By Vickram Agarwal on February 19, 2026 Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

What replacing my tires taught me about planning for retirement

By Vickram Agarwal on February 19, 2026 Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Preparing to support yourself in your elder years is a cultural norm in Canada that newcomers must adapt to. Here’s how.

I seldom think about retirement. I rarely, if ever, think about replacing my car tires either—two major Canadian preoccupations that, for most of my life, did not occupy much space in my mind. And yet, as I’ve come to realize, both forms of “re-tirement” are inevitable, expensive, and far easier to manage when you see them coming.

When my family and I moved to Canada seven years ago, we spent months driving through neighbourhoods trying to decide where we wanted to build our life. Every time I got excited about a quiet street, a peaceful cluster of homes, or a beautifully maintained community, my wife would gently remind me that I was admiring retirement communities. It happened so often that I began to joke that my ideal home would be across the street from one. As it turns out, that is exactly where we landed. We became friends with our elderly neighbors, admired the calm rhythm of their days, and began to understand something that had not been obvious to me before: retirement here was not an abstract concept, but rather something people had spent decades deliberately preparing for.

Where I come from—I grew up in multiple countries, including India and in the Middle East—retirement exists, but it is not the organizing principle of financial life. The emphasis is on stability, on supporting family, on building something durable enough that life can evolve naturally rather than stop abruptly. You save because it is prudent. You invest because it creates opportunity. But you do not necessarily orient every financial decision around a distant, fixed endpoint called retirement.

Canada is different. Here, retirement planning is not a suggestion. It is an expectation, reinforced through employer matching........

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