Agreed. The headline is extremely misleading clickbait.
This piece is reporting on what people think they need, not what they actually need (which is highly context dependent), which by itself isn’t very interesting.
The real story is the huge divergence between what people say they need vs what they’re actually targeting, but that’s not news, we’ve known about it for decades (basically every since the defined benefit pension plan ended).
The headline is extremely misleading clickbait. This piece is reporting on what people think they need, not what they actually need
The title says “Canadians expect they need $1.7M to retire”. The title says exactly what the article says, and incorrectly claiming it to be misleading diminishes the conversation here.
And the first paragraph of the article uses the word “believe”, which has a much softer connotation.
The subject line strongly implies that Canadians did the math and “expect” to need $1.7M for retirement.
When you look at the actual article, it’s simply an opinion survey reporting what people said, answers for which could be the result of anything from a rigorous financial plan all the way to a finger in the air guess.
So the headline implies a great deal more certainty in the quoted figures than is actually indicated in the article or supportable by the data.
In short: no, I stand by my claim the article headline is absolutely misleading.
I feel like you’re taking a very specific interpretation of the word “expect”. I don’t believe most people would interpret “expect” as being the outcome of crunching the numbers, so I still disagree that the headline is misleading. Still, I appreciate your explanation of your thinking.
