Retired Money

By Jonathan Chevreau on January 21, 2026
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

By Jonathan Chevreau on January 21, 2026
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Canadians are living longer, making longevity risk one of retirement’s biggest challenges. Here’s how longevity income funds like Purpose’s LPF aim to provide income for life.

Retirement planning seems to involve waging a battle between the extremes of running out of money before you run out of life, or running out of life before you run out of money. The latter possibility rarely seems to occur to people but was aptly described by FIRE blogger Bob Lai of Tawcan in a recent blog on the topic of finding a balance between spending and saving: What if you run out of life?

Or, as U.S. retirement guru Wade Pfau recently put it, “A retirement income plan should be based on planning to live, rather than planning to die.” The Michael James blog recently highlighted that quote.

Retirement is usually about planning for unexpected longevity, often exacerbated by inflation. After all, a 65-year-old Canadian woman can expect to live to 87—but there’s an 11% chance she’ll live to 100.

That fact was cited by Fraser Stark, President of Longevity Retirement Platform at Toronto-based Purpose Investments Inc., at a September presentation to the Retirement Club, which we described this past summer. Stark’s presentation was compelling enough that I decided to invest a chunk of my recently launched RRIF into the Purpose Longevity Pension Fund (LPF). A version of Stark’s presentation may be available on YouTube, or you can get the highlights from the Purpose brochure.

Stark confirms that LPF, launched in 2021, is currently the only retail mutual fund or ETF offering longevity-protected income in Canada. Note that LPF is not an ETF but a traditional mutual fund. It aims to generate retirement income for life; to do so, it has created what it describes as a “unique longevity risk pooling structure.”

This reflects what noted finance professor Moshe Milevsky has long described as “tontine thinking.” See my Retired Money column on this from 2022 after Guardian Capital LP announced three new tontine products under the “GuardPath” brand. However, a year ago Guardian closed the funds, so is effectively out of the tontine business. Apparently, it’s a tough slog competing with life annuities.

Here’s the full list of wealth advisors and full-service brokers that offer it. Included are full-service brokerages (and/or their discount brokerage units) of the big banks, including Bank of Montreal, National Bank, and recently Royal Bank on a........

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