Financial confidence index finds rising personal certainty, despite weakening economic outlooks
While they broadly share a bleak view of Canada’s anaemic economy, Canadians surveyed for the annual IG Wealth Management Financial Confidence Index showed an increasing degree of confidence in their own finances and their financial literacy. The index score for overall financial confidence rose to 52 in the 2025 edition, the first time it’s been that high since 2021. This is despite respondents scoring their trust in the economy at 39 and 60 per cent of respondents saying they now fear a recession. While on the surface the results may look like cognitive dissonance, they may point to a trend that has gripped Canadians for several years now: in the wake of generational macro events, they’ve learned to control what they can.
Christine Van Cauwenberghe sees a combination of self-reliance, industry education, and some improving macro factors in the survey results. The Head of Financial Planning at IG Wealth Management noted the emphasis that the financial services industry has placed on education in recent years and the ways it has reached out to some traditionally less served demographic groups. She also agreed that the tumultuous nature of the past half-decade has motivated many Canadians to take a deeper interest in their personal finances. She highlighted, too, the fact of interest rate cuts in Canada which have taken some of the more acute burden off individual finances.
“I think that some people have very much adjusted their lifestyle to the new normal. I think that in other cases, though, people have renegotiated their own revenue situation with their employers,” Van Cauwenberghe says. “The market has been on a tear, so people are actually making money on their investments. It may seem like there's a lot of uncertainty and difficulty, but some people are earning a lot more money, so the increased cost of everything is not noticed as much. They're still able to buy their dream home and go on their dream vacation and do the things that they want to do. They may feel that, overall, there's a lot of uncertainty, but they as individuals, for whatever reason, either have done better or have adjusted their lifestyle.”
She is also happy to credit the industry with some success in educating Canadians about their finances. She notes that financial literacy is directly related to financial confidence and that Canadians have shown a genuine interest in deepening their literacy. She also credits the industry’s investment in advisory talent from less-represented groups, such as women and Indigenous peoples. Those groups saw marked improvement in their financial confidence in the survey and Van Cauwenberghe attributes some of that improvement to their ability to find advisors with similar lived experiences.
Amid countless new educational channels now available to them, some less regulated than others, Van Cauwenberghe highlights the survey results which found a preference for human advice, even among some Canadians who do not have an advisor. 55 per cent of survey respondents said that human financial advice is more important than ever now, while only 46 per cent said they work with a financial professional.
For all the ways she praises the industry’s progress in educating Canadians, Van Cauwenberghe sees this particular result as indicative of still-poor understanding of advice among Canadians. Pinning that amorphous term to a more clear definition, like the financial planning work of goals-based advice. She says that advice needs to be understood as work that goes beyond portfolio appreciation. Advice lies in the capacity to answer the question, ‘am I going to be okay?’
Van Cauwenberghe now sees the industry’s responsibility as an educator to demonstrate the difference between an investment portfolio and a financial plan. On a micro level, she says, achieving that goal means advisors need to do comprehensive planning work. That means advisors need to force themselves to be somewhat uncomfortable and engage with products and areas that they may not be innately familiar with. They need to build teams and networks, too, so they can facilitate a plan that truly covers a client’s whole life.
“Advisors need to meet clients where they're at. Although the survey is trying to give a general idea as to how we're feeling as a society, I still think it's important for advisors to speak to individuals as individuals, get to know them personally, assess what their personal financial health is, and assess how open they are to advice. because some clients don't want the advice. They think they can do it themselves,” Van Cauwenberghe says. “I think that advisors need to assess where they're going to be able to provide the most benefit, and that is going to lead to the most long lasting and productive relationships for the advisor and the clients.”
