Book Info
Rejean Venne: 5 Years to Freedom - A Canadian Guide to Early Retirement
Ch 1 - 2: Explore the reason for early retirement, showing calculation that before you go to work, you already used 90% or even more the time with your parents, or if you are a parent, you will use almost 90% of time with your child.
Ch 3: Lifestyle Inflation to Lifestyle deflation: Our expenses tend to increase with our salary, therefore try to think of a method to reduce the unnecessary expenses
Ch 4: The method the author used was not to make a good budgeting, but to analyse all the expenses for you in the year, and work on the areas that the expenses can be saved.
Ch 5: Make good use of government benefits, for example the Canada Child Benefit Program
- Daycare: early retirement, fulltime parent, no need day care expenses
Ch 6: Choose a Low cost of living area, forget Toronto, Vancouver, even forget about Ottawa, choose a town with lower cost of living
- Author settled at Sturgeon Falls, in Northern Ontario
- Look for house, that was under bank selling, negotiate with the bank, make an offer to the bank and wait patiently
- Mortgage: choose the location where you live, reduce the size of your dream house, reduce the expenses on premium and new furnitures
- Property Taxes: choose areas where tax rate is low
Ch 7: - Car expenses: number of cars, what you can do on your own, select on insurance, save on not necessary areas, choose to live in an area where you don’t have to drive a lot, or even no need to travel by bus, save that on bus pass
Ch 8: Compare prices, stock the discounted by analysing the amount you use, buy and conserve by yourself at harvesting seasons, buy a deep freezer, try gardening, try make your own food
Ch 9: Relocating to low cost area, even though you keep your own hobby, it would be cheaper than that in big cities, invest in travel fund, and choose off season travelling to save money, compare the cost for internet and do not use cellular plan (hehe, my own plan was feasible, use a Hong Kong based cellular cheap plan)
- Life Insurance - author eventually cancelled his life insurnace
Ch 10: Calculating your net worth
Ch 11: On compound interest
Ch 12: Passive income with real estate, purchase cheap duplex or even triplex, renovate them and rent them at a higher price, try to do the renovation job on yourself to save that
- Try to replace / upgrade the facilities to reduce on the utilities expenses
- Spot those cheap properties in small towns where the town still has good developmental opportunities (retirement town, population growth)
- Save a repair fund on expenses on the housing
Ch 13: Real estate is not enough, or not safe enough, other equities For example, ETFs, author invests on VGRO (an automatical assets allocation ETF) Canadian Couch Potato Portfolio Sometime use a fee-based financial advisor
Ch 14: Make good use of tax-sheltered accounts, TFSA, RRSP Don’t use the fund in these accounts until later in life, focus on the passive income on rental incomes
Ch 15: Invest on your children’s education
Ch 16: Think of your identity after early retirement
Ch 17: How to survive a financial crisis? Have faith on the market, keep patience; when necessary, reduce spending and do some part time job to earn tempoary income; make good use of government stimulus program