Are you planning for a financial future you can no longer predict?

My first thought was that financial independence had gotten harder to achieve, and that is an undeniable fact. But then I wondered what happens when the people we’re building all this wealth for eventually live in a world that doesn’t look much like the one we built it in?

For most of us, there’s always been a simple set of assumptions that drive long-term financial planning. We buy a home because homes are valuable and will appreciate over time. We invest because companies grow and that growth generates gains for investors. We accumulate assets because they will eventually either fund our retirement or get passed down to our next of kin.

And beneath all of that is the assumption that the next generation will, for the most part, want the same things we do.

My grandparents never wondered if their kids would want to own a home, and I can’t imagine my parents wondering that about me either. Technology changed, the economy cycled and society evolved, but the basic trajectory stayed predictable.

Work, earn, buy a home, invest, accumulate. Eventually sell, downsize, retire, and pass along whatever’s left.

But l’m beginning to wonder if that continuity still holds true.

I don’t mean that the future generation has stopped wanting houses, a career, or money; that would be an unsubstantiated generalization. What I mean is that when enough small differences in attitude start stacking up, it may be time to start paying attention.

Take alcohol for example. Statistics Canada found that between 2015 and 2024, the share of Canadian men aged 18 to 34 who hadn’t had a drink in the past year nearly doubled, from 12% to 23%. Among women in that age group, regular monthly drinking dropped from 76% to 62%. On their own, those are just stats about drinking. But they’re data points in a pattern, and it’s a pattern I wanted to dig into.

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So I kept digging and found other things. Deloitte’s 2025 survey of more than 23,000 Gen Z and millennial respondents across 44 countries found that only 6% consider reaching a senior leadership position their primary career goal. Purpose, learning, and work-life balance all ranked higher. And an Ipsos survey conducted for CIBC found that 34% of Gen Z respondents believe financial advice from older generations is no longer relevant, compared with 25% of Canadians overall.

This doesn’t mean that an entire generation is outright rejecting everything that came before it. What I find curious is how it all adds up—how they are socializing, how they work, what the generations after are consuming. The changing definitions of success, what’s worth spending on, what’s worth owning.

Our children are also experiencing things that are completely new. When I was a teenager, gambling meant walking into a casino, if you could even get in. There was no app, no betting market sitting beside the broadcast on your phone. CAMH’s 2025 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey found that one in 10 Ontario students in grades 7 to 12 had placed an online sports bet in the past year, up from one in 100 back in 2017. That’s not a positive example of generational progress, but it is evidence that the world shaping their attitudes looks nothing like the one that shaped ours.

A conversation about real estate

A few months ago, I was talking to a friend who happens to be a financial advisor, about portfolio diversification. We had both grown up in a generation where real estate was one of the only real ways to build wealth. She made an interesting remark to me that in many ways was the inspiration for this article.

“But Vick, what’s even the point? Why bother buying and investing in properties expecting multi-million-dollar exits in the future?”

I looked puzzled, so she kept going. “Our kids and their kids after will probably be a rent-for-life generation. Not because they can’t afford it, but because affordability is only getting worse, and with their shifting world views, they might not even want to. In 30 years, not owning a home might just be normal.”

It will be a few decades before we know if there was truth in that assertion, but what I can tell you is that when I went looking, the numbers backed up more of what she said than I expected. There’s plenty of evidence that younger Canadians still want to own homes. But there’s also evidence the relationship is shifting. A separate Ipsos survey found that 80% of Canadians now believe homeownership is only for the rich, a view held even more strongly among Gen Z (90%) and millennials (82%) who don’t already own a home.

That is a real departure in how an entire generation sees something that was once treated with certainty. Housing is a tangible example to illustrate the shift, but I am choosing not to get caught up in whether her housing prediction turns out to be right. Instead, I am giving some serious thought to what else in my financial life and portfolio I am counting on to hold its value.

You’re not just betting on the asset

But I do want to play out this little thought experiment, because I believe it’s worth the indulgence of time.

Let’s say you buy a home for half a million dollars. You don’t necessarily need your children to want that specific home in 20 to 30 years. What you will need is for that home to still have a market when you’re ready to sell it, whether that’s to fund your retirement entirely or downsize to something smaller. And even if your children didn’t want that specific home, you’d still want it to be worth something meaningful if you passed it down.

The traditional plan assumes all of this holds up. Real estate is supposed to appreciate, so maybe that home is worth over a million by the time you’re ready to sell. You sell it outright and it funds the rest of your days in a retirement home, or you downsize and the rest funds your years ahead. The home was never just a place to live; it was part of the mechanism.

That value only exists if someone is willing to pay for it, and that someone belongs to a generation that might upend the entire script.

We talk about long-term investing as though we’re only making decisions about assets and asset classes—commodities versus properties. Single-family homes that tend to appreciate better vs. townhomes that don’t. But we’re also making decisions about future demand—and not just demand for the specific asset, but for the entire category it belongs to. What people will want, what they’ll value, what they’ll be willing to pay for. For most of history, we could make those bets with real confidence, because the future looked like an extension of the present.

If that stops being true, the consequences can show up while we’re still counting on the money.

The same question applies well beyond housing. We already saw a version of this with commercial real estate during and just after COVID, and it will likely keep changing if the way we work keeps changing. What happens to companies whose growth depends on spending habits that no longer look the same? What happens to industries built around things a new generation is gradually deciding not to care about? And what happens to the money we’re investing in these assets and asset classes decades from now?

What happens when the future changes its mind?

Honestly, I haven’t a clue, and I’m not sure anyone does.

For generations, long-term financial decisions assumed that the future would broadly continue down the path of the past. We didn’t have to think about whether the next generation, or the one after, would want what was being built. Continuity was baked into the model.

We are at an inflection point, and this safe assumption is being challenged. Not because the generations to come are better or worse, more responsible or less, but because we may be watching a generation grow up in a genuinely different environment, with different behaviours, different expectations and access to things no generation before them has had.

If continuity is no longer something we can take for granted, we’re planning decades ahead without knowing if the old rules still apply. I’m not sure we’ve fully reckoned with what that means for how we plan our financial future.

About Vickram Agarwal

Vickram Agarwal is a multiple-time founder and award-winning entrepreneur. He leads S1:E2, a business strategy consulting firm, and contributes to The Globe and Mail, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Inc.

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