After rain the good weather ? This is not necessarily true in the world of personal finance. After three years of economic gloom, Quebecers are still anxious about economic uncertainties and the ongoing slowdown, reveals a recent Léger poll.
New faces have appeared in food banks in Quebec lately: young couples. These atypical visitors, affected by rent increases or renovations, caught the attention of the Centraide organization. “Housing prices mean that people have less money in their pockets, and that catapults them into food banks around the 22nd or 23rd,” observes Claude Pinard, president and CEO of Centraide of Greater Montreal.
His team has just published, with the help of the firm Léger, an update on the “financial anxiety” of Quebecers. And its results are hardly encouraging.
If 62% of Quebecers said they felt in a “good personal financial situation” last November, they are only 57% today.
Some 86% of Quebecers say they feel financial stress. Worse still, 44% even claim to suffer from a “moderate to extreme” level of anxiety.
Faced with this anxiety, a third of Quebecers hardly dare to look at their bank account to avoid thinking about it. However, they are 22% to have increased their income in the last six months. “People have probably had salary increases, but they are dragging their feet in the face of inflation,” explains Mr. Pinard.
The hundreds of dollars that we pay each month for housing weigh more and more heavily. The cost of rent has become the second source of concern for the wallets of Quebecers, downgrading in six months the concerns related to expenses for children and energy expenses. Only food exceeds it at the top of the worrying expenditure pyramid.
These unavoidable costs consequently eat away at savings, notes the study. Nearly 20% of Quebecers plan to reduce their savings in the coming months. “When you stop saving, at the slightest unforeseen expense, it creates a complicated financial situation. »
A broken cycle
Economic pessimism hovers over Quebecers, and few of them have any hope of seeing the finances of Quebec and Canada improve within the next six months. The majority of the population believes that they will remain the same or deteriorate.
However, in general, optimism returns in a “cyclical” way after crises, observes Christian Bourque, executive vice-president at Léger. “After each major crisis, there is always a kind of upturn. […] After the Second World War, there was the Trente Glorieuses. After the crisis [du début] 1980s, we had the madness of the 1980s.”
Which doesn’t seem to be the case this time around. “During the pandemic, we all said to ourselves that afterwards, we would live crazy years… Except that, there, between Friday afternoon and Monday morning, we went from a health crisis to a personal finance crisis, without a break. We were a bit battered mentally and we barely had time to turn the other cheek; we must be more fragile than we think, collectively. »
Consumption should therefore decrease in the next six months. More than one out of four Quebecers has already reduced their spending on leisure, clothing and savings over the past six months, an upward trend.
An easy way to invigorate his enthusiasm would be through the consumption of financial information: indeed, “the propensity of Quebecers to seek information tends to decrease as the level of financial anxiety increases”, indicates Léger’s analysis.
Another update of this Financial Anxiety Index is due in six months; this third sounding will make it possible to establish trends. This survey is based on a sample of 2,104 adult Quebecers interviewed between February 17 and March 2, 2023.