Tag Archives: Financial Independence

The 6 steps to Financial Independence

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L to R: Ed Rempel, Jon Chevreau, Mike Drak

By Ed Rempel, CFP, CMA

Special to the Financial Independence Hub 

What is financial independence? How do you get there?

Financial independence means work is optional. You have enough money to live the way you want without having to earn money.

When you get there, life changes. You have freedom. You can do only what you enjoy or find meaningful.

If you don’t like your job or your boss, just quit. Your life is full of options. You can make the most of your own life.

When you get there, you can have a quiet confidence. You are financially secure.

Your plan should start with understanding your inner motivation and defining specifically the lifestyle you want to have once you are financially independent. It is your opportunity to determine your future.

Becoming financially independent requires planning and effort, but it is worthwhile to live a more fulfilling life. “It’s not about the money. It’s about your life.”

“Real freedom is financial freedom.” When is your Findependence Day?

Achieving financial independence is a very broad topic. Writing nearly 1,000 comprehensive, professional financial plans specifically for real Canadians has given me a deep insight into what really works.

Seminar in Toronto this Wednesday evening

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In pursuit of Boomer happiness

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Mike Drak and Heather Reisman

I was at my local Indigo bookstore the other weekend and look at who happened to stop by.

I’m really starting to believe in this karma thing as more and more chance encounters like this are happening to me since writing the book.

Through this chance meeting I had the chance to talk to Heather about Victory Lap Retirement and my concern that we had miscategorized the book by putting it into the personal finance/retirement section. Heather was kind enough to share her thoughts and now I’m convinced that our book should be in the self improvement section.

Not really a retirement book

Victory Lap Retirement is really not a book about retirement; in fact we make a strong case about the benefits of not retiring in the traditional sense. It really is a book about lifestyle design with the goal of helping people create their own low-stress healthy fulfilling lifestyle, one based on their own unique needs and wants. We know that through proper planning and intentional living, we can substantially improve the quality of our remaining years, which is not a bad way to go out when you think about it.

Stress is the main risk in our eyes and prolonged exposure to stress can really mess a person up and in some cases actually kill them. I don’t know if it’s just me but I’m seeing more evidence of this each and every day; examples seems to be everywhere. Is it just me or are you seeing it as well?

We discussed the role of stress in a recent blog post called “The Big Dip.”

Stress inversely correlated with Happiness

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The “Work Optional” stage: Work because you WANT to, not because you HAVE to

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Nice to see the phrase “Work because you want to, not because you have to”  used by NestWealth.com in its just-posted Retirement blog that looks at Victory Lap Retirement.

VLR, as co-author Mike Drak and I call it, has in some recent weeks cracked the Globe & Mail non-fiction bestseller list.

The line “Work because you want to, not because you have to,” was originally coined by me in the prequel to VLR: Findependence Day.

Aman Raina

Meanwhile you can view a “video book report” on Victory Lap Retirement in this clip by Sage Investor’s Aman Raina, who regular Hub readers may recognize as a guest blogger who provides considerable insights into the robo-adviser space. You can also find the video book report here via iTunes.  Aman’s most recent Hub blog was this one reviewing Year 2 of his personal Robo-adviser experience and test.

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Review & Excerpt of Clay Gillespie’s Create the Retirement You Really Want

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The Financial Post has just published my review of a new book by Vancouver-based financial advisor Clay Gillespie: Create the Retirement You Really Want: And Retire Smarter, Richer and Happier.

You can find the online review by clicking on this highlighted headline: From Dreams to Legacy: New Book Details the 5 Stages of Retirement.

And below is an excerpt from the chapter highlighted in the review. We may also run at least one other excerpt in the coming weeks. Over to you, Clay!

By Clay Gillespie

Special the Financial Independence Hub

Retirement isn’t an event; it’s a process, and it begins years before you actually retire. Working with hundreds of clients over many decades, I’ve come to realize that retirement success is best achieved in five distinct stages. Each stage reflects a different aspect of who you are and where you want to be in retirement, and it all begins with a dream.

       1.) Dreams stage

The Dreams stage of retirement typically begins about five or six years prior to actual retirement. This is the time when people have decided to retire but aren’t yet sure of the date. It’s the time where retirement goals and hopes for the future become defined and a preliminary retirement plan is developed. For couples, especially, retiring now becomes an ongoing topic of discussion, not just something brought up in passing.

2.) Reality stage

The Reality stage usually occurs between 6 and 24 months before retirement and its temporal proximity really starts to hit home. Lifestyle issues come into greater focus, along with fears that one’s retirement nest egg may be inadequate. This is a crucial time from a planning perspective. Old Age Security (OAS) and Canada Pension Plan/Quebec Pension Plan (CPP/QPP) applications need to be made, income streams need to be consolidated, taxes need to be minimized and portfolios need to be optimized for income and growth.

3. Transition stage Continue Reading…

R.I.P. Traditional Retirement

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By Brandon Hill

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Does the notion of grinding it out day in and day out for the next 40 years to experience the freedom of retirement scare you? Wouldn’t you rather strive to enjoy the journey along the way?

The good news is that the traditional concept of retirement is slowly dying.

With the elimination of most employer pension plans and the fact that humans are living longer than ever, we are forced to come up with a different take on how our parents/grandparents view retirement.

Today I’ll show you two different concepts that rethink our traditional retirement model and are gaining popularity amongst the next generation of workers.

Findependence

What’s Findependence? It’s a term coined by Jon Chevreau: author, former editor-in-chief of MoneySense Magazine and founder of the Findependence Hub, an online platform and community for curated content focusing on achieving Financial Independence. “Findependence” is simply a contraction of the phrase “Financial Independence.”

Financial Independence is the point at which you work because you want to, not because you have to. It’s the tipping point where you have the right level of savings and investments working for you to provide the income you need to live your ideal life.

Think about that. It sounds very similar to our definition of retirement and at the same time totally reframes the perception of what retirement should entail. Rather than focusing on when you can stop work forever, you now shift your mindset to creating enough passive income through investing so that you can pursue anything you want.

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