The truth is that sometimes retirement arrives whether we’re ready or not. One day your boss walks in and says “You’ve got two choices: Retire or be fired.” It’s been on my mind a lot recently because of the RBC Outsourcing Fiasco, but also because it has happened to relatives and friends in every recession, from the 1980s to the 2009s.
Here are recent some articles dealing with retirement and readiness, on my site
and in other web worlds
- The CBC reports on the RBC decision that could force up to 45 employees into early retirement in: McMaster student leads online charge against RBC hiring practices
- Boomer wrote a poignant personal post about the need to make a difficult personal retirement decision in How My Retirement Plans Got Derailed – Big Time
- At the Financial Post there’s a double barrel of early retirement articles:
Researcher’s forced retirement leaves couple uncertain of future
and
When retiring early just means more work
- Big Cajun Man explores the facts in Job Picture Less Rosey in March for Canada and when jobs get tight, the young and the old are often the ones left looking for work.
- Dianne Maley of the Globe and Mail writes “An entrepreneur’s path to early retirement” which leads to the usual bickering about financial advisor advice in the heated comments section. (But not as heated as usual as no one has a public service pension.)
- Michael James on Money discussed the idea that “up to 60% of portfolio growth may come after retirement” in Portfolio Growth after Retirement What does this mean, though, if your retirement starts 12 years earlier than expected? That’s 12 years of savings that won’t be invested and 12 additional years when withdrawals will be made ahead of schedule before the investments had time to grow. Not an encouraging prospect.
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Do you have an early retirement story to recommend? Please share your experiences and recommendations with a comment.
is that we each have to decide what we really want to spend our money on. Everyone is different. You may prefer to eat Kraft Dinner every night for a year so that you can take a trip to Hawaii once a decade. That’s fine so long as it’s a choice you’re making and not just “life happening to you” because you never thought about what you feel it’s worth spending money on and what it’s not. I, for one, do not think it’s worth spending money to replace my laminate with a granite countertop.