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My latest MoneySense Retired Money column looks at a handful of FIRE bloggers who should be familiar to readers of this site, Findependence Hub: notably Mark Seed of myownadvisor and Bob Lai of Tawcan.
As you can see by clicking on the column headline, How are FIRE adherents making out?, Seed recently announced he has reached his Financial Independence in his early 50s. Bob Lai, meanwhile, is still working in his 40s but blogged on how he hopes to reach Findependence before 2030.
The MoneySense column also updates the status of veteran personal finance columnist Rob Carrick, who ended full-time employment at the Globe & Mail last year, the subject of an earlier Retired Money column. And we mention a good blog by The Retirement Manifesto’s Fritz Gilbert about the 12 Good Years between age 60 and 72. As I ironically close the column with, it seems I have just used up my own 12 good years!
The real focus of the MoneySense column is however Mark Seed, just as it was Carrick last summer. In both cases, we exchanged views in Zoom or GoogleMeets over the course of an hour or so.
By now, it’s hardly necessary to remind readers that the FIRE acronym stands for Financial Independence Retire Early, as the image above illustrates.
Note that our FIRE subjects in the column span four decades: Lai his 40s, Seed his 50s, Carrick his 60s and I am in my 70s, evidently still running this website and writing for MoneySense, a former employer.
The end of Salaried Employment does not mean no more Working
The observant reader will note that none of the bloggers mentioned here have actually begun the traditional “Full-Stop Retirement.” When FIRE proponents describe Early Retirement, they usually mean leaving the comfort of full-time salaried employment and all that it entails: commuting, bosses, endless meetings, tax deducted at source, annual performance reviews and so on.
But in almost every case, including Carrick and Gilbert, these former employees have become freelance self-employed practitioners of what you could call Semi-Retirement, Phased Retirement, an Encore Career or other synonyms.
Take a look at what Carrick has been doing since he “retired” from the Globe and you may conclude what I quipped to him: sure doesn’t sound like Retirement! And yet, Rob assured me he now has a lot more freedom and flexibility than when he was employed, however satisfying he found the G&M job to be. (Having done a 4-year stint with the G&M in the early 80s myself, I can confirm the job had many pluses.)
Typical of those who have reached their FIRE goal, Mark Seed plans to keep myownadvisor going, as does Bob Lai with Tawcan, Gilbert with The Retirement Manifesto and myself with Findependence Hub.
While running financial blogs (or a Substack now in the case of Carrick), seems to be a baseline activity for semi-retired financial commentators, there are also several allied activities that can be leveraged by and through those platforms: public speaking, consulting and book publishing.
Indeed, one of the first books I co-authored after I left full-time employment at MoneySense in 2014 was to self-publish (with former corporate banker Mike Drak) the book Victory Lap Retirement, which describes the post-employment adventure semi-retirees can expect.
Drak, who is a couple of years younger than me, is offering Victory Lap Retirement and two books he subsequently wrote (Retirement Heaven or Hell and Longevity Lifestyle By Design) as free downloads through the BoomingEncore.com website. Aren’t you glad you read to the bottom of this blog?
