When our retirement income planning clients tell us they’ve read Retirement Income for Life, or one of Fred Vettese’s other books on retiring in Canada, I usually get very excited. 

No, it’s not because I’m a huge book nerd and love talking to people who’ve read the same stuff I have (although I am and I do). 

I get excited when clients read books like this because it means two very specific things: 

First, it means that they’re taking retirement seriously and are likely to be engaged in the process. They’re just like eager students who have done the homework and are ready to learn - an educator’s dream. 

Second, it means they’ve got at least a basic grasp of some of the harder concepts that come with retirement income planning, like: 

• What the merits of deferring Canada Pension Plan benefits might be 

• The value of protecting against the worst-case investment scenario before trying to reach for the best-case investment scenario

• What annuities are and how they might fit into a plan (and when)

• The importance of planning for survivors and not just couples

There’s plenty of information on saving up for retirement, but precious little evidence-based information on spending them (outside of academia, that is). As a Canadian actuary, Vettese focuses solely on designing a decumulation strategy with the highest probability of success. Pre-retirees who understand at least the basic concepts are much more likely to execute them than people whose first (and second through fifth) response to the idea of an annuity are “NO WAY!”

I do wish that a book with the subtitle “Getting More Without Saving More” had devoted more than a single paragraph (on page 16, if you’re looking) to people who will retire with a low income. If “most, if not all of your retirement income will come from defined benefit sources like CPP, OAS, and other government income programs” you need a smart decumulation strategy as much as your higher income counterparts do...you just need an entirely opposite strategy to the one described in this book. 

A final quibble with an otherwise excellent book is the ease with which spending less from one year to the next is offered as a strategy for systematic withdrawal plans. On paper, reducing spending by a couple of hundred bucks a month may seem like a relatively straightforward exercise, especially if you put the work into identifying your minimum comfortable spending level as well as your nice-to-have desired spending level. In real life, however, changes to spending can be difficult to execute unless there’s a well-developed infrastructure in place.

Who should read it?

Anyone who does not have a defined benefit pension plan and is within five years of retirement should read this book, and any financial planners, accountants, and investment salespeople who ever advise clients on retirement income should crack it open too.

Who shouldn’t read it? 

If you are going to have a low income in retirement (think somewhere around or below $19,000 per year as a single person or $25,000 as a couple), this book is the literal opposite of the advice you should follow. Put it down and back away slowly! Instead, check out the Retiring on a Low Income resources from John Stapleton.

If you only have time to read one chapter:

Chapter 11 on deferring Canada Pension Plan benefits is a must-read (with a big caveat that it doesn’t apply to people who will retire on a low income).  

This is a great chapter because it does three things at once: 

• It articulates the basic CPP program for people who don’t know much about it

• It explains you shouldn’t worry that CPP is going to go bankrupt just because you heard the same thing about US Social Security (you might be surprised how often that comes up, accompanied by a request to leave CPP calculations out of retirement plans altogether)

• It provides evidence-based reasoning for delaying CPP for most people

If you only have time to read one paragraph:

“How a question is asked can fundamentally change our decision even though the basic underlying facts that are presented to us are the same.  The framing effect has some major implications for retirement planning. Over time, we develop strong feelings about certain concepts, institutions or products. Some we perceive as intrinsically good and others as equally bad. If your financial advisor asked if you want to buy an annuity or defer CPP without explaining the impact in detail, your answer would almost certainly be no. Alternatively, if she asks if you are prepared to make use of all the available tools to achieve your financial goals, your answer might be different.”

(Chapter 17: A Recap of the Five Enhancements, pages 151-152)

If you only have time to read one sentence:

“If all [your] planner is doing is helping you set your asset mix, the exercise is practically a waste of time.” 

(Chapter 13: Fine-Tuning the Asset Mix, page 117)

You know the nagging feeling that something - even a lot of somethings - are wrong, but the language to express what that something is and why it’s wrong eludes you? Enter Shoshana Zuboff and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 

Here’s an example: loyalty rewards. Something about a corporation tracking every purchase I make and giving me rewards in exchange for buying certain products they’ve decided I need has always struck me as...off (see what I mean about elusive language?)

In the past, the aphorism has been “if it’s free, you’re the product” but Zuboff’s conclusion, supported by rigorous analysis, is that you’re not the product, you’re the raw materials. The product is your behaviour and the power to nudge it in ways that are beneficial to the owner of the data, and that product - your data - is worth so much to the organizations who profit from it that it’s almost priceless.

As we move through the world today, our behaviour is increasingly tracked, some of it with our knowledge, most of it without. Not only our behaviour, but our emotions, preferences, relationships, and vital signs are increasingly gathered, analyzed, packaged, and sold to companies whose entire business model is to use this extracted data to change our preferences and nudge us in directions profitable to them. Provided the screen for data extraction is even marginally useful or entertaining to the humans using it, this large-scale scraping goes mostly undetected...and - in fact - works best when it’s imperceptible. 

This system is surveillance capitalism, and it goes beyond - way beyond - what we think of as cybersecurity or privacy protection. The concern here is not that someone is going to get your credit card number from an unsecure website and use it to make purchases you’ll be on the hook for. The concern is that many someones have already gotten your physical and behavioural patterns and are using them to make you make decisions that they are benefitting from. 

Your individual freedom to decide for yourself and act on your decisions is grit in the machine of profit. Big Other doesn’t desire your emotional well-being, your self-actualization, or your healthy relationships. It is indifferent to what you decide is the highest and best use of your time, money, and attention. Big Other only cares that you are predictable and profitable. Big Other is designed to create conformity.

Bummer, yes. Hyperbole? Not so much. Granted, there’s a risk in describing something as mundane as that fitness tracker on your arm as an implacable, amoral force intent on turning you into a mindless purchasing battery a la The Matrix and already more than halfway to doing it. But - like Zuboff - I believe these structures of extraction and control are not inevitable, provided we - the raw materials - decide to create a different future. 

Hopefully, this book is a record of what will turn out to be an abortive attempt by corporations and governments to exert total, invisible control on society via our newly but deeply internet-connected lives.

Who should read it?

I know there aren’t many of us who think reading a 2-inch thick tome on the insidious danger represented by surveillance capitalism is a recipe for good times. There are certainly other entries into this topic (notably a 2015 research article by the same author for the Journal of Information Technology, “Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization”), but for a fully researched, meticulously crafted study of the historical, cultural, and economic path we’re currently on, the terminology to discuss it, and the tools to recognize it as it shifts and morphs to evade detection, this book is worth working your way through.

If you only have time to read one chapter:

Next time you’re in a bookstore with twenty minutes to spare, pick up this book and read Chapter Eleven: The Right to the Future Tense (pages 329-348). Zuboff uses this chapter to summarize the precisely built foundation of history and terminology in the preceding chapters to answer the question “how did they get away with it?”. These short 19 pages are some of the simplest reading in the book and you’ll walk away better prepared to see the full scope of the problem.

If you only have time to read one paragraph:

“Many people feel that if you are not on Facebook, you do not exist. People all over the world raced to participate in Pokemon Go. With so much energy, success, and capital flowing into the surveillance capitalist domain, standing outside of it, let alone against it, can feel like a lonely and risky prospect.”

(Chapter 11: The Right to the Future Tense, page 342)

If you only have time to read one sentence:

“If we are to rediscover our sense of astonishment, then let it be here: if industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism will thrive at the expense of human nature and threatens to cost us our humanity.”

(Chapter 11: The Right to the Future Tense)

Any book that promises to help me get better at something important, and that the work will be hard and take time (possibly even a lifetime), is a book for me. I stumbled across We Need to Talk by Celeste Headlee while I was browsing through my library’s e-book app¹, and am I ever glad I did!

Headlee is an accomplished interviewer, and had every reason to believe she was great at having meaningful conversations with all sorts of people. Turns out even a professional radio host has room for improvement. No one should be surprised to find out that I personally have plenty of room for improvement.

The first section of We Need to Talk is a meticulously crafted case that good conversation is vitally important, and that all of us have room - lots of room - to get better. The second section is designed around ten specific strategies Headlee identifies that can improve communication, and she encourages readers to choose one strategy at a time to work at consciously, rather than trying to get better at everything all at once.

Who should read it?

Everyone should read Celeste Headlee's book, but in particular anyone who - like me - thinks they’re actually a pretty good conversationalist, thank you very much. There’s so much we insufferable know-it-alls can learn if we just get better at listening!

If you only have time to read one chapter:

Definitely read “Some Conversations are Harder Than Others.” This was a chapter that stopped me in my tracks, since it’s about very tough conversations and how worthwhile they can be.

This chapter is also important because in it, Headlee lays out the five key strategies that help facilitate productive dialogue:

1. Be curious: have a genuine willingness to learn something from someone else without the intention of educating them or proving them wrong.

2. Check your bias: remember that listening to someone doesn’t mean agreeing with them.

3. Show respect at all times: focus on the positive intentions of the other person and try to see them as someone trying to accomplish something they believe to be good.

4. Stick it out: sometimes, just learning what someone else thinks is satisfactory, even if all you do is listen.

5. End well: Let go of the impulse to have the last word, and express gratitude that the other person shared their thoughts with you.

I’m glad Headlee doesn’t present these as a quick recipe for good conversations, because becoming the kind of person who can follow these strategies consistently is going to mean a lifetime of paying attention.

If you only have time to read one paragraph:

“One of the best lessons I’ve learned in nearly twenty years as a journalist is that everyone has something to teach me. If you can find it within yourself to stop using conversations as a way to convince people that you’re right, you will be stunned at what you’ve been missing. A flood of information will rushi in to fill the vacancy left behind by your ego. You might be overwhelmed with knowledge, perspective, insight, and experience. You’ll hear stories you had refused to hear because you were too busy stating and restating your case. If you enter every conversation assuming you have something to learn, you will never be disappointed.”

(Chapter 8: Get Off the Soapbox)

If you only have time to read one sentence:

“As they say, the mouth shuts, the ears don’t, and there’s a good reason for that.”

(Chapter 7: It’s Not The Same!)

¹ This is also the reason I don’t have page numbers for you!

 If you have any kind of debt at all, go read Living Debt Free, the no-shame, no-blame guide to getting rid of your debt by Shannon Lee Simmons immediately. Companion book to Worry Free Money: the guilt-free approach to managing your money and your life, Living Debt Free is exactly what those of us who have struggled with persistent debt (sometimes for years) have been missing. In fact, pick them both up, because the first quarter of Worry Free Money is devoted to identifying and dismantling the reasons money and spending are so entwined with our feelings of adequacy, belonging, and success, and I know that up until now you’ve probably only ever heard or told yourself that you have debt because you’re bad with money, full stop.

For as long as I’ve been paying attention, and with only a few notable exceptions, the dominant conversation around debt has been some implicit or explicit version of Just stop spending on frivolous stuff or Just use all that time you spend on the couch to start a side-hustle or It’s just math, see this spreadsheet?, all served with the delectable shame cherry of You’re lazy, entitled, or stupid (probably all three) if you can’t make this work on top.

I’m tired of it, and I’ve been tired of it for a long f*cking time. Getting out and staying out of debt isn’t just math or hard work, and for the love of God I don’t want you to walk around under the burden of the shame and guilt that believing those lies lays on you for one minute more.

Just like her first book, Shannon devotes the first part of Living Debt Free to stopping debt cold. She does this by digging into why it happened, how you feel about it, and how to avoid hamstringing your ability to use the strategies presented later in the book before you even get to them. Like she says—a debt-free plan you can actually live with and execute all the way through is better than any guru-approved, mathematically optimal plan that saps your emotional resources and quickly deposits you back into the familiar grooves of the debt loop.

Once you get to the strategy section, you’re going to get a lot of simple, clear information about setting up your debt plan, building a banking strategy to keep you within your self-imposed boundaries, ordering your debt, and stacking your payments. Plus, the most important set of strategies: troubleshooting obstacles when they show up. What I love most about this book is Shannon’s insistence on trying all of the tools—even the ones that are often cast as even more evidence that you’re bad with money—comparing the projected results, and choosing the ones that you can use best.

Who should read it?

If you have debt, and you have enough income to keep you safe with a little bit of extra left over to use, read this book. Especially if you’ve been fighting both debt and shame about your debt and haven’t found anyone who helps you with one fight without making the other one worse.

If you find yourself regularly giving people advice about their debt and want to remember to be human being about it, you too should read this book.

If you only have time to read one chapter:

I’m cheating and giving you two: a chapter for everyone and a chapter specifically for you if you’ve struggled and struggled and expect to keep struggling forever because you’ve cut back everywhere and still have so far to go.

For everyone: Chapter 2: Reframing your Debt: Beat the Shame-and-Blame Mentality

Why this chapter? You cannot afford to dismiss the emotions you feel around debt, and this chapter is the one to read even if you don’t go any further (but please go further). It’s the one where Shannon guides you through changing your perspective about your debt, and to “focus on what it will mean to your future, not on what it means about your past.”

For you, already years into the struggle and feeling like there are still more tiring years ahead: Chapter 13: Free Up Money Fast

Why this chapter, for you specifically? You may not need to increase your spending money the way Vanessa does, but you need to know that there’s more than just “cut back until the debt is gone” in your toolbox, and it’s completely fine to use those other tools.

If you only have time to read one paragraph:

The first order of business is to stop going into debt. That’s your most important job - always. No matter what. None of the strategies for debt repayment matter if you are taking on more debt. Not sinking into more or at least controlling how much debt you take on, is a huge part of the battle to break the Debt Loop and give you control over your finances.

(Chapter 13: Free Up Money Fast, page 221)

If you only have time to read one sentence:

You don’t have to put an epic amount of money onto your debt to get an epic outcome.

(Chapter 11: Debt-Slammers, page 196)

When I picked up The Year of Less by Cait Flanders at the library, my friend at the front desk told me she read the first part, but only leafed through the rest. “Minimalism is nice, I guess, but not for me,” she said, as she handed the book to me.

I wish she had read it all the way to the end, and will probably tell her so when I return it. It’s easy to read this as a primer for quitting shopping, saving more, and consuming less - and it is all those things - but it’s more than that: it’s an honest account of a hard year and Cait’s slow stripping away of the crutches she used to numb her feelings instead of facing and learning from them.

What I like best about this book is that Cait never pretends that minimalism or sobriety or mindfulness “cured” her and now life is tidy and perfect and wonderful; instead, this book is a sweet reminder of a sometimes bitter truth: life is about learning the same lessons about our own worth over and over again, often without realizing they’re the same because the packaging is different.

It’s harder to learn life’s big lessons when we armour ourselves with things that stop us from facing them head-on. When we drink or shop or eat to numb the feelings, we don’t let ourselves do the hard work of learning that we - all by ourselves - are enough.

Who should read it?

This is a book for you if you’ve gone through something hard for a long enough time that you’ve created positive change, thought you were “cured” and then were surprised by another hard thing, another struggle with wanting to quit, and the same lesson you thought you’d learned already being shoved in your face again.

If you’re feeling sensitive to some kind of pain in your life, are willing to examine your reactions to that pain, and will ask yourself “why?” frequently enough to learn from the answers, pick up The Year of Less. You’ll feel like you have a friend doing the same thing alongside you.

If you only have time to read one chapter:

Chapter 9: March: Lightening Up

This is the corner chapter, after some of the most difficult days of February, where Cait let’s TV and food stand in as fEeLiNgS substitutes for a while. As she watches herself, she knows that turning to easy comforts instead of putting in the hard work of facing the real issues just prolongs the hurt. And this is where you see her reflective IQ really shine.

If you only have time to read one paragraph:

The stuff I wanted the ideal version of myself to use was everything I had once bought in hopes that it would somehow make my life or myself better. There were books I thought smart Cait should read, clothes I thought professional Cait would wear, projects I thought creative Cait could tackle. Classic novels, little black dresses, scrapbook materials, and more. At one point, I’d put thousands of dollars on my credit cards for this stuff - stuff I purchased with every intention of using, but only because I told myself it would somehow help. I wasn’t good enough, but this stuff would make me better. I wanted to read, wear, and do everything so I could become the person I thought I should be. Having these items in my home proved it was possible. I would do it all one day, and become a better person one day. This time, one day never came.

Chapter 8: February: Letting Go of the Future, pages 117-118

If you only have time to read one sentence:

Who are you buying this for: the person you are or the person you want to be?

Chapter 8: Letting Go of the Future, page 118