My Story
Whoppeee I am fully retired! Unfortunately I don’t have the 7 figure savings account or even the 70% of my pre-retirement income that everyone seems to be targeting these days. Also I’m not your typical retiree either.
I’m 40 years old and got my RRSP started at an early age (22ish). At that time I was with Investors Group and didn’t really pay much attention except at tax time when I usually got a nice refund. Promptly spent on skiing somewhere along the West coast of Canada, usually Whistler. I did make regular contributions right off my paycheque – so I thought I was doing something right at least.
A few years back I started to wonder why my retirement account wasn’t really increasing like I thought it should. Of course this was in the down time after Y2K and the markets were not doing very well for a few years. Still I thought I could do better myself. Today I am retired and managing my own RRSP and TFSA acounts and am finally starting to see some improvements. Yes this includes the terrible end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 and also the remarkable run from March 2009 onwards.
Along the way I got married, moved to the Middle East (Dubai), started my MBA (with a specialization in personal finance and project management), moved back to Canada, had 3 beautiful daughters, moved to the Maritimes, changed careers a couple of times, finally ending up in the financial industry and finished my MBA. After a tour with a major Canadian bank and two very large investment and insurance firms I retired to enjoy the good life!
Unfortunately my retirement income was next to nothing, and although my house is paid off my family is still quite young. I needed 100% of my pre-retirement income and hopefully more, especially as our goals are to travel while the kids are young and earn money while being online. To do that I needed to be a bit more aggressive on the investing side. That meant I needed to learn something more than just mutual funds and budgeting. Don’t get me wrong budgeting is critical and there is a place for mutual funds (OK no there isn’t, but ETFs or Exchange Traded Funds seem like they have some value).
This is when I really started to look seriously at both the Fundamental and Technical Analysis of stocks.
Along the way more and more people begain asking my opinion of financial matters from investing to banking to insurance. I finally started this blog to answer common questions and also to help myself learn all that I can.
Please comment and let me know what you think about the various topics of discussion you find here.