The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Does it Cost More to Be Single in Canada?

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Does it cost more to be single? Renée Sylvestre-Williams, author of "The Singles Tax: No-Nonsense Financial Advice for Solo Earners," takes us through the ways 30 per cent of Canadian households pay more for everything from housing costs, to groceries, and even travel. Then, while the cost of living rises, we look into how people are faring in their everyday lives in the current economy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When TVO first went on air in 1970, the idea that public television could have a positive impact on learning was visionary. From beloved kid shows that sparked the joy of learning, pioneering must-see favorites exploring society and culture and series that made navigating life on Ontario a little easier, TVO's commitment to lifelong learning has stood the test of time. Renew your support now and help preserve this legacy. Visit TVO.comme slash 2026 renewal to make your donation today. Have you been doing mental math at the store and putting some groceries back on the shelf? Maybe even stretching meals a bit further so you'll have to buy less? If so, you are not the only one.

According to a recent survey from Spurgel, an insolvency and debt relief firm, or than 60% of respondents said they've skipped meals or reduced portions because of financial pressure in the past six months. Over half used buy now, pay later line of credit or payday loans to buy groceries. And two out of five Canadians delayed paying a bill so they could buy food. And that's just groceries. Add housing, bills, childcare, and you've got a lot of Canadians worried about the cost of living. That pressure is especially acute for Canadians living alone. The data shows single people pay 66% more in rent and 27% more in household expenses,

meaning things like phone bills, internet and basic supplies. So, is life actually getting less affordable? We look at how the economy is treating Canadians and how many are trying to make ends meet. This is the rundy. Back in December, Abacus data found that 67% of Canadians said that the cost of living was the worst they could remember. Nearly two-thirds said that it should be the top priority for the federal government. So, what's the situation right now and how hard is it to get by, let alone get ahead? Renee Sylvester Williams is a financial journalist and author of the singles tax,

no-nonsense financial advice for solo earners. And Aaron Kelly is the CEO of Advanced Symbolics Inc. Christine Bezzi is the founder and CEO of Untangle Money. Great to have all three of you on the program. How are you all doing? Great. Great. Great.

Great to have you. All right. Aaron, we're going to start with you. Take us through some of the research AI Pulitzer Pauly found on affordability in this economy. People are struggling. Yeah, exactly. So we did a research here, and we looked at how many people said that they're having financial hardship. And when Polly divides it, she divides it up into major struggle, somewhat struggling, not really struggling, or I'm fine. And I think what was most amazing, first off, is how much that percentage of people saying it's a major struggle has grown since 2021. So you see in 2021, 8.7% of people said they're saying that percentage of people saying it's a major struggle has grown since 2021. So you see in 2021, 8.7% of people said they're were having a major struggle, and now it's over a quarter, 27 percent major. And that was COVID when we're talking in 2020.

Right. So, and I don't know. And, you know, we'd have to go and look at it more. Did the COVID subsidies help people? Otherwise, it would have been worse. I mean, obviously it would have been worse because we were having a pandemic. But you see how just it just really grows. And when more than a quarter of your population says every month, it's a major struggle,

that's a crisis. I mean, that is a crisis. All right. Well, Christine, with this research, does it align with what you're seeing? with your clients these days when we're talking about major struggles? 100%. You know, what we look at is on an after-tax, after-dedduction basis, and we make your budget square, and then we fill it up with the things that you spend your money on, and we do fixed costs, or we call it committed money, and then we know from research that

there's amount you need for variable costs, so food, clothes, gifts, all the things and everything else. And then what's left over is what you can put towards future money, retirement savings, and things like that. And we see these costs just compressing your flex money or your variable spend and your ability to save for retirement. It's just, it is very hard and that the square isn't keeping up with the demands for the costs and the spending. And one of the things that we talk about pretty, that's really important to know and it's research back is that with your variable spending, food, clothes, gifts, all the things,

and everything else, you need to get joy from this. As human beings in the middle income, if we do not get joy, we will do something called revenge spending. Okay. So we can do three to five years tight. So this is why I think it's interesting when we tell young people that they should live like they're a student for as long as possible. We really can't do it for more than three to five years.

And then you will actually revenge spent and take away a lot of the hard work you've done. You might go into debt. It's really important. It is really hard for people. I'm marking the words joy on my paper. People underlined here. What does joy look like when we're talking about joy? It moves the dial for you internally.

So it looks different for everyone. And it was interesting. it is a very tight band. So maybe Renee really like spending on food, maybe Aaron really like spending on clothes, but the percentage of spend that goes to all these things is very similar. It's just the categories inside that that change.

And it needs to feel like you're doing something that is important to you, right? So, you know, if we look at tropes, it could be the coffee, it could be the avocado toast, it could be the eyelashes and nails that women are constantly criticized for. but it really needs to move the dial for what is important to you and it changes over time. All right, Renee, I'll get you to add on that.

I completely agree with everything because the thing is like there's always this, the conversation is changing, but for decades and Christine, you let me know as well. The conversation has been like budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, right? And that goes back to revenge spending. Somebody cannot live on a stringent budget for months or years at a time because what happens is you get no joy, you're deeply unhappy, you spend a lot of time very conscious about your spending, and then next thing you know, you are revenge spending. Revenge spending became a very popular term in what year two or year three of the pandemic? Because people were just so tired of, one, being indoors a lot,

especially in Ontario. There was a lot of financial stress about, you know, because some people weren't working, some, you know, there was Serb and all of those things, that people, just started spending in order to feel something. All right, Renee, we're going to move from revenge spending. We're going to talk about sacrifices. So, Aaron, what did Polly find in terms of what people are sacrificing to get by right now? Well, some people are sacrificing very deeply. I mean, we're beyond the fluff at this point.

So if we look at families, families are sacrificing vacations. Number two is saving, saving for retirement. Parents aren't saving. Now, what I found interesting in the right here, you'll see we have the single spending, the singles are continuing to save. And I think that's probably because they don't have that safety net. Maybe there's a false sense of security with couples, right? But so couples, number two, savings is going out the door.

And then you go down the list, subscriptions and gifts. Both groups giving up gifts. For singles, that's number one. That's going out. Gifts and then subscriptions. And so, yeah, I mean, people are already giving up those joyful elements that Christine mentioned. and we're into basic things like television.

Right. All right. Renee, help us interpret this. With your research based on the cost of living for Canadians who are single, how do you look at this? Honestly, when I saw those slides, a lot of it wasn't a surprise to me, right? But the fact that people are giving up savings, I would agree with you. I think possibly it might be a case of couples who are like, especially if you've got younger children, like, okay, we're just going to do this hopefully short-term sacrifice.

and then, you know, longer term, where ideally we should be reaching our peak financial earnings years, be able to catch up. The fact that single people are still saving tells me a couple things. I think a lot of single people realize that they do have to save no matter what the situation is because there's those costs down the road, right? Retirement, you know, what if you're ill down the line and all of those things, long-term care for yourself. And again, I would also add probably somewhere down the line as, parents get older, as a single person, you may be the sole caregiver for them. So you have to

have that cushion. So the fact that single people are still saving reassures me, but also kind of like the vacation thing, that tells me like a lot of people are not getting that ability to, you know, get some stress relief, walk away from work. And that work-life balance concerns me a lot. Okay. Well, Christine, I want to get you in on there. What advice are you giving clients right now about spending versus cutting to get by. Yeah, so we protect that flexible spending, even though it may be harder to spend. We call it the do-it-all years.

Most couples with young families in Canada have these do-it-all years. Sometimes it's with elder care as well, where there just isn't actually, there's not enough money to do it all. And so what we look at is, in some ways you can think it's depressing, but I think it's nice to have at least some options,

we look at retiring later, having a part-time job in retirement. We really focus on something that you might enjoy doing in part-time and then potentially downsizing or the Golden Girls Retirement, which isn't for everyone. But it is a trend we see in all countries other than the U.S. increasing. For people who aren't familiar? Yeah. Golden Girls' Retirement.

It's mainly women who outlive their partners or are single to start with. you know, collecting their resources together and owning or renting a home with other women. And they say the, you know, maintenance goes down because you're not the only one cleaning. They say there's

always somebody there. And then there's a built-in social life. So people who like it really like it, some people really don't like it. So it depends on the person. I got to ask. How realistic is something like that? Surprisingly realistic. The housing chapter of my book is the longest thing.

and there's a whole section on sort of that communal community housing situation. And it's been done. Not abroad. So there was that whole meme that kind of went viral of seven women in China who bought a house. Yeah, right? And all of that stuff. But there's Clarence Commons in Toronto where about six or seven people pool their resources, got a mortgage with the insurance, and bought a place.

And you can read it in the book, but they sat down and had a very transparent conversation about finances and how much they're willing to spend on renovations and repairs and all that stuff. There is, I forget, the Radish in California, where they pool their resources, bought land, and there are multiple houses on it, right? Families, kids, and all that. They're actually selling it right now. A compound. Compound of sorts. And then there is an association called Single Women Living Together, which provides support for lower income women, mostly in Ontario, and what it is, it is a resource for women who are looking to partner up with other women and rent. So these are all options.

And people love a Golden Girls scenario. Fair enough, yes. But you are right. It is complicated because when talking to all of these people, you have to be willing to be emotionally and financially transparent, because as Pat, who founded single women living together, told me it's not the big things that cause friction. It's the small things. Like politics, yes.

But just things like somebody might want to run the dishwasher at like six in the morning. Somebody else might. Food smells. Who's taking the spoons and forks? Yeah, who's taking the spoons and forks? Fair enough. It's not kind of thing. Flashback to dorm living.

It is flashback. All right. I want to get Aaron involved in this. We hear the news, and it's grim. We see the data. It's great. But many of us are still living as usual. And I am curious, is there perhaps a disconnect? Are people perhaps ignoring it and maybe leaning into debt a little bit? Oh, people are definitely leaning into debt. There's no question about that. And some people aren't feeling it.

I mean, we do have that small slice of the population. They know that inflation has gone up and stuff, but they weren't so close to the edge that, you know, but people are definitely leaning into debt. All right. Christine? Yeah, I would agree. And I actually, when I saw the data, I was curious, when people said they weren't cutting back on savings, was it because they weren't saving to begin with? So a little bit deeper. Because when we work with people, we force the savings conversation issue, but sometimes it's not something that's happening right now.

So that's something I'm worried about. I don't think enough Canadians understand how debt works and understand, you know, the difference between getting your money working, for you versus getting your money working for someone else. What does that mean? Getting your money working for you means that the money that's invested is making money on itself. And so we actually break down what you contributed and what money came that you did not contribute came from that return on investment.

And if you start early enough, the return on investment is more than half what you contributed, which is how you can afford a retirement. And so when your money is working for someone else, you're doing that to the benefit of someone else. You're paying this, instead of it going up, you're paying this going down. And so one of the things that really bothers me when the government talks about, oh, we've made mortgages longer, so housing is more affordable. I'm like, that's actually not more affordable.

It's a misnomer. You're now asking people to pay much more in interest, and you're asking people to work much harder for the banks. And a lot of people, I'd say, don't understand, you're very right. They don't understand that a lot of these, so we did a study on people, going bankrupt. And when you go bankrupt, the financial advice, all sorts of professionals come in, right, to help you pay back these debts. But they're not working for you, the bankrupt person. Right. They're working for the people that you owe. But a lot of people just trust this and don't

get their own financial advice or because they think those people are helping them. And so it's, I think one of the things that came out loud and clear which we didn't make a graph for is that everybody, whether you're single, you're a household, everybody feels our tax system is too complicated. It's actually not working well for anyone. And, you know, if you have to hire a professional just to pay the government, your taxes, because you feel otherwise you're not getting all the little

exceptions you could have gotten, or, you know, if, heaven forbid, you're in a bankrupt situation. You can't afford to help anyone, but you can't get through it on your own. So you're kind of at the mercy of the others who do have professionals. Because we've seen people who are slaving away to pay off the deaths and everything they own, whereas it would have actually just been better if they kind of declared and walked away in a way. Very interesting. I really wish consumer proposals and bankruptcy had less stigma because I think we get to businesses all the time. And I think that we can get into trouble and it's compounding and it can just spiral out of control.

And I wish people would take the reset and just, you know, I didn't realize that you had to get your own professionals. I don't know as much about the spaces I would like to, but I really wish we didn't have the same stigma about it and more people took advantage of them. There's a lot of shame and blame about money. If you cannot manage your own finances personally, for some reason, that just becomes that you are a failure as a human being.

But if you think about it, a lot of Canadians aren't really exposed to actual proper financial education. They kind of see how their parents or their family react to money. So they kind of build up their own money stories. But, you know, having a conversation about, you know, maybe when you get your first allowance or when you start working and all of those things, doesn't happen with a lot of Canadians.

All right. With that being said in our last minute that we have, I do want to make sure that we get some advice from the experts here. So, Christine, I'll start with you. Despite high housing costs and food costs, people still might want to save and can, perhaps see the concern there? Yes.

What advice can we offer them? Know that you're not able to do it all. You aren't. The math doesn't math. It doesn't work. It's about trade-offs. Really focus on what's important to you and let the noise fall away.

And so one thing we like to do is base your costs in hours for how many hours you work to pay for something. So I think it's a lot easier to decide if a coffee costs me one hour of my time, is that worth it for me? or if an item out of a vending machine is an hour of my time, is that worth it to me?

And if we stop sort of frittering our money away and we spend it intentionally, we find that people have much better outcomes and they're able to get, and the tradeoffs feel more manageable and they're able to get to the things that bring them joy. But it's a different way of looking at it. So you're doing great where you are.

You're going to have to make tradeoffs, figure out what's important to you. Some people are happy to live with another person and they don't need to save as much money then. Exactly. Renee, you got the last one? I would add on to that, you know, your lifestyle works for you, right? Don't compare yourself to others.

That is just the death of ego. But also on a sort of bigger scale, you know, support policies that will help you. Right? You know, is it, you know, again, is it a housing policy that works for you? Do you love the idea of co-op housing, which can be 30% under markets, and you still own something and support those policies. All right. And can I add to the policies?

I do think we do need a government-level policy change here, simplifying the tax system. And we have an opportunity if we can encourage people saving and investing in Canadian business in a way, we can actually achieve a lot of things that the government is trying to overcome. But we really, to do that, need to overhaul the tax system. All right. We are going to have to leave it there, Renee, Christine.

I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Erin, this is just the beginning for us. You are going to be back with some more data sets for some future interviews, so we look forward to that. Great. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks, Stan. When you live alone, the math is simple. There's no one to split the bills with. Housing, groceries, utilities, it all falls on one person. That means single people end up paying more. And there are a lot of single people. Canada, 4.4 million in 2021, making them the most dominant household type. We dig into the financial

challenges, single Canadians face, and strategies for navigating them. Renee Silvestor Williams is a financial journalist and author of the singles tax, no-nonsense financial advice for solo earners. And she joins me in studio. How are you doing? I'm great. How are you? I'm doing well. All right, your book offers financial advice specifically for Canadians living alone. Why is it needed? Well, the thing is, I guess I started my newsletter five years ago because I had my own questions. The midst of COVID, right on the end.

A midst of COVID. I had time. We all had time. We weren't allowed out of our house. I was freelancing full time. So clearly money was top of my mind. And I had a whole bunch of questions. Could I afford to retire?

What's going on? And as somebody who works in journalism and communications and I have done contracts and gig workers, I had what I sort of described as a whole bunch of puzzle pieces, but I had no idea what the picture was like. Okay. What are we talking about one more time about? We're talking about, like, I have an RSP, I have a TFSA.

I even had a lira from a contract that I did, like, more than a decade ago. But there was no cohesiveness to it. And because I had time, and I'm like, okay, I'm single. How much do I have to say if I want to retire? What happens when I get older? And my health may not be great. So I started pitching stories. Some landed, some didn't.

But then I'm like, there's a wealth of information here. I couldn't really find anything online at the time. So I started the newsletter and five years later there's the book. But going back to your point about giving advice is I've noticed in those five years, there really wasn't a lot of people talking about being single and how much it costs to be single. But now in the last, I would say two years, and this might be my algorithm, but I'm also seeing it in the media as well. There's a lot more conversation about how much it costs to be single.

What are they saying? What specifically cost money? Oh, well, housing, affordability. Housing affordability that is the big topic everywhere in any major city across the globe, right? Because, yes, you can live with roommates, but if you don't want to, you're shouldering rent, you're shouldering mortgage costs. There's no rental protection in Ontario after, I want to say November 18th or 15th, 2018. All right? So it's really difficult to plan your spending when you don't know how much rent's going to go up by on a year-to-year basis, especially if your salary does not go up by the same amount. I want to pull up some data.

This is information pulled by Aaron Kelly of advanced symbolics. She had her AI pollster Polly do some research on this topic, and she found that 59%, say, housing, no surprise there, is the highest cost. then taxes at 24% food expenses next at 13% leisure at 3 and transportation at 1.5%. Does this research surprise you? It does not. Like the housing thing as we just talked about, that does not surprise me. Like the cost of a one-bedroom now is ballpark between 18 and 22, depending on where you go. Obviously, Vancouver and Toronto, most expensive.

Food costs, they predicted what? It's supposed to go up another 5% to 6% this year? And it costs a lot to eat relatively healthy, right? Especially now that, you know, a lot of places are not bringing in food from the U.S. because of the ongoing boycott, right? So you're looking further abroad. And then there's transportation costs. So we know what's happening right now in the Middle East.

Right. And gas prices already started going up. That's correct. Absolutely. So none of that research surprises me. I'm curious. You know, there are going to be some people when we talk about, the cost of what it is to be a single person,

whether it's by choice or not, circumstances, of course, if you are a widow to divorce, all that. Some people say that being single is a choice. And so with that, perhaps it does come with a premium. What do you say to that? Yeah, but also being partnered up is also a choice. I mean, there's choices around the way.

But I will push back on being single as being a choice, because for some people it isn't. We don't know what happens in a person. life to make them decide to be single. We don't know. And I would never want to speculate on that because we don't know what's happened in a person's life from childhood up. Maybe they've gone through a bad divorce.

Maybe they were widowed. Maybe it was something terrible. But the thing is you shouldn't be financially penalized for making a decision. Right. Like there was a RBC study that found that single people tend to be about 66% more rent-wise because you're not splitting those hard costs. So I would push back on that. Well, let's go back to the data that Aaron Kelly had pulled out there.

Taxation. Why is it a sticking point for singles? I think as you get older and you're planning for retirement, and a lot of this has to do sort of post-retirement, there's income splitting, right? Which the higher-earning spouse, a partner, you can split your income, which they radically drops you down into different tax bracket.

A single person, especially somebody, a higher-earning single person, doesn't have that option. And even if they maximize all their tax deductions, they still don't get that advantage, right? Because they are the economic household unit. Even if they live with a sibling, they're still not considered the same economic household unit

as somebody who's common law or somebody who's married. Can we do a little history lesson a little bit? Because in the book, you talk about sort of income tax. If we go back to the First World War, the perception and the idea of income tax was actually geared perhaps more to single people. It was not the individual. The individual.

How much this. So when they were looking at putting together the income tax act, which is what we have, they were looking at it on an individual basis. So they weren't going to specifically kind of focus on couples. Now, we do all file our taxes individually. There are just some benefits that, you know, advantage couples. So let me just make that really clear. But if I recall correctly, there was some point.

pushback from the official opposition because at the time it was majority men who were working. Right. You know, women went into the workforce in World War II and then they came out of the workforce after that. Well, majority, not everybody. And then, of course, more and more into the workforce. I keep in mind, the tax code does change because it was in the early 2000s where gay couples, whether they were partnered or married, were recognized as an economic household unit as well. So there are, there's possibility for change.

What that looks like and how deep it will go, I don't know. But I do think there are opportunities for change there and how you redefine an economic household unit. All right. I want to go back to housing. Yes. How are singles being shortchanged when it comes to housing? You obviously talk about rent and rent splitting.

Yeah. There are other, you know, when we talk about a mortgage, quite challenging, just where we are today. Yes. So if you are a high-earning single, you probably have a better, trance of qualifying for a down payment. But these days you need a minimum to income and possibly money from family member, the bank of mom and dad, or, you know, a gift, a monetary gift to afford something, especially in the, you know, six or seven major cities across the country.

So financially, it can be more difficult for a single person, especially somebody who may not be in the top 20 or top 15 percent of income earners in the country to buy a place. All right. I want to give some people some solutions, some advice. What are some top three? Give me top three tips in terms of protecting themselves, you know, in terms of savings for the future. What can someone do if they're seeing? Well, I like to say, I'm not going to tell people to budget. I feel like people already know that and they're doing it. So it feels a little condescending for me to say, go budget. You can't budget your way out of a financial crisis. Okay. Right. Not a housing crisis, my bad. But kind of just know where you are financially. Like you don't have to know what every single dollar is doing,

but kind of a general picture of where you are and where you want to be. And I would say, the second thing I would say is get involved in your community. What does that mean? It means, I think, having a strong community around you, especially when you're single is even more important. So I believe it was chapter 2 or 3 where I talk about having a team around you. So obviously friends and family, but also things like having a good employment. lawyer, right? There's a lot of layoffs happening right now. Having a good employment lawyer

can be the difference between getting two weeks severance and 12 weeks severance. I mean, that happened to me when I got laid off about a decade ago. And the third thing, and this one is, I would say, get more politically active, like support politicians that are looking or have concrete ideas about how to address housing affordability, how to make it easier to live in a city, whether, person or as a family, right? Because there are just some things that cannot be solved by the individual in of itself. It takes perhaps a whole bunch of people getting together and supporting political action. Renee, we are going to leave it there. I appreciate your time, your insights, and your passion, of course. Thank you so much. I'm Jay-N. Thanks for watching the rundown. We'd love to

know what you think. So send us your suggestions and feedback at tb0.org slash rundown feedback or leave us a comment on YouTube. Until then, I'll see you tomorrow.