How are FIRE adherents making out?

My own semi-retirement project, FindependenceHub.com, often republishes FIRE-related blogs. Recently, I ran one from the MyOwnAdvisor blog by Ottawa-based Mark Seed, who announced on his site in April that he had finally retired in his early 50s, after 17 years of blogging about it. For this Retired Money column, I interviewed Seed on Google Meet to learn how he did it.  

For most FIRE gurus mentioned here, the term “retirement” means no longer being a full-time salaried employee with all that entails: commuting to an office, bosses, meetings, and so on. The emphasis is on the Financial Independence aspect of FIRE more than outright Retiring Early. Like most FIRE believers, Seed plans to keep writing and blogging and stay mentally and professionally active. He is practising the acronym he coined: FIWOOT, which stands for Financial Independence, Work on Own Terms. He says he’s retired from the workforce but continues to “putter-away at stuff. I will run the blog for a few more years. We shall see. I might work at a golf course in a few years too… But I no longer have any Monday-to-Friday job—all gone… My wife retired last fall at age 52. Still hasn’t worked.”

One “accelerant” in reaching Findependence in their early 50s is that Seed and his wife decided not to have children. In other words, to use the vernacular DINKs, they are Double Income No Kids. As he explained in the Google Chat, “that was a personal choice for us, which may or may not be aligned with other peoples’ lifestyle decisions.” As a result, even before formally retiring, the couple was able to travel a lot in their 30s and 40s: to Europe, Latin America, and across Canada and the United States. 

While Seed spent his formative years in Toronto, he’s been in Ottawa for 25 years. Initially, the couple rented their home, but their well-paying jobs enabled them to buy a house even as they simultaneously contributed to RRSPs—he started contributions to his RRSP when he was 22 with just $25 a month—and started contributing to TFSAs upon inception in 2009. He invested in mutual funds from 1995 to 2008 but got serious about investing during the financial crisis of 2008-09, which was when he bought his first stock: Enbridge. Gradually, he started shifting to ETFs, initially with XIU (iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF), an exchange-traded fund he owns today for extra diversification.

As for real estate, the couple used to own a 2,400-square-foot, three-bedroom bungalow with half an acre of land in south Ottawa. But seven years ago they downsized to a condo with half that square footage. That was the plan all along: to have a “lock-and-leave” home as they got closer to semi-retirement and started to travel more. 

Pay yourself first—10% to 20% of net income

Like any good FIRE couple, they “paid themselves first” at least 10% of after-tax income, and sometimes even 20%. They paid off the mortgage in January 2024 and, after a spell of working part-time, Mark’s wife quit for good in October of 2025. Mark transitioned to part-time work in early 2025, rather than leave the work force cold turkey. The couple has no vacation or investment property, but his family has a cottage. As for vacation homes or rental properties, he says, “I just don’t want the liability. I think one house is enough these days.” 

Travel looms larger in the couple’s plans. So far, their longest stint away has been three weeks but they are planning to ramp up to four-week vacations in the coming years.

Seed started the MyOwnAdvisor website in 2009 and now writes and posts once or twice a week. The site name summarizes what he regards as his brand: his journey to becoming his own financial advisor. “I wanted to be my own financial advisor and not just on the investing side but also also be savvy on taxation, insurance planning, risk management, debt management, and estate planning.” 

He’s mostly self-taught. “I always thought I can do this without having tons of designations or letters after my name,” he says. Even so, he hasn’t ruled out getting a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) designation at some point. The only advisor he ever had was a typical rep at a major financial institution, with whom he met infrequently. However, he says, “I don’t begrudge people paying 1%—nothing wrong if you’re getting value.” Seed believes asset allocation ETFs have democratized investing and are making business tighter for the wealth management industry. “They [advisors] have to think beyond the investing piece. It’s not just picking an ETF, because anyone can do that these days.”   

Seed plans to keep MyOwnAdvisor going for the immediate future; it helps him “look back and see my thoughts (on a stock or fund or a certain asset allocation) and remember what the heck I was thinking… I use it as an online diary to chronicle the good, the bad and the indifferent.” 

A hybrid approach to investing

Seed’s site advocates a largely “hybrid” approach to investing: a combination of low-cost ETFs and mostly dividend-paying stocks. He says he landed on a “pretty good formula” of being 45% in individual stocks, 45% ETFs, and 10% cash or cash equivalents. That’s a fairly aggressive 90% equities weighting. His individual stocks are now exclusively Canadian. He sold his individual U.S. stocks to make room for more of his favorite global ETF: the iShares Core MSCI All Country World ex Canada Index ETF (XAW). As the name implies, it’s a global equity ETF that excludes Canada. It’s 64% in U.S. stocks.

Unlike many other financial bloggers, Seed is less enthusiastic about the all-in-one asset allocation ETFs, since his personal risk tolerance is so heavily in stocks. He’s too young to worry about registered retirement income funds (RRIFs) but expects to take Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security at age 65. He sees those government pensions and his small employer-sponsored defined benefit pension as “inflation-protected big bonds.” His personal financial projections go out to age 95 just to be on the safe side.

He does some public speaking on investing, such as regular talks to the local Ottawa Share Club, and has been a guest speaker at some financial institution webinar series on do-it-yourself investing, along with contributions to MoneySense. He has not yet written a book, but says he’s “tempted to write an eBook at some point but I’m not sure what it would be about. There’s a lot of stuff out there on ETFs and stocks.”  

Seed’s definition of retirement is similar to how The Globe and Mail personal finance columnist Rob Carrick defined it when he announced his retirement from his full-time staff position at the newspaper. We wrote about this almost a year ago in Retired Money, where Carrick revealed that at age 62 (at the time), he would continue to write two columns a month freelance for the Globe, as well embark on other new projects, including a Substack column. 

Asked for an update, Rob said this via email: “My take on retirement is that I’ve gone independent. Working for myself and my own pace rather than for my old employer, The Globe and Mail. Loved my Globe years, but what I’m doing right now is a great fit. I did start a Substack, which has been consistently building its paying and non-paying subscriber base. I am also doing speaking events, some consulting, biweekly Globe columns and two podcasts. One is the Globe‘s Stress Test, where I co-host three episodes a season. The other is The Findustry, which I co-host with CFP Shannon Simmons. The audience is financial planners and advisors.”    

Tawcan blogger planning FIRE in his 40s

While Seed is not aware of many of his readers achieving FIRE in their 40s, there‘s already a younger generation blogging about it. Bob Lai, the blogger behind Tawcan, is 43 and already planning his early retirement before 2030, which would still be in his 40s. In a recent blog post he outlines the steps he’s taking this year to ensure that outcome.