Findependence Hub turns 10 years old

Hard to believe but Findependence Hub just turned 10 years old. We launched Financial Independence Hub on Nov. 03, 2014. Here is the very first post.

You’ll note that for a long time, we self-referred with the short-hand “The Hub.” This was of course long before another site was launched a few years back also called The Hub. So we try NOT to refer to ourselves using that short form, as it may be confusing.

However, the slogan still applies: North America’s Gateway to Financial Independence. That’s because both our readers and content providers are in Canada and the United States. Given the population differences, though, we are disproportionately Canadian.

From the start, the aim was to publish at least four blogs a week, and often five. In fact, as of this writing, we had published 2,931 blogs: just shy of 3,000. That’s roughly 300 blogs a year.

As we explained a few weeks ago, generally we don’t schedule Wednesday blogs far in advance, in order to leave that slot open for any late-breaking developments. It also allows us to shuffle the schedule when necessary.

The future

So what of the future? Well, my personal financial life is more or less an open book, between what I write here and what I write every month in my Retired Money column at MoneySense.ca.

As I disclosed earlier this year, I am now 71 and therefore enter the magic land of RRIFs as of the end of this year and into January 2025. At some point, I may retrench blog frequency down to three blogs a week instead of four or five: aiming for Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Happy to hear reader and sponsor feedback on that though. I’m also open to partnering suggestions.

Certainly I would like to thank the registered users who have hung in this far, as well as our advertisers who make it possible to provide this content at no charge to readers.

It’s always nice to look back at what we’ve learned but I can’t do better than point readers to last weekend’s republished blog from Fritz Gilbert’s The Retirement Manifesto. There he relates what he learned writing more than 400 blogs about Retirement. Fritz’s turf is America but we view Retirement and Semi-Retirement quite similarly.

From Findependence Day to Victory Lap Retirement

I’ve always made a distinction between the term Retirement and Financial Independence, which I shortened to Findependence, as in my financial novel Findependence Day. The original North American/Canadian edition was published in 2008, and ultimately spawned this website. You may still be able to find copies at Amazon.

There was for a time another URL called FindependenceDay.com but sadly I let that domain lapse and and any content that might be there now has nothing to do with me. When I ran that domain, it mostly sold the original edition but you can still find the U.S. edition published by Trafford.com around 2013.

If anything, this site is about a concept called Victory Lap Retirement, the title of my last (co-authored) book, published in 2016 or so, with ex corporate banker Mike Drak.  To me, Findependence Day is the day you achieve your goals for Financial Independence, and Victory Lap Retirement is everything that happens after that milestone.