Credit cards are displayed in Montreal in 2012.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
A new poll suggests that paying down debt is the biggest financial priority for Canadians in 2015.
It is the fifth year in a row that debt repayment came out as the top concern in the annual survey by CIBC.
Twenty-two per cent of those recently polled said paying down debt was their top priority in the new year; followed by building savings (12 per cent); paying bills or getting by (10 per cent); managing day-to-day spending or budgeting (9 per cent) and retirement planning (5 per cent).
Christina Kramer, executive vice-president of retail and business banking at CIBC, cautions that it's important for those, particularly in older age groups, to be concerned about debt repayment, but that should not mean they lose sight of other financial goals like retirement planning.
The results were from a telephone survey conducted by Neilsen with 1,014 Canadians between Nov. 13 and 17.
The polling industry's professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error as they are not a random sample and therefore are not necessarily representative of the whole population.