Interview on Global TV's The Morning Show

 

The Morning Show Interview

If you think fifteen minutes of fame goes by fast, then try six!  That's how many minutes we were allotted for our interview on Global TV's The Morning Show to talk about our book "Retired at 48 - One Couple's Journey to a Pensionless Retirement".  There was so much to talk about, and so little time!

I'm not sure if we were able to convey that the purpose of our book is not to teach people how they can retire at 48, but to help them create their own retirement plan so they can figure out at what age they can retire and with what type of lifestyle.

We never got around to talking about some of our strategies for generating a tax-efficient income flow, including taking advantage of favourable tax rates for Canadian eligible dividend stock, and simulating income splitting by making all of our non-registered accounts joint and each claiming half the income.

We didn't get to explain why we felt confident that we would not run out of money too soon as long as we stuck to our retirement plan. If we ever find ourselves spending more than planned in any year, we will reduce our discretionary spending in the next year to get back on track.

We didn't have time to share our tips for reducing expenses in car insurance, health insurance, cell phones, cable, entertainment and more.

Hopefully what we did talk about generated enough interest so that people will want to check out our book.  This was a great experience and provided excellent exposure for Retired at 48.  We would like to thank Global TV for giving us this opportunity!

Click on this link to see our interview.

Toronto Star Book Review and the Purpose of the Book

Our book Retired at 48 has been reviewed by Toronto Star Business reporter, Ellen Roseman.  The Toronto Star article can be found here at this link.

Based on the book's title, you would be justified in assuming that we are claiming that we can teach you how you can retire early as well.  That was never our intention.  Our retirement plan is based on our own personal circumstances, which most likely won't apply to most other people.  In particular, we had two reasonably well paying jobs, no kids and no debt when we started to seriously save for retirement.  All these factors contributed to our early retirement at age 48, more than any strategies or planning steps that we could implement.  So it would be unrealistic to think that anyone else who has a different personal situation could expect the same results.  This is just what happened to work out for us.

Having said that, the steps we took to create our retirement plan in order to calculate at what age we could afford to retire, should be applicable to most people.  These steps include analyzing and tracking our spending habits, creating a budget and sticking to it, generating a savings plan that predicted  how large a retirement nest egg we needed to accumulate and how long it would take to get there, and a spending plan which we now follow closely in our retirement years, to ensure we don't deplete that nest egg prematurely.  Our strategies to structure our post-retirement income to minimize income tax burden, and to generate a regular income flow to pay our bills, should also be applicable. 

If you are looking for the magic bullet of how you can retire at 48, then please don't read our book.  We won't be telling you this.  But if you want to learn how to generate a plan to determine at what age you could retire and with what type of lifestyle, then our experiences may help you.