Retirement Notes

I want to tell you about two meetings with my financial planner, separated by exactly one year. The first one made me question everything I’d ever assumed about retirement in Canada — the timeline, the number, the whole picture. The second one made it real. The First Meeting (September 2024) It was supposed to be…

It started, as many questionable ideas do, with a glass of red wine and an internet connection. It was spring 2025. I was somewhere between my second and third glass when I typed what felt like a perfectly reasonable search query: cheap European cities to live in, in countries with a tax treaty with Canada…