(I AM NOT A FINANCIAL EXPERT, PLEASE SEEK ADVISE OF A PROFESSIONAL, THIS IS WHAT HAS WORKED FOR US)
First up money.
This is the major issue when retiring. Will you or won't you have enough to live on; especially when you have no idea how long you are going to live. Financial planners now use the age of 90 as your expected life expectancy.
You've worked all your life and have had a regular income. Now you're relying on government pensions (if you're lucky) and what ever savings or private pensions you have been paying into.
We/I have been planning hubby's retirement for years. I haven't worked in years, so we knew 95% of money in retirement was going to be coming in via hubby's income rather than mine. We were okay with this.....obviously we discussed it prior and this is what worked for us.
One thing we did and anyone can do this, whether they are ten years away from retiring or just one year. Write down your monthly outgoing's/bills, so you can work out how much you need to cover everything to survive. I did it all on an Excel spreadsheet, but writing it down in a notebook will work as well. This is a good habit to get into, and I still do it, just to see where we are each month.
Our spreadsheet, includes all utilities, car/house/life insurances, credit card bills, house/property taxes. Make sure you include cash you take out of the bank each week; with that I multiplied 52 weeks worth of cash divided by 12 to make the monthly amount. If you have rent/mortgage/car loans etc. include those. Anything you pay out each month. Some things like our water/sewage bill comes in bi-monthly don't forget those types of bills.
This helped out a great deal with working things out.
What also helped us was getting forecast's from the government and any private pension companies showing us what we should expect in payments from them when retired. Both the Canadian and the UK government did this for us no problem.
We have tax free savings accounts here in Canada, use them!!! They come in handy. Until you start getting regular payments you may have to dip into your savings accounts to supplement your pensions.
When applying for pensions do it at least six months ahead of time. Our local library had free sessions with the people from the government pension department. They were super helpful; as all the forms you have to fill in can be quite complicated; especially if you were born in a different country! We found the most complicated forms to complete were for the Old Age Security, which is not a huge amount each year. We were thinking we would have to give them our first born child with the amount of questions they asked!!
Oh and one country talks to another country, so in our case the Canadian government does know where you are receiving other pensions from....LOL Everyone will take their piece of the pie!
If you were born in another country, you need a lot of info from your birth country, including your citizenship and immigration papers. Thankfully we were organized and had kept everything from when we lived in the UK and when we moved to Canada. We also told our kids what they needed and gave them their paperwork, and kept photo copies ourself, as they are 25 years away from retiring.
It did take us a few months to get used to receiving money at different times of the month and we did have one or two glitches along the way. We receive a monthly amount once per month from a RRIF. The first month we were to receive it, they forgot to put it through 😠Luckily I had moved money into our savings account as a plan B just in case something like this happened. The bank and our financial advisor apologized but it was an inconvenience. (LESSON HERE, HAVE A BACK UP PLAN!)
All our Canadian income/pensions, have between 20 to 30% tax taken off at source, so we do not get dinged with a big tax bill at the end of the year. All foreign income comes in without tax taken off at source. We won't know until March 2026 to see if all our calculations were correct when we file our taxes.
Hubby stopped receiving a pay cheque from his employer at the end of 2024. So technically we have been receiving just pensions since the beginning of 2025. So far so good, we have managed just fine. Everyone said we wouldn't need as much money. I can't say for sure that's the case, but I am guessing the more we slow down and do not do as much that will be true.
We have a window of probably 10 years where we will be fit enough to travel. So we know that money will be flowing a bit more during the next ten years. Do we have enough to live off until we are 90; as per the financial advisor and our accountant son, yes we do; but who knows?
If anyone else has any tips or hints for retiring and managing money please add yours in the comments.
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