Hub Blogs contains fresh contributions written by Financial Independence Hub staff or contributors that have not appeared elsewhere first, or have been modified or customized for the Hub by the original blogger. In contrast, Top Blogs shows links to the best external financial blogs around the world.
Like troubled Brazil, Russia is another trouble spot among the four BRIC nations. (Brazil, Russia, India, China). While most investors probably have minimal exposure to BRIC economies (either through BRIC ETFs or mutual funds, or in more diluted fashion, Emerging Markets funds), this is an example of a geo-political emerging event that bears carefully watching.
Sometimes these seemingly limited local eruptions have a way of spreading globally and ultimately impacting markets far beyond. For an example, check out this Wikipedia entry on the 1997 Asian crisis, which began in Thailand. I dare say when investors first heard about trouble with the collapsing Thai baht, they had no idea the trouble would soon spread to the rest of Asia, with possible global repercussions. To contain it, the IMF had to step in with US$40 billion.
So investors should monitor the events in Russia closely. This is a good example of why we need to pay attention to geopolitics and macroeconomics. Right now, ISIS, oil, Turkey and the Middle East is at centre stage of investor concerns but the events in Russia, including the Ukraine, call for scrutiny and caution. Here’s Business Insider’s take on Russsia’s encroachments on the Ukraine.
While most homeowners won’t pay off their mortgages and reach financial freedom until right before retirement, I plan to do it a lot sooner — by age 31. I’ve managed to accomplish this in Toronto, Canada’s second most expensive housing market. How did I do it? Through frugal living, sacrifice and hard work. I was inspired to reach my “findependence” so early after reading Jonathan Chevreau’s book, Findependence Day: How to Achieve Financial Independence: While You’re Still Young Enough to Enjoy It. Here’s my story of how I plan to reach mortgage freedom and findependence and how you can, too.
My Journey Towards Mortgage Freedom and Independence
Sean Cooper
Owning a home has been a goal of mine ever since a young age. My lifelong goal of homeownership became a reality when I purchased a beautifully-renovated bungalow in the suburbs of Toronto in August 2012 for $425,000.
Buying a home at such a young age took a lot of sacrifices, but it has been well worth it. Instead of living on the main floor, I rent it out and live in the basement. I was inspired by the host of HGTV’s Income Property Scott McGillivray, who lived in the basement of his first house for nine years to get financially ahead. In my spare time I work as a freelance financial journalist.
Even after graduating from university, I continued to live like a student. I didn’t go out and buy a fancy car or go on a five-star vacation – I continue to ride my bicycle to work, pack my lunch and shop at discount grocers. Those savings alone add up to thousands a year. Instead of renting an expensive condo downtown, I was fortunate enough to be able to live at home, paying my parents rent, saving towards a down payment.
While not everyone can afford to buy a house at age 27 and be able to make the sacrifices I’ve made, there are still things you can do to help pay down your mortgage sooner and reach findependence.
Pay Yourself First
In the words of David Chilton, you should “pay yourself first.” I’ve been able to pay down my mortgage through pre-payment privileges. Most closed mortgages come with pre-payment privileges that allow you to make lump sum payments and increase your payment. The easiest way to pay down your mortgage is to pay yourself first: set up automatic withdrawals from your bank account, so you’re not tempted to spend. You’ll save thousands in interest over the life of your mortgage and be mortgage-free years sooner. Ease yourself into it – see what money you can afford to contribute right now towards your mortgage. Even an extra $25 a week can shave years off the life of your mortgage.
SMART Goal Setting
I’m a big fan of goal setting. Through goal setting I’ve been able to realize my lifelong dream of home ownership. Goals are most effective when they’re SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely). For example, if you’re saving towards a home, by putting aside an extra $200 per week in your savings account, you’ll have $10,400 saved in a year that you can use towards a down payment or a lump sum payment against your mortgage.
Create a Budget and Track Spending
It’s hard to know if you’re on your way to reaching your financial goals if you don’t have a budget. A budget is the most basic tool and effective tool for managing your money. Are you guilty of living paycheque to paycheque? Do you often wonder where your money goes each month? Not only can a budget help you gain control of your finances, it can help you achieve your long-term goals, like mortgage freedom.
A budget acts as a roadmap that helps you stay on course. Creating a budget doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Just creating a budget can often lead to savings. You may be surprised how much you spend a month on coffee: by saving $2 a day, you’ll have $60 extra a month to put towards your mortgage.
While a budget is helpful, don’t forget to track your spending. Tracking your spend is vital to ensure you’re not going over-budget every month and putting your dreams of mortgage freedom in jeopardy.
Live Frugally
There’s a difference between frugal and cheap. Today it’s hip to be frugal. Being frugal means having the willpower to say no to spending from time to time. Changing a few costly spending habits can lead to big savings.
Rather than spending $10 everyday buying your lunch, why not brownbag your lunch instead? You’ll eat healthier and save a bundle. Instead of driving to work, why not take public transit or bike like me? The savings can add up quickly.
Frugal doesn’t have to mean being boring. You can still have an active social life. Instead of going to a pricey restaurant, you can host a potluck or have a picnic in the park.
Streams of Income
While living frugally can help save money, if you want to reach mortgage freedom sooner, boosting your income goes a long way. There are many ways you can bring in extra income: renting out your home, working part-time, or freelancing.
If you have some spare time in the evenings and on weekends, why not put it to good use by getting a part-time job? Rather than using your basement for storage, you could transform it into a rental suite and start bringing in a steady stream of income. With the extra money, subsidize your mortgage and make lump sum payments against your mortgage to pay it off years sooner.
If you’re willing and able to make a few small sacrifices, you can reach mortgage freedom and financial independence a lot sooner like me. You can work because you enjoy working, not because you have to.
Sean Cooper is a Personal Finance Expert and Financial Journalist. He is a first-time homebuyer and landlord who aspires to reach findependence by age 31. Follow him on Twitter @SeanCooperWrite and read his blogs and request his Writing and Web Design services on his website: http://www.seancooperwriter.com/
We’ve heard from several individuals about writing for the Hub and yes, we welcome contributions. Some guest blogs will be going up in the next week or so. Since this site does not charge at this point, we aren’t yet in a position to pay contributors but we are happy to provide what exposure we can. Contributors are welcome to include links where appropriate and of course can end each piece with a short italic description of who they are and how they can be reached.
Because the Hub aims to be a North American portal on financial independence, we welcome contributions from knowledgeable good writers from both the United States and Canada. Remember that the book Findependence Day (which began this whole adventure in 2008) is available in both American and Canadian editions. So are the two new e-books.
The standard length for blogs is often said to be between 400 and 600 words but there’s also evidence that lengthier meatier pieces can get good play and pick-up. Really, it’s a balance between having enough space to be substantial, while recognizing that in this time-starved hectic world we live in, most people have the attention spans of the proverbial gnat. If you run out of steam at 350 words, so be it. And if you need 750 or 900 words to say what you want to say, then go for it.
The longer the piece, the more you need to include subheads and at least a photo or image of some sort. I will act as editor to the extent necessary.
Try to target our six major categories
What topics? Scan the second (gray) bar on the home page to see what we’re focusing on. If you want to reach younger Gen X and Gen Y readers, then Debt & Frugality is the place to target. The category of Wealth Accumulation is very broad and can include anything from asset allocation to pensions to ETFs to robo-advisers (we just put up an item on the latter).
Further along the continuum of Financial Independence, there is the Decumulation section, which is all about drawing down on wealth instead of building it up. And the Longevity & Aging section is a key focus of the Hub because of our belief that the baby boomers and their children are going to be on this planet a very long time on average, assuming they take care of themselves. See the links in this section to the blogs of Change Rangers’ Mark Venning and Agenomics’ Lee Anne Davies.
The Business Ownership category is another important niche. We considered calling this one Boomerpreneurs because so many baby boomers are leaving corporate employment (voluntarily or otherwise) and going out on their own as consultants, freelancers, franchise owners or building entire new businesses from scratch. But of course Entrepreneurship is hardly restricted to the boomers. Most of us stayed in the corporate womb for far too long and might better have embarked on the entrepreneurial path much earlier. Those wishing to pursue “Multiple Streams of Income” (from the Internet or otherwise) may well be building businesses at younger ages, either on top of a full time job or taking the leap direct from college or some starter job that they chuck.
The category of Politics and Economics is very broad. See the initial post there to get a flavour for that. We believe the further you have travelled along the road to Findependence, the more you need to pay attention to geopolitics and macroeconomics. Those interested in this area will find plenty of scope here.
Reviews
The Reviews tab refers chiefly to book reviews, most of which should touch on financial independence in some fashion. As above though, this can include many genres of books: everything from history to biography to entrepreneurship and the Internet. Any book that addresses our main categories will be fair game. And if you’re the author of a book yourself, perhaps a self-published e-book? (we know all about that!). Drop us a line anyway and we can discuss it.
This doesn’t have to be restricted to books. If you love the latest album on iTunes or think a movie is wonderful and want to share it with the world, then give us a try. Of course, we’d be more inclined to run it if it touches in some way on Findependence: a film like The Wolf of Wall Street.
A word on the forums
Another place we’re looking for content is the discussion forums. We have five forums planned to start with and they take a demographic/ages-and-stages approach to the key steps in reaching Financial Independence. Once we have a bit of two-way to and fro between contributors, this may be the place to develop story ideas, ask questions, post links and even subtly promote your business or product, if done in a way that readers are presented with valuable content. They will be moderated but having gone through a long experience with the Wealthy Boomer forums in the past, I think we’ll be able to spot the difference between blatant sales pitches and valuable sharing!
It will be awhile before the forums reach “critical mass.” That’s beyond our control and up to the community. In the meantime, we’re happy to provide the infrastructure.
How to reach Jonathan
First, try jonathan@findependenceday. If I don’t respond quickly it might be that our email system is experiencing a hiccough during this transition between sites. If so, send a DM (Direct Message) to @jonchevreau at Twitter but be sure to @me as well to tell me to check the DM. Like many Twitter users, I can’t be relied upon to monitor DMs unless I’m flagged via the @function. Those who have my actual email are welcome to use it as well: I just don’t want to put it up on the web just yet because of all the spam it may create.
For the longest time, Robert Bengen’s 4% annual withdrawal rule (plus an inflation adjustment) was the gold standard for simplicity in estimating SAFEMAX: a safe annual maximum withdrawal rate from retirement nest eggs that minimizes the odds of having to break sharply into principal at too fast a rate, thereby leaving little or nothing in advanced old age.
Of late, there’s been a lot of articles questioning this rule. Actually, it’s been going on for awhile. The following piece from Investment News goes back to early 2012. You may have to register to read the full piece but it’s free once you enter your email and probably worthwhile to bookmark them anyway. And you might want to do the same here at the Financial Independence Hub too! — JC
Regular readers won’t be surprised to see an installment dedicated to the difference between Retirement and my preferred term Financial Independence. However, I’m by no means the only person endeavouring to make this distinction. The other day a prominent American financial planner and influential blogger, Michael Kitces, called for a shift in focus for his profession in this essay published on his blog.
He noted that for most of its history the term “retirement” has been synonymous with “not working.” For all the pleasant imagery of golf, vacations and walking on the beach, the historical context for the term retirement was, Kitces wrote, “a mechanism to ‘force’ people out of jobs they were no longer competent to perform. Programs like Social Security were originally a way to soften the blow for those forced out of the workplace into retirement … and they weren’t expected to live long in that retirement in any case.
Total leisure may not lead to happiness
But research is showing that a total cessation of work in favor of a life of 100% leisure “does not actually create the happiness that we might have expected,” Kitces says, “Leisure as an occasional break from work is appealing, but a full-time life of leisure can become boring once the novelty wears off.”
This is exactly what Financial Post writer Andrew Allentuck once told me: Allentuck himself has passed the traditional retirement age of 65 but he continues to write a weekly Family Finance feature focused on the retirement readiness (or lack thereof) of various couples in their 50s and 60s (usually.) When I asked him about this, Allentuck said simply, “Retirement is boring” and added that self-evident truth that the more you work, the more money you have.
Kitces observes that being productively engaged in work brings about the meaning and purpose in life that fuels positive well-being. The work environment also provides a source of interaction with others to fuel our social well-being. This explains the rise of part-time work in retirement or even entire new “encore” careers on the part of those who, financially speaking, could afford never to work for money again.
The financial industry has held out the state of “not working” as the ultimate goal and reward for decades of career success, yet those that reach the retirement finish line often find themselves “unhappy and unfulfilled” after a few months or years. The words in quotes is Kitces’s phrasing, which he follows by suggesting it may be time to rename retirement.
Findependence more achievable than Retirement
Roger Wohlner (from Twitter, @rwohlner)
His suggested alternative? You guessed it: financial independence. My own call to shift the discussion from Retirement to Financial Independence was articulated in a guest blog I wrote more than a year ago for Roger Wohlner, aka The Chicago Financial Planner.
Here’s how Kitces frames the discussion: “Being financially independent is about being independent from the need to work, which then opens the door to more productive conversations about whether we want to work, and what meaningful work might be.” (his emphasis).
I have noted before that for young people for whom retirement is a distant and seemingly impossible prospect, Financial Independence is a much more doable goal. Kitces says as much when he provides a nod to my book, writing that “For many, their ‘Findependence Day’ may be much more achievable than a full-on retirement, in addition to being more personally satisfying and conducive to well-being!”
But he adds that you can’t plan for financial independence until it’s identified in the first place. Addressing other financial planners and their interactions with clients, he closes: “So the next time you’re talking about ‘retirement,’ think about ‘financial independence and see where the conversation goes!”
Posted By 
Posted By 
