Retirement

For many of us retirement means the transition from the day-to-day grind of working to days of leisure, kicking back or puttering around and, best of all, no more schedules or alarm clocks. The other important transition is from the final days of earning money through employment, to spending your money. Even smart people can…

Conventional wisdom – and a good rule of thumb – suggests you should not have any debt when you retire. However, a recent Globe and Mail article reports that people are more comfortable with carrying debt into their retirement years than past generations and that more than half of all retired Canadians are carrying some…

The grim reality is that our population is aging and this is always a factor in health care costs.  All the technological advances and health care innovations keep us living longer and longer while managing chronic conditions that would have resulted in death not that long ago. Related: How mobile technology can improve your health…

Tired of shovelling snow, thousands of Canadians have decided to live in a warmer climate. We’re familiar with snowbirds, but there are many who are choosing to move permanently to somewhere nice and sunny – a place where the pace of life is slower and the quality of life higher. Why move? There can be…

As if you didn’t already worry more than enough about retirement, now is probably a good time to worry about having too much money. No. Really. The problem won’t be that you’ll have saved too much, so you can stop that thought in its tracks right now. No, the real problem is that by leaving…

When I worked in banking, January and February were known as the dreaded “RRSP Season”.  It was the approximate equivalent of the retail “Christmas season” with long extended hours, lines of desperate people wanting a quick RRSP purchase, and the inevitable sales quotas. Related: How an RRSP loan turned my $12,000 contribution into $20,000 With…

Imagine a world of total certainty – you know when you’ll die, how many times your car will crap out on you, what the markets will do, and if your third kid will need braces.  In that world. figuring out exactly how much money you’ll need to save so that you can stop working entirely…

Let’s play a game of Necessity Tetris (Retirement Income Edition).  Your screen is the amount of monthly income you’d like to have in retirement, and the tetrominos (yes, I looked it up) are the various sources of income you’re counting on to appear as a result of your hard work, diligent saving, employee benefits, and…

Do you ever feel like you spend most of your life saving and saving and saving for retirement (or financial independence), worrying about how much you should have invested in stocks or bonds or mutual funds or GICs, and if it’s enough, but that what you do with your money after you reach that magical…