Tag: Retirement Posts

It’s no secret that over the last few decades the economies of North America have changed from ones that favour saving to ones that favour spending. When interest rates were 10%, you could simply leave your money in the bank and watch it grow. Now with inflation rates of around 3% per year (which is typically caused by the government printing more fiat money), your purchasing power will decrease if you leave your money in the bank. That means that most of us are forced to put our savings into the Stock Market Casino and hope that black comes up more often than red. With interest rates hovering around 0%, only a fool would leave the majority of their money in the bank. GICs are obviously an option, but unless you are making more than 3% per year, you’re just pissing money away as well. Also, GICs are illiquid, meaning […]

There was a tweet tonight that kind of got me thinking. Nowadays, most of us are educated in school that we should start saving for retirement as early as possible to take advantage of the benefits of compound interest. There are lots of books that parable that concept, one of which is The Wealthy Barber, a book I read when I was probably 23 or so. The question on Twitter had to do with the amount of money a person would need a year to maintain a roughly comparable quality of life. The number floating around was $50,000 a year, one which I think (depending on where you live obviously), would probably be sufficient for most people, assuming they own their own home. There are several rules of thumb to what that absolute number should be, one of which says it should roughly be about 75% of your final year […]