a language barrier? That people mostly gravitate towards Vancouver and Toronto?
So, what do you think?
Update: July 12th 2019
A great reader commented with a link to another StatsCan page I did not know existed, that very simply lists out the net worth medians.
As I did not have those numbers they are using to generate these files, I was using the averages of the averages on the other StatsCan page, to haphazard net worths.
Here they are, simply via StatsCan directly for 2016:
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Can’t get enough? I have all of my Canadian Net Worth Series posts here.
