Rob Carrick’s G&M retirement: what he and other retiring PF writers have learned about Retirement

My latest MoneySense Retired Money column has just been published and features input from Rob Carrick, who just retired from the Globe & Mail after almost three decades covering Personal Finance (PF henceforth). You can find the full column by clicking on the hyperlinked headline here: How financial journalists plan their own retirement.

While some may view this as an exercise in Inside Baseball, the column also features interviews with someone Rob and I agree was the “granddaddy” of Canadian PF writing: Bruce Cohen of the Financial Post. Bruce in effect handed off the PF beat to me a few years after I joined the paper in 1993. For the column, Bruce provided several retirement tips but clarified there were at least two such PF writers even before him (Mike Grenby and Henry Zimmer.). Guess you could call them the grandaddies of Canadian personal finance writing!

Unlike other journalists mentioned in the column, Bruce is one of the few who actually did truly retire: after a 5-year transition he says he fully retired at the traditional retirement age of 65. Now 75, he lives on 50 acres north of Toronto. He cites actuary Malcolm Hamilton’s conclusion that spending/lifestyle in retirement is pretty much the same as pre-retirement: “Ergo, most people did not need a 70% income replacement ratio. That’s been true for me, though I don’t know if it still applies  to the general population as many older people seem to carry significant  debt into retirement and many adult children are living with their parents.”

The MoneySense column also includes input from Garry Marr, another ex Postie who just weeks ago announced he is returning to the Financial Post to write about — you guessed it — Personal Finance.

Retiring from Full-time Retirement Blogging

Meanwhile, south of the border, we got some input from Fritz Gilbert, who announced this spring in his The Retirement Manifesto blog that he is  “retiring” from full-time blogging about Retirement. 

Pretty ironic, isn’t it?

Since Rob Carrick is still only 62 years old, he clarifies that while he is no longer a salaried employee at a newspaper (he formally left on June 30th), he definitely plans to keep his hand in PF writing, including two monthly columns at the G&M: one on traditional PF, the second on his new Retirement experience.

He agrees that Retirement is a bit of an outdated word and that what he is doing is closer to Semi-Retirement, or indeed the term I coined in my financial novel, Findependence Day.

Carrick doesn’t foresee a traditional full-stop retirement any time soon. If you tell people you’re retiring, “they instantly assume golf clubs and breakfast coffee at Tim Hortons with your fellow retirees. Yeah, that’s not for me. I’ll follow your example, staying active in the PF investing space.”

Cllearly Carrick has embarked on Semi-Retirement. In addition to his two  G&M columns each month, he may do the odd public speaking gig. In his retirement column he’ll be “explaining how Retirement is a crummy word. It doesn’t have any meaning… I think Findependence is actually a good word. I have financial independence right now, Findependence, whatever you want to call it and will basically work selectively … but not working as hard as when I was full-time.”

Other financial writers who haven’t yet retired

The column also looks at older Canadian financial writers who still haven’t stopped working: notably Gordon Pape, who is now in his late 80s and still writes for the G&M and publishes his Internet Wealth Builder newsletter. Or someone who will be familiar with Findependence Hub readers: Patrick McKeough, who in his mid to late 70s still publishes the Wall Street Forecaster and other newsletters and runs the TSInetwork.ca website. We often republish his blogs here. Then there’s Ellen Roseman, who was long a consumer affairs and PF writer for the Toronto Star and long ago declared she never planned to retire. That has not changed, she confirmed for the column. Now 78, she continues to work in semi-retirement as a financial educator and public speaker.