Tag Archives: Financial Independence

Weekly Wrap: Work may not end after Findependence, as Encore Careers beckon

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | May 15, 2015

By Jonathan Chevreau

Financial Independence Hub

On Wednesday, the Financial Post ran an online column of mine it titled Life After Retirement: Your Working Career Probably Isn’t Over Yet — Welcome to the Encore Act.

Regular Hub readers will know that if I had my druthers, the headline would read more like “Why Work won’t end after your Findependence Day.” (that is, the day you achieve Financial Independence).

I don’t view the terms Retirement and Financial Independence as interchangeable. By definition, Retirement (or at any rate, traditional full-stop Retirement funded with a generous Defined Benefit pension) means no longer working for money. Financial Independence (aka Findependence), on the other hand, can occur years and even decades before traditional Retirement and so seldom means the end of productive work.

This very web site — which just passed six months in existence — is dedicated to clarifying this distinction. And of course the site also constitutes a big element of my own personal Encore Act: next Tuesday will be the one-year anniversary of my own Findependence Day. In my case, I define that as no longer working as an employee of a giant corporation or government entity, and having the financial resources to work if I choose to, and not if I don’t.

How to find your Encore Career

One Thing I Wish My Father had Taught Me

Posted By Michael Drak | May 13, 2015

By Michael Drak,

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

As I was growing up my father taught me many important lessons. I was taught about the importance of getting a good education and using that education to get ahead in the world.

He instilled in me the need for working hard, making good money and providing for family. He taught me the importance of saving and having the goal of eliminating debt as quickly as possible.

But what he didn’t teach me was about the important concept of Findependence and how it would positively impact my life once it was achieved.

It really wasn’t his fault for not making me aware of Findependence [a contraction of Financial Independence] because back when he was working the goal was to find a good-paying job with a solid company, try to stay there for the rest of your working life, and eventually retire with a defined benefit pension in your back pocket.

Days of a single employer for a lifetime are almost gone

Life was so simple back then but times have changed. Continue Reading…

How to achieve “Flow” — or optimal experience

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | May 8, 2015

By Jonathan Chevreau,

Financial Independence Hub

In a book on happiness we reviewed here recently, I came across a book called Flow, billed in the subtitle as “The psychology of optimal experience.”

This book, first published as a hardcover way back in 1990, became a New York Times bestseller and has spawned several followup titles elaborating on the concept of flow and creativity. The author’s name is not easily recalled: Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor at California’s Drucker School of Management and also director of the Quality of Life Research Center at Drucker. (Incidentally, if you find the name unpronounceable and unmemorable, as I do, one of his books helpfully suggests the surname can be pronounced “chick-SENT-me-high.”)

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Flow and the author who coined the term.

I must say that I was a bit skeptical about the term at first: Continue Reading…

How to get the new TFSA limit to work for you

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | May 5, 2015

By Jonathan Chevreau

Financial Independence Hub

Here’s my latest column from the print edition of MoneySense magazine, written right after the federal budget: Get the new TFSA limit to work for you.

Click on the link for details, but in a nutshell — and has been extensively reported in the media, such as this piece by Gordon Pape (subscribers only) — there’s no reason why you can’t add another $4,500 to your Tax Free Savings Account right now, in addition to $5,500 you may have contributed anytime on or after Jan. 1, 2015. (Note to American readers: the TFSA is the equivalent of Roth IRAs, providing no upfront tax deductions but which let you eventually withdraw money tax-free in Retirement or for other purposes).

That means a whopping $20,000 per couple. Now while Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau seems to think only “rich” people have that kind of money available, the fact is that many hard-working middle class people have been saving and investing for the better part of two or three decades, and built up substantial non-registered or “taxable” portfolios. Even though they may have paid income tax to acquire the capital in the first place, over those decades they have been paying annual taxes on interest, dividends and (often) capital gains generated by that capital.

As the column points out, those who have built such “open” portfolios don’t have to use new cash to put $10,000 per annum into their TFSAs. They merely have to start transferring their non-registered securities into their TFSAs. This is called a “transfer-in-kind” Continue Reading…

How to find your Encore Career

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | May 5, 2015

By Sheryl Smolkin, Retirement Redux

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

I recently interviewed Lisa Taylor, president of Challenge Factory, for savewithspp.com. Challenge Factory helps individuals make career transitions and employers dealing with an aging workforce.

Her organization draws on the talents of a wide variety of professionals as required by individual clients. But what’s really interesting is that they have a roster of over 160 people who are experts in their own jobs, who have agreed to take on Challenge Factory clients for one-day test drives.

“If you’re in one occupation, and you’re thinking that you might want to go and do something totally different, the best way to make a decision is to do a dry run,” Taylor says. “This gives our clients an opportunity to spend a day with an expert in that particular field to find out if their assumptions are really true and whether the job is really as great as they thought it would be.”

A life stage that can last 20 or 25 years

I asked Taylor what the terms second act, encore or legacy careers really mean to her. Continue Reading…