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Did the 4% rule work if a Canadian retired in 2000?

Did the 4% rule work if a Canadian retired in 2000?

I love this article from the Globe and Mail (sorry kids! Sub only!But please sub to at least one Canadian paper and one magazine a year to support homegrown content /soapbox) but here is what I think the most important takeaway is:

The bursting of the internet bubble provided a real-time test of Mr. Bergen’s “4 per cent rule,” which brings me to the hypothetical Canadian investor who started their retirement at the end of August, 2000. They began with a $1,000,000 portfolio. Half was invested for growth in the S&P/TSX Composite Index while the other half was invested for income in the S&P Canada Aggregate Bond Index.

The investor took $3,333.33 out of the portfolio to live on at the end of each month (a 4-per-cent initial annual withdrawal rate) with the payments being stepped up each month to adjust for inflation. (The figures herein are based on monthly data with reinvested distributions, but they do not include fund fees, taxes or other trading costs. The portfolios were rebalanced monthly.)



(Yeah, the 5% seems to be missing)

This is absolutely great news — unless you were that 6% guy. Ouch!

The shocking realization you’ve reached your goals

The shocking realization you’ve reached your goals

Tax season brought us a huge refund which we will use to payoff the mortgage

I realized this week that some personal finance adages are true. I suppose that I always knew this intellectually but I managed to say this out loud (and by “out loud” I really mean, “in a Signal chat”) this week and once I said it, the weight of what I had accomplished came into sharp focus.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Mr. Tucker’s work was recently acquired by another company. This required him to sign a whole new slew of legal documents, some of which were a bit unclear. Fortunately for me though, I have a friend who is an incredibly brilliant employment lawyer who is licensed to practice in Ontario AND in California. Those are two very challenging jurisdictions to get licensed in (and she has a ton of experience with tech companies) so clearly, the woman is a GD genius. Luckily for me, she is also a lovely friend who read all of Mr. Tucker’s new documents before he signed them.

When all was said and done, she asked me about how things were looking for him at work, personally…and that’s when I took stock and realized that … IT DOESN’T MATTER! We are finally at a point in our lives that while it would be shitty, a layoff wouldn’t decimate our finances.

Having her ask that question made me go through our accounts and made me realize the following:

– Our mortgage will be paid off by July (two months before schedule!). The house is currently worth high 6 figures.
– Mr. Tucker’s retirement accounts will meet our target by the end of 2023.
– Any layoff would result in a severance enough to carry us through to the end of the year.
– The kid’s RESPs are currently funded enough to get them a 4-year undergrad degree + books at a local university. We’re still funding it but even if we stopped putting money in it today, they’d still be fine!
– We are currently mostly living off my income, which is private disability insurance indexed to inflation until I am 65.
– I have a small pension + lifetime benefits (Mr. Tucker would get half of it should I die as well as half of my CPP and the kids would get an orphan’s benefit as well until they are out of school).
– On top of regular tax shelters, I also have an RDSP which gives me 100% return on investment via government grants until I am 49 (and can grow tax-free in investments until I am 59).
– Should either of us pass away, we have sufficient life insurance and investments to carry the surviving spouse and the children.
– We have a secondary property that is currently rented to a family member at-cost but that has a mortgage on it at around 1/3rd of its value.

When I wrote all of this in a message I realized quickly that even though I had spent some time worrying about the company acquisition, there really is nothing to worry about. While we wouldn’t be living high on the hog, the decisions we made have been good ones.


We do a monthly game night with friends but for Easter we decorated eggs

So, those true adages? Consistency does beat intensity AND time in the market beats market timing. Let’s look at one example, our kid’s education savings accounts:

Consistency beats intensity
I didn’t end up opening an RESP until my eldest was around 3 (12 years ago). Up until 2020 we could only afford to fund it to the tune of $80 a month ($40 each) because we had a pretty high child support payment and I stayed at home with the kids until the eldest was 4.

But what we did do when they were younger was that we asked family members to give us money for their RESPs instead of buying gifts for various holidays. So for about 5 or 6 years (until they wanted to spend their birthday & Christmas money), we were able to throw in an extra $150 twice a year for their education.

Time in the market beats timing the market
When I go back and look at what we put in vs what we actually have, we see an almost 40% increase over the last 12ish years (investments + grants – so 20% each) in the original accounts (we do still fund these with the same $80 monthly).

Conversely, we also started a new RESP in 2020 using a Robo-advisor because we wanted to play catchup on our contributions and get the grants for previous years. In those 40 months we have seen a 24.6% return in that account – 20% of which is grants, so really we have only made 4.62% on our money since 2020. Not bad (but not great) considering how awful it’s been.

So even though we have been putting more away every month the long game has paid off in spades when you look at the return. We also aren’t done yet, I will continue to put money into the account until we run out of grants available to each kid AND it will also compound for at least another 3 years.

No matter what the market does, we just continue to fund our registered accounts. Dip in the market? Fund it monthly. Market overvalued? Fund it monthly. I just cannot be bothered to think about these things and even through it may or may not be the most perfect way, dollar cost averaging has often been my long term strategy. I used this strategy because it was easier to set up our budget and make savings come out of our accounts every month like a bill rather than have to constantly think about it.


Spring chorin’ has begun

Hoisted by my own petard
I was saying to Mr. Tucker the other night that while we intellectually know that we make good money and have assets, we sometimes feel a bit like money is tight. The reality is though is that we have structured our budget to feed money into two kinds of goals. Regular goals such as putting money away to buy a car with cash every 10 years, education savings, emergency savings etc. Then we also have stretch goals, which is basically saving almost everything Mr. Tucker makes into vacations, retirement accounts and paying off our house early.

So we feel poor sometimes when I have to say, “No, sorry, we are out of pocket money this month so we can’t have take out.” Because really, we live off of a bit over what a median household income is in Canada. But we don’t actually ever have to make really hard decisions, so it’s all in our heads and is guided by our goals. The things we end up denying ourselves is junk food, more subscription services or weird baubles at the dollar store. We don’t deny ourselves the things we really enjoy, such as travel and going to concerts. The kids also have all sorts of cool lessons and activities. But this is self-restriction for a higher goal. We’re actively making choices to deny ourselves shit we don’t really need in order to reach…well, apparently we’ve pretty much reached it…OUR LONG TERM GOALS.

It’s just absolutely wild to me that we can see the finish line after years of just putting in the effort. Of course, Mr. Tucker still wants to work until the end of 2024 but it is nice to know that we have a backup plan should things go south.

It’s so funny that one little question from my friend would lead to such a heavy weight being lifted off of me. But here we are!


Another fine book club was had

A short history of my personal FI success

A short history of my personal FI success

My foray into personal finance started when I was 18 and dirt poor & living on my own. In the 90s buying clubs like Columbia House (hah! Remember them?) and Book of the Month Club were all the rage and like a fool, I was a member of both of them. But as fate would have it, one of the books that I received was The Tightwad Gazette (TWG) II. When I got it I read it cover-to-cover and then I read it again. Despite the fact that these mail order clubs were pretty awful, I probably have benefited more financially from stumbling across that book than from anything else that has happened. It lead me down a road of seeing that there was a different way of living and it gave me the power to understand that I had control over my money. Eventually I bought both TWG I & III as well as Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL), which is the book that had the most impact on me during my 20s and 30s.

Before the FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) movement with its stoicism and side hustles by tech-based workers & other high-income adherents, there was Joe and Vicky. Their vision of the for financial independence (FI) movement was one of simple living and community. Their ideas were about resource management not just for the accumulation of cash but also concerned the environment & leaving the planet a better place. It was a vision for a better world and it spoke to me. Although I have enjoyed some of the FIRE blogs over the past 10 years, I have been embedded into the YMOYL vision of FI and have found that the bootstrapping, solitary goal of accumulating money of most FIRE bloggers has struck me as mostly empty. Of course, there are those who have a larger vision but they don’t seem to be the ones screaming the loudest.

Of course, you may be thinking, “Well Tucker, learning about all of this by 20 certainly didn’t help you to retire early! You worked until 3 years ago!” While that is true, it is also missing the larger picture, which is the one of independence, or having the freedom to make different choices. By learning to be good with my money it has given me the option to make decisions that I may not have been able to make had a lot of debt or lived a large lifestyle. Here are some things that FI knowledge has given me:

– After being laid off from my well-paying corporate job I was able to join a government-sponsored small business training program that lead me to owning an eco-friendly cleaning business in my early 30s.
– After listening to my mother, I bought a condo downtown for $115k when I was 24 years old with a $5000 inheritance I received (full disclosure she co-signed the mortgage). After a couple of years I was able to remortgage & used the money to pay off my student loans (the difference was 6.5% a year!).
– After I became a parent, being frugal allowed me to stay home with my kids until they were 2 & 4 years old.
– I went back to work when it looked like Mr. Tucker’s job situation looked tenuous. But we were still able to live off of one salary.
– When I went back to work I was able to take contracts from September – May and stay home with my kids over the summer (I would have worked but student programs generally filled those jobs during those months).
– Going back to work allowed us to spend a month in Puerto Rico in 2014 & not have debt long-term.
– Saving up a huge down payment for our house allowed us to take on a smaller mortgage than we would have. We are now looking to pay this off by 2023.
– When I was diagnosed with Primary Lateral Sclerosis the waiting period for sickness benefits with Employment Insurance was a month & only lasted 12 weeks. The waiting period for my Disability Insurance to kick in was 13 weeks! Having savings & having an emergency budget for when money got tight helped us not use credit to see us through.
– Being disabled can be expensive: having a doctor fill out my forms just to apply for my benefits was $45 each time. I have great medical insurance but it only pays a portion of my mobility device costs.
– Because we wanted to travel when the kids could be pulled out of school and my mobility was still good, we are frugal in our daily lives but have visited many countries, were able to go to Disney (twice!) and Universal and are able to rent cottages with friends in the summer.

All in all, my FI knowledge, ability to switch into a tight budget, and our savings rate have all contributed to our lifestyle. Between graduating from university & my diagnosis I have worked full-time only about 10 years & the rest were part-time or were the years I was a stay-at-home-parent. We don’t have a basement full of stuff (but if you enjoy that kind of thing, more power to you), we only got a car when the eldest was around 1, we cloth diapered, we reused everything, ate a lot of beans, and didn’t buy a lot of things we didn’t need. But we did want to travel, our kid’s university savings accounts are well-funded and our retirement accounts are doing well. We also have a ton of friends in our community and the kids and the adults all have hobbies that they enjoy doing.

Overall, this is the definition of FI success to me. We don’t live life on autopilot but instead make concentrated decisions of how we want to spend our time & money to live the life we want. It’s part luck, part good choices but also making great friends, having the support of our families, and having fun hobbies to sustain us. We have even loftier goals for the next three years but more on that later!