How financial journalists plan their own pension – Moneysenense

At the end of June Rob left the paper after 29 years; His beat was PF for 27 of those years. But as is typical of financial experts, he is not really retired in the traditional sense – he has just left employment. At the age of 62 he admits that my term “fight pendence” is an appropriate description of his changed status. He plans to write two monthly columns for the Globe: one about his new pension experience, the other on traditional PF. His popular Carrick on Money column is written by Globe and Mail colleagues and is simply renamed money.

Rob and I both look back on the groundbreaking work that Bruce Cohen did in the Canadian PF-Beat, who handed Bruce to me for a few years after I joined the financial post in 1993. Although we regard him as the grandfather of Canadian PF writing, Cruce himself two previous PF writers two previous PF writers and in fact the Greand-Grandfaters of the genre: The Late Mike Zimmer and Henry Zimmer.

Rob spent a decade with Canadian press before the globe; After participation, he sold editors about the fact that at that time no one was covered in the newspaper PF as Cohen did. The Toronto star had Ellen Roseman and James Daw about PF. James is now retired. I remember that years ago in a speech said that she was not going to retire ever. That has not changed, she confirmed for this column. Now 78, she continues to work in semi-pension as a financial educator and speaker in public.

Unlike other journalists who are mentioned in this column, Bruce is one of the few who really retired: after a transition of five years, he says, he fully retired at the traditional retirement age of 65. Now 75, he lives in 50 hectares north of Toronto. He quotes actuaris Malcolm Hamilton’s conclusion that expenditure and lifestyle in retirement are almost the same as with the retirement: “Ergo, most people do not need a 70% income replacement ratio. That is true for me, although I do not know whether it applies to the general population if many older people are retiring and many adult children with their parents.”

Back in the FP -Newroom I was opposed to Garry Marr, who wrote about Allied topics such as real estate and mortgages. Garry left a few years ago, but the FP has just announced that he will return as a full-time columnist to take over-you guessed the PF-Beat. His first column appeared on August 12.

Asked for his tips via e -mail, Marr said he is not going to retire, but those who hope for one day should benefit from employers’ competitions on RRSPs. “I return to Postmedia with two liras filled with employer contributions. The pick-up of this by employees is extremely low. How many circumstances are there where a 100% return on your money makes no sense? … Never to reject free money.”

Retiring full -time blogs about pension

This spring, the American pension blogger Fritz Gilbert made the ironic announcement that he is that “Retiring” from full -time blogging about pension. However, he keeps his blog, the pension manifesto, and will write when the mood strikes him.

For this column, Gilbert says that although money issues can be at the top of our career earlier, “We soon realize that the true value is in sorting out the non-financial issues. While we continue to retire, we realize how really complex those non-financial issues are, and we discover that it is in the Doolhof and experimentation, experimentes, experiments, experiments, experiments, experiments, experimenting, experimenting, of experimenting. is confronted with the constant changes in your life.

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Bruce Cohen emphasizes that HealthSpan Is more important for pensioners than the lifespan, and he proposes to a large part of choosing where to retire, is now and in the future access to health care. Moreover, “social activity is of vital importance and can support both physical and mental health.” Hobbies are important for the mind: he recently recorded photography via an iPhone 16 Pro.

I don’t expect Carrick or Gilbert to retire for a long time. I am 72 and still go and have to admit that I am influenced by experienced financial writers such as Gordon Pape and Patrick McKeough. Pape is just in the late 80s continues to publish His newsletter for internet richness builder and writes regular columns for the Globe. McKeough is in the mid-70s, but still publishes newsletters from investors such as Canadian Wealth Builder and Wall Street predictor. (I often publish his blogs on my website.)

Returning to my interview with Rob Carrick, we started our zoom exchange where I had gone with Garry Marr: about the value of employer pensions. Carrick says he was lucky to be in the defined benefit pension plan of the world. “Pension is like building a wall of many bricks. My pension is [just] A stone. “His wife, a consultant, also has a small pension pension, so that is two large bricks as a solid foundation.

Priority one was paying off the mortgage

While such pensions reduce the amount of available RRSP contribution room (via the so-called pension adjustment), Carrick always maximized the space. What worked for the couple was the payment of their mortgage in the fifty and then transferring the release payments “Dollar for Dollar” to RRSPs and TFSAs. He admits that he and his wife were lucky to entered the housing market decades ago. It is not without reason that my financial novel did Pindpean day Explain “The basis of financial independence is a paid house.”

“You are absolutely right about that,” says Carrick, adding that he is sad about how difficult it is for younger people who bought houses after the run -up in prices in 2020/2021.

Unlike me, Carrick has no immediate plans to start an RRIF. During his wealth accumulation days he was a do-it-yourself investor (do-it-yourself), mainly investing in exchange-related funds (ETFs) and dividend shares. However, when he started to retire with full -time work in the past 18 months, he consulted a financial planner and consolidated various pension accounts. His planner manages most of the Carrick family’s portfolio and “I leave when he goes to RRIF to him. He gives us a route map that I follow: rrifs are in the future, but we don’t have to open them yet.”

The majority of his money is now in a mix of ETFs, individual shares and GICs purchased when the interest rates were higher. “I didn’t want to be one of those pensioners who opens their investment account every morning to see how they do and make all these changes,” says Carrick. “Have a good plan and stay there: check every six to 12 months and that’s it.”

Investing in ETFs of assets allocation

Knowing that Carrick was an early enthusiastic supporter of ETFs of Assiva allocation, I suggested that although many financial journalists know that in theory a single assets allocation ETF might be all that we really need, in reality most of the temptation to float in multiple investments.