When it comes to retirement, baby boomers seem to be favouring lifestyle choices over wealth preservation, quite a different path compared to the generations that came before them, according to recent Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey.

The study found that retirement has been redefined – with people expecting to live and often work longer than any preceding generation, and taking different approaches to preparing for and living their best life during these years.

Most are seeking flexible work arrangements, such as part-time work (39%) or going back and forth between periods of work and leisure (24%), but not always for the same reasons.

Most boomers have "mixed feelings about living longer and transitioning into retirement," said Ken Dychtwald, CEO of Age Wave, the group that conducted the research.

"While they welcome the extra time to pursue new interests and spend more time with family and friends, they are concerned about outliving their assets and experiencing a serious health disruption. Even those who have saved adequately can be anxious and often overwhelmed by this complexity and the unknowns they face."

Last year, an RBC poll found that 85% of yet-to-be retired baby boomers believe they'll work until they choose not to. But, among those who've actually retired, only 62% actually had that choice.

That's changing, of course. Now that provincial governments have struck down laws allowing employers to sack staff once they turned 65, businesses are more cautious when about weeding out higher-paid older workers through early-retirement incentives or outright layoffs.

In fact, even talking about retirement with older employees can get you into trouble, warns Toronto lawyer Colin Kelly. 

Any comments that an employee might reasonably interpret as encouraging retirement, even if  well-intentioned, may result in employers being charged with aged-based discrimination, according to a recent Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ruling.

The share of U.S. adults providing financial support to both an elderly parent and a child has grown from 12% to 15% in the last seven years, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center.  

Longer life expectancy and delayed childbearing mean that more middle-aged people have dependent children and parents who are still living.

Today, 42% of Gen X has a dependent child and a parent age 65 or older, compared to 33% of baby boomers.

While the share of middle-aged adults living in the so-called sandwich generation has increased only marginally in recent years, the financial burdens associated with caring for multiple generations of family members are mounting.

Despite an aging population and increased longevity, the increased pressure is coming primarily from grown children rather than aging parents, Pew reports.

Millennial investors are more skeptical of financial advice than older generations even though it's the latter group that's been hit hardest by market gyrations, according to a recent survey by Accenture.

The survey of digitally savvy U.S. investors also showed that they're more determined than their predecessors to learn how to get things right.

Many perceive financial advisors as salespeople who push products that enrich their firms rather than their clients. As a result, they were four times more likely than baby boomers to say they were unwilling to act on the advice of a financial advisor without first consulting other sources.

Over half admitted taking financial advice from someone other than an advisor — including family, friends and social media contacts — in the past two years.

Consumers over the age of 55 have have been eating out more over the past five years while younger generations have decreased their food service patronage, according to The NPD Group.

The reason: Boomers, as a group, have more discretionary income -- largely because so many are delaying retirement -- while younger people face particularly high unemployment rates, an anemic job and mounting debt. In other words, they're broke.

In the past, older consumers visited restaurants less frequently than than younger diners and received less marketing attention as a result. But that's changing.

Boomers and even older consumers have increased their share of restaurant traffic by six percentage points since 2008, while dining by Millennials has decreased by almost the same amount showing -- once again -- that business should be rethinking just who they market to, NPD reports.  

Last year, I wrote a column about a Stanford University experiment in which groups of students donned virtual reality headgear that gave them an opportunity to interact with computer renderings of themselves.

What's interesting is that one group was shown only images of themselves at their current age, while the other also were presented with age-morphed versions of how they might look years down the road. 

When each group was later asked how much they would save for retirement, the ones who saw their older selves said they would save twice as much on average as the other group, largely because they empathized with their future selves.

Following up on this idea, some financial institutions have developed web-based tools to bring these images to life. A handy reminder as the annual RRSP season kicks off again.

For millions of Canadians, buying lottery tickets, betting on the horses or feeding the slots is nothing more than a fool’s tax that raises billions for provincial treasuries. For many others, however, gambling is a serious soul-shattering addiction that's tough to be beat.

And the older you get, the bigger the potential problem, research suggests. Some 68% of Canadian seniors gamble, and around 2.1% have moderate to severe gambling-related problems, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.

Seniors gamble for the same reasons — to have fun, make money, curiosity — that drive most casino visitors.

However, with much more time on their hands, some older people use gambling as a way to escape their everyday problems: loneliness, the loss of a spouse, or the stressful demands of distant family.

The recession and subsequent sluggish economy appears to have impacted the generations differently.

And the most notable dichotomy is surfacing among the two youngest adult generations: Millennials and Generation X, according to a report from Financial Finesse, a large provider of workplace financial wellness programs across the border.

Millennials are managing their finances surprisingly well despite having by far the lowest income levels while Gen Xers are having a harder time with debt, making ends meet, and most aspects of overall financial planning, the report suggests.

Early and late baby boomers with young children appear to be over-prioritizing college planning at the cost of their own financial security, leaving themselves vulnerable as a result of not taking care of their own needs.

It's no secret that Canada is steadily becoming a nation of many languages, as recent waves of immigration reshape the country’s main cities. Results from the 2011 Census found that one in five people spoke a language other than French or English in their homes.

The number of people who can conduct a conversation in both English and French jumped by nearly 350,000 to 5.8 million in recent years, but that hike is largely due to people in Quebec speaking both languages.

Overall, the bilingualism rate of the Canadian population at large is essentially unchanged.

And, it appears, that's not likely to change in the future either.