Of all the people who come to us in need of financial help in Red Deer, there are none more heart-wrenching than senior couples whose golden years in retirement deteriorated into a tangled web of debt and declining income.
While bankruptcy is a viable solution for them, our seniors grew up in an age where paying your debts was a matter or personal ethics. Debts that could not be met were a sign of disgrace and shame. Yet despite the fact that many seniors abhor the thought of bankruptcy, the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy in Canada (OSB) tells us people 55 and over are the fastest growing demographic group declaring bankruptcies in Canada.
The same can be said for senior citizens in our neighbor to the south. With decades of stagnant income for many average Canadians, saving for retirement has become difficult at best. Indeed, rather than saving for the future, many of us find ourselves borrowing more and more just to maintain our life styles.
The more debt you carry with you into your retirement years, the more you place yourself at risk. Many Canadian seniors are getting into financial difficulty because they resort more and more to credit cards to supplement insufficient retirement income. This is a recipe for disaster.
If you are approaching retirement and you are concerned about the size of your “nest egg”, do not hesitate to seek out financial help in Red Deer right now, while your income may still be large enough to reduce your pre-retirement debt load.
You can meet with an approved credit counselor or a bankruptcy trustee licensed in Red Deer for help in developing a personal budget. Both offer free initial consultations and despite what their titles imply, bankruptcy trustees can do more for you than manage a personal bankruptcy filing.
Personal budgets allow you to control expenses to be able to reduce present debt to more manageable levels and possibly to increase retirement savings as well. The process is simple on paper but difficult in practice. It often involves confronting the painful but necessary realization that to avoid bankruptcy in your retirement years, you may have to modify your life style to learn to live with less. However, this does not mean you have only a life of deprivation to look forward to. It may mean opening yourself to the possibility of learning to enjoy life’s simpler, and far less expensive, pleasures.
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