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Web platform RetireMint offers something most other sources of retirement planning information don’t: advice on the non-financial aspects of quitting work for good.
I have to admit that when I first heard about RetireMint, it was the clever name that initially got my attention. At first glance, it seems like a misspelling of the ubiquitous term retirement. However, those who follow personal finance news and use the numerous tools and apps devoted to it will probably know about products with the word Mint in them. Intuit once had a free budget tracker and planner called Mint, although it was shut down earlier this year.
But now that I have your attention, let me add that RetireMint (with a capital M, followed by a lower-case letter i rather than an e) is a Canadian retirement platform. And it just might affect how you plan for both the financial and the lifestyle aspects of retirement. There’s not a lot of risk, as you can try it for free at retiremint.ca. In fact, there will be no charge at all for retirement planning users, RetireMint co-founder and CEO Ryan Donovan told me in an email. Nor is there advertising. Instead, revenue comes from its Find a Coach tool: a search tool and online directory of professionals who can assist with users’ planning needs. (They pay a monthly fee to be listed on the platform.)
One thing I liked, once I gave it a spin, is that it isn’t just another retirement app that tells you how much money you need to be able to retire in comfort. It spends as much or more time on the softer aspects of retirement in Canada: what you’re going to do with all that leisure time—travelling, part-time work, keeping your social networks intact and so on.
In that respect, the “beyond financial” aspects of RetireMint remind me of a book I once co-authored with ex-corporate banker Mike Drak, Victory Lap Retirement (Milner, 2019), or indeed my own financial novel, Findependence Day (Trafford, 2013). As I often used to explain, once you have enough money and reach your Financial Independence Day, everything that happens thereafter can be characterized as your “victory lap.”
But it’s not my intention to plug those books here, beyond saying that I immediately understood where RetireMint is coming from. So back to the program. RetireMint’s mission statement is: “Helping Canadians retire better, faster and more prepared.” It also bills itself as “Your guide to the modern retirement.”
Donovan sent me a pdf with some main points for the site, as well as providing access to the software. He also penned a guest blog on my website late in August, FindependenceHub.com, appropriately titling it “Retirement needs a new definition”.
There he explains that “Retirement has become so synonymous with financial planning, and so associated with ‘old age,’ that they’re practically inseparable. Yet, in reality, retirement is a stage of life, not a date on the calendar, an amount in your bank account, and is certainly not a death sentence.”
Donovan doesn’t argue that financial planning is the keystone of retirement preparation, as “you won’t even be able to flirt with the idea of retiring without it.” But the subject is much broader in scope than that. As he puts it, this wider definition must “break free from the tethered association of solely financial planning.”
How did Donovan come by all this retirement expertise? He was never a financial advisor, per se, but he did work as a product manager at a wealth advisory office. So, he worked with the advisors at the firm to design products and communications for retirement planning.
So, RetireMint itself does not offer any investment advice, nor does it suggest any financial products or decisions. “Our in-house assessments regarding financial planning [and] tax planning are designed to replicate questions that a financial planner would ask when beginning to develop their plan.”
On my own site, one reader comment on Donovan’s blog post: “I love seeing attention given to a more holistic view of retirement. I recently retired from my full-time career in financial services. Seeing the gap that exists, I [became] certified as a retirement coach before leaving my job. My goal is to help people with the non-financial side of retirement. When I tell people in my age group about my plan, I’m usually met with blank stares, because they don’t see the need. Retirement won’t magically solve all your problems and, as the statistics show, it can create a whole new set of problems.”
Curious about what some retirement-bound RetireMint users thought of the program, I asked Donovan to share a few testimonials:
“Before taking your assessments I thought I was far more prepared than I really am. I have a lot to think about and I’m ready to start planning!” —Nancy, Calgary, Alta.
“RetireMint has opened my eyes to many other areas of my life that I need to plan to truly feel ready to retire.” — Catherine, Vaughan, Ont.
“Exceptional resource for retirement planning. User-friendly site, I like the assessments, and insightful advice. Highly recommend!” —Steve B. Victoria, B.C.
In a recent Retired Money column, I looked at a couple of books, including one about the 4,000 weeks timeline in retirement, which captured just how fleeting the average lifetime is. It suggests that the retirement period will be even shorter.
And as Donovan noted, the industry paradigm is that you have about 8,000 days in retirement, or around 22 years. “In each of those years, you will have more than 2,000 hours of new-found free time that would have been spent working throughout the majority of your life.” But filling those hours with meaningful and purposeful activity is more easily said than done.
It also should be said that, despite its carefree image, retirement—and indeed old age itself!—is not necessarily the bed of roses often depicted in the ads of attractive, carefree senior couples frolicking in retirement homes or on river cruises. As Donovan’s guest blog pointed out, retirement entails some dark, inconvenient truths:
The RetireMint team identifies 14 different topics, ranging from obvious ones, like estate planning and insurance to less apparent matters, like hobbies and the psychological shift into retired life. Donovan says roughly 8,000 Canadians will reach retirement every single week over the next 15 years. But more than 60% do not know their retirement date one year in advance, and more than a third will delay their retirement because they don’t yet have a plan in place.
When Donovan’s guest blog was shared on social media site Mastodon, the above factoid about suicide prompted this comment from one poster, Mike Fraser: “You ever think those suicide rates aren’t related to not knowing what to do with all that free time but more about how to survive when you can’t work and have to live on nothing? The article assumes a lot of privilege.”
Another poster agreed with that comment: “Privilege, precisely. The very concept of retirement is a recent phenomenon, appearing post WWII. Prior to that it was normal and expected that multiple generations shared the same house, then died there. People worked until they couldn’t, then helped run the household. Watching grandkids, mending clothes, cooking, advising. The idea of endless leisure time until you die? Very new. And now perhaps we return to that out of necessity.”
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