Tag Archives: Work Optional

Semi-Retirement: the Halfway House between Employment and Full Retirement

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As those who have clicked on some of the 37 interviews featured at this week’s Canadian Financial Summit will know, there’s a lot of content to absorb.

One of those 37 talks was my chat with Kornel Szrejber for a talk titled Semi-Retirement: the Halfway House between Employment and Full Retirement.

To find it, you need to click on this link and then scroll down to my name, or whichever of the other 36 speakers you are interested in hearing. Each name is highlighted in blue and is a hyperlink to the actual interview. At the bottom of this blog you’ll find a link to Thursday’s content, including my conversation with Kornel and PWL’s Ben Felix about the MoneySense ETF All-Stars.

Similar to my MoneyShow Zoom interview earlier this week that was also about the MoneySense ETF All-Stars 2021 edition, the video with Kornel shows me in my home office: like all regular Zoomers, some of the books I have written are not too subtly displayed over my right shoulder.

New 2nd US edition of Findependence Day

Regular readers of the Hub will likely find my interview with Kornel to be somewhat familiar. We cover the topic of Findependence, which is a term I invented and introduced with the first Canadian edition of my financial novel titled Findependence Day. You can still buy the original book by clicking on the site.

Alternatively, you can click on the “Buy US edition” tab and you can find the first US edition published by Trafford, or the just-published second US edition published by Best Books Media in New York. Apart from focusing on US financial rules, the second edition also includes end-of-chapter summaries that weren’t in the original edition. It also puts more emphasis on the “Work Optional” theme.

Victory Lap

As the title of the interview with Kornel suggests, I view Semi-Retirement as a halfway house between full traditional salaried employment and the old-time Full Retirement that used to commence the moment you reached age 65. I am now three years beyond that, so am well into what Retirement guru Doug Dahmer calls the “Work Optional” phase. Another term for this is Victory Lap Retirement, which is the title of a non-fiction book I coauthored with former banker Mike Drak.

During our chat, Kornel asks me about what I’ve been up to since I left full-time employment in 2014 and how Findependence differs from traditional Retirement. As I say to friends and family, I try to work just three or four hours a day but when you’re operating a website aiming for fresh content every business day, it’s hard to really “retire” in the usual sense of the word.  It’s all about “encore” careers, although I saw a clip on Twitter yesterday that suggested that in the post-Covid world, aging baby boomers are becoming a bit disillusioned with the Encore career idea and are increasingly inclined to really slow down and smell the roses while they and close friends and family are still healthy enough to enjoy their leisure.

More on the MoneySense ETF All-Stars

The other of my presentations at the Canadian Financial Summit was a three-way chat with Kornel and PWL Capital’s Ben Felix, about the MoneySense ETF All-Stars 2021. It’s an audio-only conversation taped in the summer and you can access it through the usual podcast platforms here. Continue Reading…

Work Optional: Retire sooner to live your best life

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By Vicki Peuckert Cook

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

If you’ve spent any time reading about personal finance lately, you’ve likely heard about the “FIRE” movement. FIRE means Financial Independence – Retire Early.

Suze Orman got headlines by announcing she hated the FIRE movement (but she changed her position a few weeks later.) While Clark Howard “FIRE’d” before it ever became a popular thing to do. (If you think “retire early” doesn’t pertain to you, I strongly urge you to keep reading!)

Whether you agree with people who want to retire early in their 30s or 40s or not, it’s not hard to support the idea of becoming financially independent. Making work optional at some point so you can choose how to live your best life makes good sense.

Tanja Hester and her husband, Mark Bunje, left their careers behind to retire early (at ages 38 and 41) after reaching financial independence. Tanja’s new book, Work Optional – Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way teaches you how to get there too: no matter when you start or what age you’ll be when you leave work for the last time.

Retiring Is about your life, not just your money

It’s hard to think about retirement without focusing on money. After all, retiring without a solid financial plan – especially retiring early – is a recipe for disaster.

Tanja clearly explains what a bad idea it is to think you can just get back into the workforce if you run out of money in retirement. Her conservative advice is to Make Your Plan Bulletproof by diversifying your “magic money” sources.

Tanja doesn’t just tell you what to consider. She provides action steps and detailed information on ways to shore up your finances before quitting your day job for good.

What I really love about Work Optional is how Tanja embeds the importance of financial planning within retirement life planning. She redefines money as a tool to “help you live your best life as soon as possible.”

This helped me think about early retirement less as a race to get done with work but as a path to defining “living” according to your own terms.

Work Optional is organized in 3 main sections:

  • Determining what kind of life will thrill you
  • Creating a conservative financial plan to be able to live that life
  • Adapting to live your best “post-work” life

You can see that crafting and living your retirement dreams bookend the part of retirement planning most people really focus on: money. But Tanja doesn’t let you skip the tough questions you need to answer in order to transition to living the retirement you want.

She knows there is more to it than money, and she asks you to dig deep and engage with the most critical person in your retirement planning: YOU.

You have to do more than read

If you’re on this site, you probably listen to podcasts and read plenty of articles, blog posts, and books focused on personal finance. When I started on my own FIRE journey, I read everything I could find. Even with all of the information I had, I was still hesitant to act.

Did I really understand what I was reading? What if I missed something and made a mistake? Did new information come out that would help with my retirement planning? Continue Reading…

Retired Money: Work Optional and the FIRE movement

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My latest MoneySense Retired Money column looks at the so-called FIRE movement: (an acronym for Financial Independence/Retire Early), as well as a new book by a FIRE blogger titled Work Optional. You can find the full column by clicking on the highlighted headline here: How “Work Optional” can fit into your Retirement Plan.

You’ll see that regular Hub blogger Doug Dahmer — founder of the Retirement Navigator planning software — has been using the phrase Work Optional for at least five years, even though the new book of that name was just published in January 2019. It’s a useful phrase that describes the kind of thing Mike Dark and I refer to as Victory Lap Retirement in our jointly authored book of the same name.

There are many ways to describe this phase, but generally it refers to a period after full-time employment. FIRE proponents often declare that they “retired” in their 30s or 40s but of course most of them do not spend the next half century doing absolutely nothing. They really create encore careers based on self-employment, and often build businesses based on book-publishing, blogging and public speaking, wherein they reveal “how they did it.”

Victory Lap and Findependence

To some extent this very website does a similar thing, focused as it is on Financial Independence, or my contraction of it, Findependence. Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…