Our Surprising Early Retirement Strategy Revealed

if you're if you're in your 50s this is what we did when we were in our 50s preparing for retirement so we just really wanted to clear up about how we arrived financially at the position where we are right now but before we do that if you are new to our Channel we are Tina and norm and we talk all things retirement Financial travel and whatever is going on in the news at the moment and you're most welcome to join us we appreciate you viewing our videos yes so I retired from my career at around 55. I've had enough of that and but what what I had been doing um unbeknownst to me that would um Carry Us in early retirement because I was very interested in photography 18. absolutely in fact that's where we met a norm it was at The Good Old Dan Hall Camera Club so I'd always taken photographs and so I got into doing stock photography which was a a growing industry with this microstock movement um back in 2004 2005. so after about five or six years I built a pretty good income and I was able to just give up my main career um and we ran stock photography like a business so we had write Downs so when we traveled and went to foreign countries we would be taking pictures wouldn't we team yeah all the time yes we did so we wrote a portion of those trips off because we were exclusively photographing for stock photography and building a portfolio so we built that residual income base from royalties and that is how we were able to retire and finally when Tina got to 60 we persuaded you to fully resist and so our income at that point was able to pay all of our expenses until we were able to collect CPP which we opted to do early yes we did didn't we but we had also at the same time being changing the way while this was going on we were changing how we were doing our investing weren't we Norm very much so originally we had been putting a lot of our money into our rrsps and we decided that that possibly wasn't the best strategy so we stopped doing that that's right didn't we so we we didn't have company pensions uh Tina worked for a company but they didn't provide pensions I was self-employed at the same time that the I was starting to do the stock photography I realized one of the number one strategies for being retired was to be debt free that that was one of the biggest things we wanted to do wasn't it yeah so we were looking at our investments um over the years in mutual funds and they had disappointing returns so when we were 50 thereabouts we decided no more mutual funds no more paying to rrsps because we anticipated being low income in retirement because we didn't have company pensions all that we would have is income from the the rrsps that we'd already saved yeah and the state pensions yeah we never achieved those big salaries to get the benefits from the tax relief so we were investing in our home we decided let's pay off our home as quickly as we can and that became the new plan didn't it so all the money that was going before into rrsp suddenly went into paying off the mortgage as quick as we can and we actually did that didn't we in a very small period of time we managed to be mortgage free and that was a great feeling because it had always been part of our plan that we were going to sell the house to help fund our retirement wasn't that and that decision Tina was based on the fact that we didn't have company pensions yeah and we bought into this myth of needing a million dollars in retirement which is absolutely ludicrous so yeah we when Tina hit 60 we decided we would move to a cheaper town and be near our son who lives here and and his family and rent so yeah we're throwing our money away on rent but we are in rent control and it's very affordable for us because we get minimal rent increases each year and the other thing which is awesome too is that ours actually includes all our utilities so we don't have to worry when the cost of hydro or anything goes up because it's already taken care of so when we decided to take CPP at the earliest opportunity we could see that if we left it and took it later um you you're running the risk we needed the money to live on we didn't have those company pensions yeah so we saw the break-even period being quite a way in the future and we didn't think that we could count on having that longevity in our life after all with a baby boom generation and we've been experimented on by all these food companies and Plastics companies who knows what with everything we've been eating right that's right so coupled to this whole thing about selling the house being debt free the other building block was living frugally and being content yeah and so that was our major um idea so living frugally being below pension age we managed unbeknownst to us it was a big surprise yeah but we were living on the royalty income from our stock photography and stock video uh portfolios I got the CPP at the earliest point and added to it which made life even more comfortable yeah but of course remember I was two years behind you so that's right yeah so at that point um we could live reasonably well yeah the only the thing about selling the house is that we invested half of it in the stock market and we kept half of it in cash instruments High interest savings accounts and various uh Investments like that that were easily to be cashable so basically we have never lived on our house proceeds that we got when we sold it have we no so in actual fact all the Dividends are keeping being reinvested in there so whatever the money is generating is staying there the only Provisions that we did have was one of the things we wanted to do when we retired was we wanted to travel but we decided we would have to allow for that didn't we because we weren't going to have this extra money coming in each month so we did um give ourselves a budget didn't we to travel we did and so we have spent some of the house money in the first few years of our retirement um and we set a budget of 25 000 a year and that primarily was taking cruises and spending a month or two in Portugal in the winter time as well but the dividends keep coming so I'm Gonna Keep topping it up for everybody who was criticizing us that we sold a house and then the properties took off in value and that we lost and we lost doubt no we we've been getting yeah the the safe income from dividends and reinvesting it so it our kitty it just keeps growing and we're not using it to live on then covid came along and we haven't invested in that no so our advice to anybody in their 50s or indeed if you're retired is passive income is incredibly powerful and the opportunities for passive income are all around you I did it with photography and video because I had a lifetime of doing that there are a myriad other opportunities for doing this gig economy and once you create something like that you can have a small sole Trader business and you can make some write Downs based on your expenses which lowers your income once again and it becomes like a package doesn't it that it really does you just almost need to sort of set yourself a budget find out what you need find the ways that you it can be funded for you and we have never looked back have we no um it was the best decision we've ever done and our investment strategy has been Buy and Hold um we we had a couple of dead stocks so we sold those but the vast majority of our Holdings are what we bought all those years ago and they've been producing consistently and when we get that dead money we talked about in one of our videos so yeah the dividends that aren't being reinvested in our brokerage account we buy more stocks of the quality ones we already own and I think one thing too Norm that you'd mentioned was it wasn't available to us when we were in our early 50s but if you are around that age then fund your tfsas um it wasn't there when we could we could have done it we have done it and done it every year since but if you are a lot younger than us take advantage of that it's a huge tax break it's a great strategy Tina because the dfsas came along later in life for us but we knew we would be low-income retirees because we didn't have these Company pension schemes so the tfsa would be perfect for that because we didn't need the tax write-downs from our rrsps but all the money is sheltered and we've been investing since day one in those maximizing every year we do have dividend income stocks in there and if we ever Drew anything out which we haven't so far it doesn't increase your income for tax purposes because it's tax-free so if you're a mid to low income employee right now and a funding rrsps maybe talk to your financial advisor and see if there's an argument that you should be funding tfsa instead because you're not going to get the advantage of being a a huge income earner getting the tax write Downs in rrsps and then being a low income retiree if that's not you then the tfsa makes a lot of sense so we haven't spent our house money in retirement no income no we haven't spent hardly any money in the last three years on travel for various reasons yeah but we have enjoyed going to the trailer haven't we yeah and we we did spend our money on that and as you can see we are not there at the moment so we are having a brief break back home just to do a few things yeah and we thought we would just like to have this chat with you because a lot of people don't know the story about why or how we retired and how we fund it and we just wanted to give a few pointers especially if you're in your 50s and you're looking at retirement just number one thing get rid of debt yeah work as hard as you can yeah absolutely it's the only way to go be be debt free in retirement and if you can live frugally yeah then do that we we're not bothered about a big expensive car we've our next rental cars we've had it four years this Christmas and it's got 80 000 kilometers on it we just put gas in it and change the oil and it's perfect of course that was another thing too Norm hey when we moved in here was we had two cars so we had two of everything we were paying for yeah that I had so after a while we decided okay one of those has to go and that was a really smart decision because when you are retired a lot of the times you go places together or one can take the car and the other can stay home or vice versa and really it's it's really a bit of a waste having two cars and all there we fellas yeah and once again it's it's not just getting rid of the car it's getting rid of the maintenance the tires taxes Insurance yeah everything isn't it and and so that's why we live frugally and and we're not zooming off in opposite directions we make sure that if we have appointments yeah then once I will take the car one stays at home or one comes with us yeah to the appointment it's it's a mindset you're not denying yourself a car or you're not denying yourself a millionaire lifestyle just live how you would want to live and cultivate that Frugal mindset so have we explained what we did with our house money and I I think we have and I think we also just want to say that if you want to retire you can you just have to formula make a plan for you so it fits for you like we did for us and we use the CPP option of getting that early just to top us up from our passive income that we had already developed and maybe look at passive income it's it's not easy to generate we've gone from stock photography stop video and and now YouTube and we have a little business that we are able to save some of our hard-earned money by having tax write-downs so why don't you do something like this as well so if you haven't already subscribed to us and you enjoy content like this please do so because it it so encourages Tina and myself um to know that we're on the right lines and we're not just two old fools blathering away and we don't want you to miss out of any new videos that we're gonna do so as Norm says we would just love you to subscribe to our Channel it helps us a lot so we hope that everybody is keeping well and staying safe and until the next time bye-bye bye

Channel: This Is Our Retirement

Views: 34,600

Keywords: retire, retirement, baby boomers, retirement travel, retirees, retirement lifestyle, retirement planning, this is our retirement, retirement fear, norm and tina, norm and tina retirement

Id: nbelpleouJQ

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023