I mentioned in my previous posts that I would be addressing 12 aspects of my life over the next year to help me prepare for retirement in three years. The general premise is that most people plan for their finances, but not the other areas of their life to the same degree, and I want to mentally prepare myself. This month’s series of posts will cover one of the most important groups of issues in preparing for retirement — the big three, if you listen to some organizations. End-of-life plans,
I confess that I assumed as I went that I would have the answers for each topic by the time I finished each month. Or, more pointedly, that I would have the exact plan for the remaining time up to my retirement and thus be fully ready for my big day. Yet, as I have looked at the topic this month, and even some of the future topics, I realized that I may not be quite as solution-oriented as I expected. Instead, some of what I’ll come up with may be simply a plan-to-have-a-plan to get to my retirement plan. I may not have the full answer or even a good action yet.
I don’t know why that surprised me, but it does. Some questions may take me several months, or even years, to truly decide what I want to do. Anyhow, on with the show. Today, I’m starting with end-of-life planning.
As mentioned, most people think of retirement in terms of how they finance their life, not in terms of how it is all going to end. I started doing some reading on what end-of-life (EoL) discussions should look like, the areas that it might cover. Some of the readings were from governments, focusing mainly on getting your legal affairs in order; others were broader in focus, making sure you have the social, emotional and religious aspects of dying covered. Still others focused only on the health side or others focused on the practical side for those left behind, with binders of important numbers and documents.
Almost all of the sources talked mainly about pre-death and after-death issues, and generally argued that the best way to handle all of it was to know what you want and to have a candid discussion, however hard, with those who will manage your affairs when you’re gone. I did like the idea that they collectively suggested of talking to various groups for information and perspective:
Family
Friends
Substitute decision-makers
Health care providers (to get accurate medical info)
Financial advisors (to have an up-to-date and accurate financial picture)
Legal advisors (to ensure all the instruments are in place, if/when needed)
Yet, therein lies the first rub for not having a full “answer” to my questions. That is not a one-and-done exercise. I can’t say, “Okay, let’s blast through everything on Tuesday” and schedule my family at 9:00 a.m., my friends at 9:45, etc. That’s not the way that will work. Nor are the questions small. Let’s take a stab at the first one, as it may help contextualize things for everything else (spoiler alert — it doesn’t for me, but it does for a lot of people).
Q1: Do I have any religious or spiritual beliefs to address in the EoL process?
This includes my ongoing care, pre-death, or for my actual funeral. I initially thought, “Not really”. However, once I picked at things a little bit, there were things I would like and others to avoid.
For my ongoing care, I can’t think of any, that’s still true. I don’t need regular visits or to attend mass, nor do I feel the need for regular spiritual comfort or guidance. If I struggle with my mental health near the end, or more mood to be more specific, it might change.
For pre-death, my thoughts turned a bit broader than I expected. I am somewhat comforted by the idea of signing off from this mortal coil. In Catholicism, that would typically be a final confession and the administering of last rites. I am long lapsed from Catholicism, and I don’t believe in the literal idea of a Father, Son and Holy Ghost in any form that our brains have conjured. I believe in the possibility of a higher power, but if it exists, to me it is more like a collective consciousness of the universe or a higher plain of existence. I doubt it exists, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I confess that I still pray occasionally. Not to a deity of form and shape but to that larger universe. More like sending out good thoughts into the void. I don’t pray for specific things, I offer my gratitude for the life I have lived and the people in it, and a hope for strength. More of a mental bargain with the universe than a prayer, if that makes sense. And yet, I like the idea of some sort of final reckoning. It’s not a religious judgment day but a personal one. To look back at my life, to accept that the end is coming, and to be at peace with what I have experienced. Hopefully, it would be a mental preparation to allow me to say goodbye graciously to those who have improved my life by being part of it.
And I guess I would want a professional to help guide me through that conversation with myself. Maybe it’s the ritual aspect, an enhancement to the thought process. Maybe it’s the formality of it. But I think I would like that. Ideally, it would be someone I know, but that’s not likely. I’m not looking to go back to church or start my own cult. 🙂 I suspect, though, that I would be willing to have a spiritual advisor in a hospital stop by for a chat. The only person I can think of at the moment for an individual would be a friend of a friend, Hope, who is a military chaplain. I’ve chatted with her before when I struggled with the concept of faith and a life well-lived, but she’s not in Ottawa, nor are we close. But someone “like” her? There’s a book by a chaplain in the US called “Here If You Need Me” about her experiences dealing with state parks, accidents, rescues, etc. Someone like her, I think. But it could equally be a mental health professional, a social worker perhaps, instead. I used to talk regularly with a social worker who retired from CHEO, but that relationship has mostly run its course. She’s aged out of the therapy business. Or it could even be some form of simple toast ceremony, like a classic Chinese tea ceremony. A way to honour my passing while I’m still alive and that I can take a sip of something and something broader people could participate in. I don’t have an actual answer, just an inkling. It will take some more thought in the coming years/months.
For the funeral stuff, that’s easier. I know that I don’t want a religious ceremony with a service. I haven’t yet fully decided on cremation (my leaning) over burial (there’s probably some form of transubstantiation phobia going on tied to being worm food for eternity), but I like what we did for my mom at the funeral home in terms of a small get-together and some form of eulogy or at least a toast to my memory. It doesn’t have to be a full eulogy or anything, I know how hard it is to do them. And I will have already written my own, of sorts. I will have a goodbye message ready to upload and share after my death. My own obituary, perhaps, along with perhaps some goodbye messages. Regardless, I love the idea of a small event, some happy music. A playlist of the 70s and 80s. It should not be a sad mourning, but hopefully something more upbeat with jokes and laughter. An Irish wake, drubbed downward to be less about the drunken brawling and more about the smiles. Like the PandA wedding, without the photos, ceremony and elaborate planning. A cruise on the river would be perfect, or at least somewhere near water. (The water theme will return in future posts.) But in the end, that “event” is not about me, it’s about comforting those that are left behind. They will be the final arbiter of what it should look like and what would make them feel better.
For actual funeral arrangements, Andrea and I will still have to figure out some funeral plans, whether we buy plots, etc. But the more we can plan it out in advance, the less work for Jacob, I hope.
Finally, on organ donation, I’m totally open to anyone harvesting anything useful. What’s left won’t be me; it will simply be raw material to be reused or recycled.
These initial thoughts have given me six action items on my retirement to-do list. I can write my goodbye messages and obituary, and sign organ donation forms. Those are easy and concrete. The sign-off ritual, funeral arrangements, and wake options are less direct though, as I mentioned at the beginning. It is not so much a plan as a plan-to-have-a-plan. And I won’t nail them in the next month. Those may be part of the last two years before retirement aka the pre-retirement plan. I’m still in the planning of the pre-retirement phase. 🙂
ACTION ITEMS: – Design an EoL “sign-off” ritual – Make funeral arrangements – Write goodbye message(s) – Write own obituary – Suggest options for wake/visitation – Sign new forms for organ donation
And if you’ve read this far, I’d be happy to hear any ideas for pre-death / “live” ceremonies or suggestions for a wake/visitation!
I’ve posted previously about the # of days, such as 1500 or 1400 or 1300. I forced those milestones, tried to organize my thoughts around 100 day increments. It didn’t really work as a ritual.
However, if I glance at my countdown clock on the page to the right, I see it saying 1094 days and some hours as change, which doesn’t mean much. Well, until you realize that it is three years from today. That will be my last day of work. I’ve mentioned already that I chose my father’s birthday as my target date, the day he would have turned 100. There’s a symbolic element in there that helps crystallize my thoughts.
In the meantime, it now divides my remaining time. Over the next year, there are a series of things I need to prepare, organize, figure out, etc. in order to be in the right spot financially, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and physically when my last day comes. I want to give myself the maximum chance of transitioning “well” to retirement. However I choose to define that, in the next three years. One obvious thing is my physical health, particularly for my lower back and the ability to be able to do certain movements when I do certain activities like kayaking.
I’m spending a lot of time right now on rituals, as a couple of the goals in the next year are going to challenge me. In the same way that I need to make some new investments over the next three years, I also want to combine some of my traditional approaches to goal-setting and achievement with extra enhancements through ritual and ceremony. Some don’t need it; they’re easy; others would benefit from a full-court press.
Tonight, I treated myself out to simple nachos at a restaurant by myself. I’ll do something similar 35 more times until I get to the last day, taking stock as I go. Wish me luck.
I mentioned in a previous post that as I gear up for my retirement planning, I want to revisit the idea of rituals and ceremonies (R&C). I don’t think I have given enough thought over the years to using R&C to increase my motivation or commitment, or even to improve my delivery and attainment.
There is a ton of research about various “rituals” in terms of cultural, religious and community groups, and they focus heavily on the particular type of goal that goes with it…teaching responsibility, indoctrinating or inducting someone into a group, promoting kindness or compassion, increasing a sense of self, or more often, increasing the sense of belonging to a group in the form of shared rituals. Those are powerful, but they’re not really what I’m talking about…I’m not dressing in robes, for example, or starting a cult.
Instead, I’m talking more about adding a prescribed frequency or form to an otherwise regular activity or goal. An “enhancement”, if you will, to give it added meaning and thus increase the likelihood of doing it. Some of my reticence in delving too deep into them in the past has been that various articles that combine rituals with goal-setting for personal development often inadvertently confuse different aspects of goal-setting for where the “ritual” should come into play. When they do, the advice isn’t that useful.
Understanding the basics of goal-setting vis-a-vis rituals
For example, there are lots of articles and advice out there for goal-setting and rituals that revolve around three main factors:
A ritualized process of making a formal plan
A scheduled event formally set and conducted, with a relatively fixed frequency
A ceremony to note when you have accomplished it
They take the “plan – do – review” mentality of any sound planning system and add a ritual aspect to each and every element. In my view, the ritual portion only really helps achieve something if it is attached to the “DO” portion of the system (#2), not the first or last phases.
Don’t get me wrong. Planning (#1) is a prerequisite, a primal foundation. And if adding a ritual helps you improve or regularize your planning, I’m all for it. It can be quite enjoyable designing new trackers, setting a schedule for when you’re going to “check-in,” setting up checkboxes, buying dot journals, making layouts, etc. The hidden nuance though is that this sort of ritual reinforces the “planning”, not the “doing”. Anyone can make a great plan and update it daily. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will do the items on the list. To me, it is like the idea of someone deciding that they speed too much, so they set a goal of driving more safely. If you’re going to drive safely, you have to have something to drive…so having the car is a prerequisite, but simply having a car or decorating the interior or adding lights to the underside doesn’t mean you’re going to drive safely. Those “enhancements” have nothing to do with your goal. It just enables you to do the activity at all. Like a to-do list…it enables you to plan what to do, but it doesn’t mean that you’ll actually do it.
For those who want to argue semantics, another way of thinking about it is to make your first item on your to-do list as “updating the list”. If you attach a ritual to it, it is ONLY good for that item. It will help you update the list; it won’t necessarily help you make progress on other items.
Continuing that vein, I believe #3 (review) has the same problem. Tracking is great. In fact, there is an entire mantra of “what gets measured is what gets done”. Except without the “DOING” in the middle, tracking means nothing. Many people set and track goals, like weight loss, with no change. The acts of planning and tracking are, in themselves, necessary but insufficient.
Admittedly, there are half-measures for each that CAN contribute to progress, buried in there, sure, but not enough. Like many hobbies, it’s almost like planning, doing, and tracking are three separate activities. And I’m only interested in the “doing” portion right now, I already know how to plan and track.
I’ve done a deep dive into the various options for rituals, and I’m grouped them into five different “tiers”. Today’s post is just about Tier 1, simple rituals.
Tier 1: Simple rituals
Let’s take the simplest ritual: the checkbox ritual. Within the “plan – do – review” process, you put something on the list and check it off when done. Putting it on the list — in the “plan” phase — is a partial ritual. Deciding it is important enough to put it on the list and reminding yourself that you’re committed to it is a (soft) ritual. You don’t put “breathing” on the list, you just breathe. So, if you put walking around the block on your list, that “ritual” of committing to it enough to put it on your list is a half-measure. When you’ve done it, you get another half-measure by checking it off. It’s a start, but not much of a boost from the ritual. It keeps it top-of-mind, which is why you make the list.
For those with a very strong “list” mentality, putting it on the list may, in fact, be sufficient. There is a danger that people start to make “simpler” lists over time so that they can keep checking things off. Like:
Wake up
Get dressed
Go downstairs
Make breakfast
Eat breakfast
Go to the bathroom
Etc.
It’s similar to putting “make / update the list” on the list just so you can check it off and feel momentum. Most people limit themselves to putting things on their lists that are meaningful. “Buy milk” is great for your list of chores for the day, but rarely is it significant enough to consider adding a “ritual” to it so that you do it.
There are exceptions to my mocked list above. For example, if you are newly retired (3y and counting down) or on summer vacation, it can be easy to stay in your PJs. But if you feel you lolly-gag too much, and you want to be more productive, you might easily add “Get dressed” to your list. Or if you always eat pre-processed breakfast or buy your breakfast pre-made at a store or skip breakfast completely (cough), then “make breakfast” could easily make your to-do list as something significant enough that you MIGHT not only put it on the list, you might need help doing that task. Or perhaps if your doctor tells you to drink more milk, adding it to your list might be significant. But, for now, let’s just leave it as “put it on the list, check it off”.
The next three rituals are relatively tied for usefulness, commonality of use, and general methodology — scheduling, duration, or quantity rituals. For writers, they often use a scheduling ritual they nickname “butt in seat” where they say, “Okay, every morning at 9:00 a.m., I am going to sit and write.” They disconnect from the internet, turn off their phones, ignore the doorbell, find a quiet place to write (usually the same place every day) and they put their butt in the seat. And they write. Or people will say, “Every morning at 6:00 a.m., I’m going to go for a run”. Again, rigorous scheduling of the activity. It doesn’t have to be daily, some people will sign up for fitness classes two days a week, like spinning every Tuesday and Thursday at 4:00 p.m. after work. Scheduling is the most common of all rituals. It adds a bit of “planning” to the mix, as it ties into their daily list of activities, blocking off the time to do that activity.
Alternatively, people will go for a duration ritual, although often combined with scheduling. “I’m going to write for a minimum of 2 hours!”. “I’m going to work out for 1 hour!” “I’m going to ride my stationary bike for 35 minutes three times this week!”. Again, fairly obvious, fairly common. As with scheduling, there’s a half-measure from planning that helps, too, as they are tying it into their daily schedule, but not necessarily at a specific time. This is great when something might need to move around (early morning, afternoon, evening) if you have a varied schedule already.
The last one, a quantity ritual, is very similar to the first two. It is basically taking the duration ritual and substituting a quantity element to harness a bit of tracking to the process. “I’m going to do 5 push-ups, 10 sit-ups, 10 burpees, and 2 sets of dead weightlifts.” Or “I’m going to write at least 1000 words”.
The third level of simple rituals is the chain ritual. One of the most “famous” is the so-called Seinfeld chain (although Seinfeld disputes attribution). The idea was that Seinfeld was writing jokes, and he made a “ritual” for himself that every morning, he would sit down and write jokes (for so many minutes or so many jokes). And the goal was to keep the daily chain going as long as he could. If he missed a day? No biggie, he would reset the count, and start again. But the ritual of extending the chain was an extra reinforcement for the goal.
Anyone who has used DuoLingo knows the same schtick. Every day, it asks you to extend your daily training streak. Many games now add various types of chain-ritual-type gamifications to the game, challenging you to extend your “streak” to encourage you to play more often. Puzzle games, in particular, want to see you “learning” (as they claim), which means you’re playing regularly and likely buying power-ups as needed. Many apps regularly add rewards now as you extend your streak, giving you special avatars, badges, or even access to extra areas of the app like a VIP section.
Some so-called goal-setting experts argue that these types of rituals are really not rituals at all. They’re simply quantifying the goals. So they want to argue that a goal of “writing” and a goal of “writing every day at 9:00 a.m.” are really just a nuance of specificity. I disagree most strongly. The goal of writing is the same, but adding a time or quantity or duration changes the goal, or more accurately, changes the “how” of the goal. The ritual changes the delivery. Which is the whole point of adding a ritual.
If you could have done the goal of “writing more” or “writing regularly”, you would have already done it. Quantifying it would make no difference; you would have simply tracked that aspect. Changing the specificity here also changes WHAT and HOW you are going to do it, not just the outcome.
Does this help me?
To be honest, this initial list doesn’t help me much. I already use checkboxes, duration and quantity constantly. I might not use scheduling enough, and although I would LIKE to use chain rituals, my challenge has often been that the easy goals don’t need their help, and the hard ones are difficult to schedule appropriately.
For the scheduling, I’m reminded of the story of the Harvard professor asked to teach his students about time management. He came into the class, bringing along an empty vase and some rocks, gravel, dirt and water. He tells the class that the vase is a metaphor for their schedule. First he puts rocks in, all the way to the top, and asks them if it is full. They all say yes, so then he starts putting gravel in, letting it filter down and settle. Again he asks if it is full, and most say yes, a few are hesitant. He proceeds to add dirt or sand, and it settles all the way down. This time when he asks if it is full, they all say no. So then he adds water, and declares it full. When he asks what this teaches them about time management, one brave soul states that no matter how full your schedule is, there’s always room for more. The professor shook his head and handed his life lesson. “The rocks have to go in first or they won’t go in at all. So, what are your rocks for your schedule? What’s most important?”
The metaphor is strong, and for a long time, I’ve used it for tracking my goals. What are my rocks? The downside though is that my biggest rocks — work and generating income, spending time with Andrea and Jacob — eat up a lot of my day, leaving me little to no time or energy for other rocks, no matter how “big” I think they are or should be. Which is not really true, of course. I just don’t give them sufficient priority to schedule them. I don’t put the other rocks in first.
Meanwhile, I use the simple rituals where it helps, or skip it where it won’t.
However, knowing how it works can also remove the incentive/motivation factor. I can’t often manipulate myself by simply adding a quantity ritual, for example, as I know that 1000 words of bad writing doesn’t really meet any goal. Similarly, for duration. Scheduling rituals can help, if I have control over my schedule and there are no outside forces nudging my schedule out of whack (as I mention above).
But, for now, I have my initial list of five options for tier 1:
Happy Sunday. I’m doing 100-day incremental countdowns to my expected retirement date. When I started the last count at 1400, I was full of goals, thinking I would accomplish a bunch of things, mostly around writing, etc. And the increments are intended as a bit of a test drive for my future retirement.
Now, I know that when I retire, one of the first things I’m going to do is take 100 days off. A 3-month vacation where I do basically SFA. It’ll be August, Jacob may be starting school still and Andrea will be working. But as that fall kicks off, I’m going to chillax like a MF. I’m going to read, I’m going to walk, I am going to NAP like crazy.
I intend to do almost no work during that period, even though I have lots of writing projects lined up. I’m struggling if some of those writing projects will start sooner than that, juggling some stuff, but as far as I know, they’ll be lined up waiting for me to pull the trigger over the late fall and early winter.
So I wondered if I should use this first big 100-day increment to work/plan/adjust or just to chill? And the decision was almost made for me. There has been a LOT going on even without my goals.
Work is not going as smoothly as I had hoped, and I honestly don’t know what my long-term plan is for that. I’m engaged in some e-scanning with mentors, and enjoying the conversations with nothing major hanging in the balance. Planning without consequences, in many ways.
My home life has been a relative stress ball though. Jacob has had a bunch of health stuff going on over the last 4 months almost to the day since I last wrote about my 100-day plans. And with no real resolution in sight. It’s better than it was, but still not sustainable in its current form. So we continue to push.
Both Andrea and I have little room for an additional mental load. So last week, when I happened to notice at first a line on our ceiling, I didn’t really enjoy discovering that the line was actually more than a line. It was about a half-inch wide and about six to eight feet long. Obviously along a beam, directly below where we had work done on the bathroom last year. Dun dun dun.
I checked around, and sure enough, there were other areas with rippling and shifted surface tension on the drywall. It looked like obvious water damage and was even a bit spongy (albeit dry) to the touch. Well, frak. Andrea was home the next two days while I was at the office doing mentoring stuff, so she had the plumber come in. His reaction? Yep, obviously water damage from above.
Except when he started opening holes in our kitchen ceiling, there was, in fact, no water. It was exactly along a beam, where two drywall areas had overlapped. Something shifted, the tape slipped, and the line formed. I don’t know what happened to the other areas. But no water. He had to make six or seven holes to find out though, yet didn’t have to break tiles upstairs in the bathroom. Yay. So all we need is the drywall in our kitchen ceiling fixed. Do you know how much MESS that makes? A lot. Just the holes in the ceiling left a fine coating of dust everywhere. And even some in our toaster, which we haven’t figured out how to clean out yet. We’re hoping compressed air does the job.
When I focused on the “day” last time, I used today as a microcosm of the types of things I’ll do in retirement. Laundry, of course. Reading, of course. Some internet stuff, the black hole for time. And some HR work (I was coaching someone this afternoon). Followed by groceries. Just “being” without trying to push myself like I don’t have time for things.
I don’t know if it is the perfect way to celebrate the 1300-day mark or not, but it worked. I still have some stuff to do tonight that is a holdover from my week, and I’ll have to do it tonight unfortunately. I’d love to dump it to tomorrow, but I’m not retired yet. See you in 100 days (Tuesday, May 14). In the meantime, 185 weeks and 5 days to go.
Since I work in the public service, I have a pretty good pension. Gold-plated, if you ask some people, at least in comparison to what the average private sector person can get from their employer. Indexed for inflation, guaranteed for life, forced savings with matching input from the employer, and for those who joined the public service before 2014, people often treat it like the classic private pensions that come with a magic number of 85 (and it used to be explained that way).
Basically pensions that use a magic number work as an addition of two things — your age + your years of service. If that number is 85 or above, you can take your pension with no penalty. More recently, there is often a small catch…sometimes you have to be at least a certain age, like 55 years old. In a perfect world, that would mean you would start working for an organization when you were 25, work for 30 years, and at the age of 55 you would have 55 years of age + 30 years of service = magic 85. Most people out there who know about pensions have heard of magic numbers, so why is there a course?
There’s a course for several reasons. First and foremost, the government manages the pension and they have an obligation to explain it to members i.e., what our mandatory pension gives us. To do this, the powers that be at Public Services and Procurement Canada have put together a detailed generic presentation deck on our public service pension plan. They share it with private contractors who are trained in the content, and thus there are financial planners across the country who can give the same presentation with the same information to the federal public service employees who work across Canada.
Second, there is WAY more to the pension plan than simply that number. Bells and whistles and options, oh my! Life insurance, death benefits, lump sum payments, what happens if you are less than 55 or under 25 or 30 years of service, what happens if you started working after 2014, what happens if you are with them less than 2 years, etc. It’s complex and detailed.
Third, the magic number formulas are the way pensions used to work and lots of other ones do, but it’s now more accurate to think of it as a combination of “age, service”, not “age + service”. Very few people are 25 when they start, work 30 years exactly, and hit 55 with the old style magic number of 85. So then the second clause kicks in, which makes the magic number idea almost meaningless now.
Under the pension, the focus instead is on what combination of age and pensionable service do you need to get an immediate annuity (monthly benefits with no reductions), with three scenarios:
Retirement for disability –> any age and at least 2 years of service;
Regular retirement –> Over 60 and at least 2 years of service; or,
Regular retirement –> Over 55 and at least 30 years of service.
If you were in the second category, you’re magic number could be as low as 62. And yet you would qualify. The magic number doesn’t really apply anymore to that category and never did to the first.
I’m in the third category, which is where the magic number used to apply. However, with the new rules, it doesn’t. When I am 55, I’ll only be at 28 years of service or so, i.e. I don’t meet the second criteria, so while I *could* retire at 55, my pension would be hit by a reduction formula i.e. a penalty. If I wait until 57/58, I’ll meet both criteria –> over 55 AND at least 30 years of service. (And, FYI, the so-called old “magic number” would be 87/88, and meaningless).
(Someone on Reddit noted that I had skipped explaining the change from using magic number formulas in my first draft of this post, and it was confusing. Note that there are a couple of presenters out there modify the magic number slightly to still use it as they find it a simpler transition for some people to understand. You *can* keep the magic number idea in your head, if you prefer, if you think of there being a cap on age points as up to 55 points and a cap on years of service as up to 30 points. The disability option or over 60 options remain exceptions, and you can still add up to 85, but I agree with the Reddit people — keeping the magic formula explanation is too misleading, so hopefully the change shows more readily above now — as noted, the short version is that it has changed how the two variables are used i.e. it is “age and service” not “age plus service”.)
Fourth, there’s demand. I know of at least four different courses available. One is simply online, and as far as I can tell, just shares the basic deck with an audio track. There is also a half-day course that seems to go through the basic deck, except in person. A third course is a one-day course that goes a bit more in-depth, and then there’s the one I took — three days with each day broken into two half-day topics per day. In Ottawa, it is offered by the Retirement Planning Institute (RPI).
Lots of people have taken the courses before, and most who have taken the short ones thought they were “okay” while just about everyone raves about the three-day course. Pop wisdom says to take it once when you’re early in your career and once closer to the end of your career. Some would even go so far as to say that you should take it every 10 years as a refresher, but that seems like overkill to me. Maybe the half-day ones are somewhere in the middle, but I agree with taking it early and late in your career. There are definitely aspects that apply to different stages of your career and I wish I had realized certain aspects earlier (around RRSPs, for example).
But the fifth reason came up in the intro to the first session. In short, our pension is so different from most other people’s pension plans that our financial situation overall DOES NOT look like anyone else’s. Our pension plan rates, investments, risk profile, all of it looks very different from the average consumer out there, so why would we take a “general” pension course rather than one that focuses on OUR pension and OUR situation? I’ll come back to that later. I screwed something up awhile back in my financial planning, and this course would have allowed me to correct it. Not huge, but not nothing either.
The first morning session is dedicated to the official deck prepared by the government. I found myself a bit surprised with it — it is remarkably good. No bureaucratese, no “on the one hand” waffling, it is relatively simple and direct. The deck walks you through the pension and benefits website, supplementary death benefit, leave without pay, actual retirement benefits (including indexing and bridge benefits), service buybacks, survivor benefits, group insurance benefits, and other services and information.
It is long and detailed, and incredibly useful. That session alone is worth the price of admission, and those who do the half-day elsewhere with just that deck are well-served, although I suspect it is better handled in person than in a recorded online version.
For me, I would say I liked four of the elements a lot from this session:
a. How the contribution rates are coordinated with CPP/QPP…Under CPP rules, you have to contribute to CPP. Everyone does, public servant or not. And when you turn 65, you’re going to get your CPP. So that is already in place. The maximum insurable salary / earnings under CPP for 2018 is set at $55,900. So your CPP contribution for the first $55,900 is already set … you are paying approximately 2.3% of that amount for CPP already. And they don’t want to “double tax” you, so for the first $55,900 of your salary, they charge you only an additional 9.83%. Add those two together, and you get 12.13%. So you pay 12.13% on $55,900 with some of the money going to CPP and some going to your public service pension. If you earn more than $55,900, you pay 12.13% on the rest.
In summary, the first $55,900 is harmonized so it comes out to 12.13% to two sources, anything above $55,900 is also at 12.13% but that all goes to the pension plan. Which means, drum roll please, you pay the same percentage all the way through, but it is coordinated with what you pay to CPP. I never knew how that worked before, and page 4 of their deck lays it out pretty well…I must confess however that the speaker ad-libbed a bit at this point and it was very helpful to have him help us “see it”. Hence why I think the in-person course is likely a bit better.
b. What you get for retirement…depending on your circumstances, it can be a monthly pension or a lump sum. Lump sums have a bunch of rules about tax limits, transfers to RRSPs or purchasing life annuities, for instance, but there is a nice breakdown of the various options (pp. 10-13). It doesn’t really apply to me since I’ll be doing the monthly pension, but it was good to know.
c. Explanations of the bridge benefit…pp. 26-28 cover your options related to a bridge benefit, i.e. a “top up” to my pension from, in my case, age 58 to age 65 to take into account that I may not take my CPP until age 65. I knew almost nothing about this and the short overview was extremely helpful. There are a bunch of options to work out, basically variables in terms of how long from my age of retirement to age of 65, and I’ll need way more info from a financial planner to work that out, but it was still eye-opening for how it worked.
d. Service buyback options…pp. 29-30 give you the bare minimum of information about service buybacks but the presenter went through it pretty well verbally.
In my case, I worked as a co-op student back in ’93 for eight months. They deducted pension stuff from me at the time, but when my service ended, they just paid it out i.e. paid it back to me. However, that is service that I can “claim” towards my 30 years, and all I have to do is pay what would have been contributed to the pension if I had paid into the service for those extra 8 months (the fact that I got paid back at the time means it is now “eligible” to be reclaimed as opposed to already being in my pension).
Here’s the first kicker, which I already knew. You buy back at your PRESENT rate of pay. In other words, I have to make my contributions of 12% (as calculated above) for 8 months of salary at my current salary, not what I was making as a co-op student. Well, pooh. I wish I knew back then not to take it but just to leave it there. I have another six months in ’96 that was a probationary period, and I can reclaim that too. So I can buy back up to 14 months of service by making just over a year’s worth of extra pension contributions.
The obvious lesson learned, which is not a surprise, is that if you have any service eligible, you want to buy it back as soon in your career as possible because it will be cheaper. If you can buy back a year of service at a current salary of $50000, you’ll pay approximately $6000 to do it ($50K x 12.13%). If you wait and do it later when you’ve got promoted and earning $100K, you’ll pay $12K. Since most people’s salaries continue to increase as a public servant through inflation and promotions, the sooner the better. I didn’t do that and because I didn’t do this great 3-day course earlier in my career, I never thought about it until recently when I’m nearing the top of my lifetime salary rates.
So then we come to the second kicker – figuring out if the buyback is worth it. I certainly wanted to know how to calculate if it was worth it for me to do in my specific situation. I had already asked the official pension people for an estimate of the current cost of all my buyback options rolled together into one lump sum, and they gave me my total. About $17K. Wow. That’s a LOT of money.
As the guy was presenting, he must have read my mind and said essentially, “Some of you may be wondering if you should buy back or not. And as a professional financial planner, I can tell you that it all depends on your situation, you have to weigh the variables and other costs, and decide in the end that the answer is yes.” In 20+ years of advising public servants, he said there were only two situations where it wasn’t in the client’s interest, and both times they were very close to retirement and the purchase was going to mess up other investments.
I was a bit skeptical, I admit, but it was like he was still reading my mind. “If you’re skeptical about that, here’s the real question you’re asking. Should I invest in a gold-plated protected pension, guaranteed for life, and indexed for inflation every year? Yes, as much as you can.” A pretty clear picture. Of course, it depends on where that $17K is sitting right now and if you have it available, but generally, yes. It is also heavily related to something else for me, and I’ll cover that in the hard core financial section below.
The third kicker for me was a small nuance of how you pay that money to the government / pension plan. I already knew there was an option to just pay it all at once, and just write them a cheque. But I don’t have $17K sitting in a bank account screaming “use me, use me for pensions”. I also knew that a second option was to have them estimate when my retirement date is and pro-rate it over my paycheques until I retire. Not a bad option. But the real kicker I didn’t know was that I can transfer FROM MY EXISTING RRSP to the pension plan. I can take $17K of investments I ALREADY HAVE and just MOVE the money over? Hot damn. Sign me up and call me ready for retirement 14 months earlier. Now THAT’S exciting!
2. Legal aspects of retirement and aging
The first afternoon was a substitute presenter, a lawyer who had done the course before, and he was there to talk about the legal aspects of retirement. Now, the course is being taught in the NCR, and some people live in Ottawa and some people live in Quebec. And some people have property in both, or have lived in one and now live in the other. Some married, some not. Some divorced and remarried, some single. So there was a lot of interest in WHAT IF scenarios.
There are a few basic things they were trying to accomplish with the session. It was a lot of “if this, then that” but the overall message was, “if you want our life to be difficult, do whatever you want; if you want to make certain things simple, here’s what you can do.”
For example, have a will, or more accurately, DON’T DIE WITHOUT ONE. It is just way more complicated for everyone involved if you die without a will. Seems obvious, but I confess that Andrea and I didn’t do our wills when we were younger, waiting instead until Jacob was born. We were living together and had even bought a home together, yet hadn’t executed full wills. Not terrible since we were common law in Ontario, but potentially disastrous if we were in Quebec. We have them now, of course, and so we weren’t really interested in that part. We understand the basics, I’ve done the executor duties for my dad and mom, I’m good to go for the most part. But there was a young couple in the course who were in our old shoes, didn’t have wills, and were suddenly seeing the complexity of their situation in being common-law with no will and living in Quebec.
Second, they wanted us to understand that if you’re in Quebec, and you’re not married, your support and survivorship rights are limited. When he started explaining it, the back of my neck started to itch. It didn’t sound right to me, because I thought a bunch of stuff had changed. See, I’m a weirdo pants when it comes to law stuff. I read things most people glaze over when they see. So a few years ago, when the Quebec Court of Appeal granted spousal support to the wife of the Cirque du Soleil owner even though they weren’t legally married, the tabloids went nuts for the amounts of money involved, the newspapers talked about a legal milestone, and legal papers talked about how this meant another province now recognized common law support rights. And I read the last two sources (newspapers and legal papers) and thought “Okay, so Quebec is mostly like everyone else now for common law marriages”. Interesting. A throw-back interest to my law school days.
Except the lawyer was saying that what I thought was now the law in Quebec was not actually the reality.
This guy was reading my mind too because he said, “Now you may have thought that changed when the Quebec Court of Appeal did blah blah blah…” and I was like, “Yes! Exactly!”. Except I had missed something. The Supreme Court of Canada overturned it. I totally missed that happening, partly because I didn’t read the tabloids, the newspapers treated it as “Okay, nobody gets rich, no story”, and the legal papers basically said, “Okay, same as it always was, nothing to see here.” They talked about the decision / outcome of who won, but not the legal implications or issues at stake, at least not in the same level of coverage. It wasn’t revolutionary, it was “same old, same old”. But it is now back to the the way it used to be, and common law spouses can get seriously SCREWED.
Unfortunately, the session did not have a clear presentation that he was following. As I said, the lawyer was substituting for the guy who was supposed to do it, and while he was certainly knowledgeable, it was more like 3 hours of him saying, “Here’s an issue…if you live in Ontario and you’re married, it works this way. If you’re in Quebec and married, like this. If you’re in Ontario and COMMON LAW, then this; Quebec, this. If you’re divorced on a Thursday while wearing a hat shaped like a Beaver…”. It was hard to follow a lot of the twists and turns, and 80% of it didn’t apply to Andrea and I. Of the remaining 20%, we had most of it already covered.
I didn’t feel I got a lot out of the session other than “have a will” (some interesting elements of why you shouldn’t do a holographic will, which was GOOD to know, as I have considered using a kit and/or redrafting the one we have from the lawyer that I’d like to tweak every so slightly and if I do, I should really use the full lawyer for it and just pay the freight), don’t own properties in multiple provinces if you want your life to be simple, don’t get divorced, and if you’re together in Quebec, life is a LOT easier legally if you’re actually formally married. Again, you can have a simple life, or you can have a complicated one, particularly if you don’t do things the right way but want something different from the default.
3. Health and retirement
In a separate blog about my health and weight loss, I blogged about the health session (#50by50ish #50 – Lose weight – Part 5, what changed?) and that I was pretty disappointed with it. It had a knock-on effect of inspiring some other thoughts about my health, but it wasn’t a great session. I was expecting a tightly focused presentation about health in retirement and what to expect, and instead it was a general “health” presentation that was good for anyone at any stage of their life. I liked the presenter, a doctor in the military, but the main thrust of the presentation was “what will limit how long you live?”.
Based on the Ontario Health Study, she listed the five biggest factors:
Exercise — How active are you?
Tobacco — Do you use any?
Diet — What do you eat?
Alcohol — How much do you drink?
Stress — How to you choose to react to life?
Nothing revolutionary in there. It did feed into a larger narrative I have been working on about “am I saving for retirement in terms of (x) investments?” such as health investments, planning investments, financial investments, social investments, etc. But overall, I thought it was “meh”. She did close out with some references to the importance of powers of attorney for personal care, as had the lawyer, but I really would have expected that one of the two of them would have spent a fair amount of time on this. After all, weren’t we talking about health in retirement or legal issues in retirement, when those are likely to be needed at some point?
They didn’t ignore them, but they didn’t spend any real time dedicated to them either. I also confess that I had thought that this session also included the psychology component, and while there were a few references, I was really disappointed it was missing. It wasn’t until the start of the third afternoon that I realized there was a whole session on psychology and so I was a little too harsh perhaps.
Yet I don’t want to imply it was useless. There were some interesting bits. For example:
She referenced Dr. Mike Evans’ “23 and a half hours” video on YouTube that went viral a few years ago, and his site, www.reframehealthlab.com.
I’ve often thought of retiring to a “country location” or at least something like a cottage, and so this session actually prompted Andrea and I to talk about it a bit more too. I read Big Box Reuse by Julia Christensen (BR00115) a year or so ago, and one of the examples in it was about health care in a retirement area of cottages in Michigan (I think). One element the doctor mentioned was that rural healthcare has a huge impact on your life expectancy — yes, you’re not experiencing the stress of city life, but you may also experience an hour-long wait for emergency care. If you dial 9-1-1, who in that area is responsible for responding? Not likely a huge issue for our likely options, but an interesting element.
She gave some links on the benefits and steps to becoming an e-patient with a copy of your own medical record, as well as lists and checklists for all your health planning needs.
At the end of the presentation, there was a “call to action” component, and I don’t think it really resonated with anyone. She had a list of 35 things that people “could” commit to, such as being an organ donor, developing an “attitude of gratitude”, or doing a cancer screening, and the range of things was just too great. I think if she had grouped them to say, “Let’s do ONE thing from column A, ONE thing from column B, etc.” to get us to commit to three things, she might have had a good ending. Instead, it just sort of fizzled out.
4 and 5. Financial Planning Part 1 and 2
The afternoon of the second day and the morning of the third day were more elaborate presentations on what was covered in the upfront overview / introduction on the first morning. Truth be told, this is the main reason people take the course — the real financial stuff. The rest is “add on”.
I loved the session from the beginning, including the opening question. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially, “If you were taking a trip which would last two to three weeks, how much research and planning would you do?” and then the second question, “If your retirement lasts 25-30 years, how much time have you spent planning for it?”.
Such a simple question, but it contributed to my overall thoughts on retirement planning. Honestly? We’ve done the basics for financial, but I’ve never really spent much time planning the rest of retirement. From my other posts, that planning includes health in particular, but I’m also wondering about the psychology side. So I’m going to spend a bit of time on it in the next six months. Picturing what retirement might look like for me.
After the quick intro, we got to the second thing that I learned I had already screwed up. There is a pie-chart showing sources of seniors income, and notes that for most, the breakdown is:
28% pensions;
21% OAS;
18% CPP;
13% ongoing employment;
12% investment; and,
8% other.
It’s a typical pie chart for the “average Canadian retiree”. And most banks will show you something similar when you talk to them. Except public servants are not the typical retirees. Our pension is great, guaranteed for life, and indexed. It drastically changes our risk profile and our likely sources.
So what did I screw up? My risk profile for my RRSPs. Based on the “typical sources”, I rated myself as moderate for risk, somewhat conservative, and I did my RRSP investments accordingly. Except I have this amazing pension that has almost zero risk, which means if I want an overall balance of moderate, the RRSP investments are less important, and could have been done as high risk for that small portion. I never thought about it when we met with the bank, and they didn’t say anything about us having a different overall risk profile than most Canadians. They don’t know our pensions. However, even when we saw a financial planner a few years ago, he didn’t flag it for our investment choices either. Interesting. Not a huge issue, but I should have done it differently years ago.
The next part of the financials was a lot of extra info and learning about CPP and OAS, as normally they are the next two biggest resources. But most of it was flagging different scenarios and variables around “when do you take your CPP?”, highly relevant assuming in my case that I go at age 58. Do I take it at age 60 or 65? What does that look like? What impact does that have on bridging? Throw in survivor benefits, drop out years, spousal benefits, disability benefits, and clawbacks, and it’s a complicated set of questions. The course isn’t designed to answer the questions so much as getting you to know which questions tend to apply to you. On a cynical side, one might say they are advertising “come see us and we’ll go through in detail” as the presenters are registered financial planners, but to me, that’s just part of the industry, as they do the presentations in part to drum up business. But the presentation was still rock-solid.
The next source is ongoing employment, and listening to them talk about it, I developed less and less interest in continuing paid employment after retirement. I had always assumed that I might do some consulting work, but I’m not as sold on that option. Combining work income with retirement income might raise me up enough in the tax rates to wipe out some of the benefits of the retirement income in the first place. It certainly risks messing up the tax benefits of RRSPs.
The second day was devoted to taxes and various tax shelters (RRSP, Registered Life Annuities, Registered Retirement Income Funds, and Tax Free Savings Account). I confess that my knowledge on the intricacies beyond basic RRSPs is a bit limited. Even to the point of having thought “we have a TFSA” because Andrea has one, as opposed to us both being able or needing to have one. I am not even sure that I have ever really though in detail about the interactions between RRSPs and the tax system over the whole life of the investment — for me, it was always about “invest now, get the tax break now” rather than “is my marginal tax rate lower or higher than what it will be later?”. The presentation went through TFSAs vs. RRSPs in detail and was really well done. I even liked the overview of “what happens to your RRSPs at age 71” (i.e. what you convert them to). And last but not least, there were some good tips on RESPs that we need to follow up on, just to make sure we’re maximizing the usage for Jacob’s future.
After the tax shelters, the presentation moved on to more traditional investments and asset classes, namely guaranteed investments, fixed-income (bonds) and equity (stocks). This is where the risk profile came back in too…obviously, with a secure pension as the main asset, the rest of our allocation can look quite different from the typical retiree.
And then the course got REALLY hard-core. Pension-splitting. Age credit clawbacks. OAS recovery taxes. RRSP withdrawal before age 65. The tax implications of all of it. Cash wedge strategies.
If I thought the opening day session was worth the price of admission, this was that on steroids. It is the REAL retirement planning, and there were a LOT of great questions in there to think about. Sure, some of them didn’t apply, but a lot of them did. Things we had never even thought about. And, as I said, I have my buyback strategy and RRSP profile wrong considering that I’m a public servant. Things I wish I knew back when I was a new inductee, not someone within sight of his potential retirement date.
6. Psychology and retirement
As I mentioned above, there was some psych components in the health section, and I thought that was “it”. I had lost track of the fact that there was a whole afternoon on the topic and I was STOKED at lunch to come back and talk about it. But the session was disappointing. Not terrible, just not up to my expectations.
Don’t get me wrong, it started fine. She worked through asking questions about what “work” means to us, and what we give up in order to do it (things like time, freedom, health). But retirement represents a huge level of change for most people and is even rated higher than pregnancy for the degree of social adjustment required. Then she walked successively through personal identity, lifestyle and relationships. All key areas that are going to be impacted by retirement, and thus “risk” factors for you if they don’t go well. She was fun and engaging as a presenter, but she just didn’t have a frame for explaining things that well in my view.
What I really wanted was a deep dive on some of those issues, and I’ll blog about it in the future a bit, most likely geared towards personality types. If you use the matrix of introverts/extroverts and analytical/intuitive of Insights Discovery (if you’re in government, you’ve seen their work — it’s the basis for the four-colour lego blocks sitting on everyone’s desk), then analytical introverts are “blue”, analytical extroverts are “red”, intuitive introverts are “green” and intuitive extroverts are “yellow”. The colour isn’t that relevant other than to help you identify broad personality traits and remember them.
Now, if I took those four types and applied them to sense of personal identity, then the analytical types (blues and reds) are likely to be the most affected by retirement in terms of their sense of “who they are”. The reds are the cliché for big bosses who run companies or teams, and then retire and try to run their household. They’re used to being in charge, and they’re going to delegate tasks to family members and run a tight ship at home. Only to be told to ship out instead. If blues and reds don’t have anything to replace it with — a volunteering role, a new project to lead — they can often feel lost. Greens and yellows identify more with people, so the loss of their “work title” won’t affect them (leaving the people will, but that’s the opposite of the blues and reds).
The best example though is that a lot of athletes are strong reds. And when they are finished their athletic careers, they often have no idea who they are. They identified as a hockey player, a football player, a skier, and now, they’re not. So lots of athletes talk openly how they flounder for a long time adjusting to that change. It was “who” they were, and when they can’t do it anymore, they lose themselves.
There was almost none of this in the presentation. More like “it might be an issue for you”. Well, there’s an easy way to tell. If you get people to think about their personality profiles and decide if they are blues and reds, then you know that for them there is a REALLY HIGH chance that it WILL be an issue. Which means THOSE people need to think about mitigation strategies to offset the risk in retirement. If they want retirement to go well, they need to know how to handle that loss of identity.
By contrast, the intuitive / emotional greens and yellows are going to be worried about saying goodbye to everyone. They’re losing close friends, people who seem like family. One colleague retired, and because she didn’t want to say goodbye, she comes back for luncheons with the group about once a month (a regularly scheduled thing). She is a solid green (an intuitive introvert), and it is really important for her. I think it is part of what made her stay working past her retirement date — she would miss the people. Other people may choose to handle it by ensuring they have “replacements” at the ready — volunteer groups, a new social circle, joining a seniors group, something to provide the now-missing social interactions.
For me, I will indeed miss certain people, but I will also lose a lot of social interaction during the day. If I went with zero social interactions at home, that would be a risk to my happiness (I need some, but not as much as most). However, the loss of “identity” could be quite large for me. I’ve got ways to mitigate it, but easier to handle if you plan in advance rather than after the fact.
As I said, I was excited for the session and perhaps my expectations were too high. Five minutes in and I thought I could present a better frame than what I was seeing. Something that would tell people, “No THIS part is about YOU” and “this part maybe less so”. I’ve done a bunch of reading since then on some websites and books, and I think I’m going to blog about it in the future. Some really interesting stuff.
That’s a wrap
And that was it. The course was over.
The training was great, well worth the cost (even though work was paying for it), and I really liked the fact that they let you bring your spouse for free. Private sector, public sector, stay at home, whatever, they can come too. Andrea and I did the course together, and it led to some interesting side-conversations about various pieces. Given that I’m 8 years older than Andrea and will hit my retirement date about 7 years before her, it also means that some of what I’m looking for is a plan of “what I’m going to do while waiting for her to retire”.
For the first two months? I’m hoping to simply nap and read. 🙂
