What is RetireMint?
But now that I’m being attentive, I’ll add that RetireMint (with a capital M followed by a lowercase i as an alternative of an e) is a Canadian retirement platform. And it could affect your planning for the financial and lifestyle elements of your retirement. The risk is not great, since you may try it out without cost at retiremint.ca. In fact, there isn’t any fee in any respect for retirement planning users, RetireMint co-founder and CEO Ryan Donovan told me in an email. There are not any ads, either. Instead, revenue comes from the Find a Coach tool: a search tool and online directory of pros who may also help users with their planning needs. (You pay a monthly fee to be listed on the platform.)
What I liked after I tried it out is that it isn’t just one other retirement app that tells you the way much money you should retire comfortably. It’s just as much, if no more, dedicated to the lighter elements of retirement in Canada: what you are going to do with all that free time – traveling, working part-time, maintaining social media, and so forth.
In this respect, the “beyond financial” elements of RetireMint remind me of a book I once co-wrote with former corporate banker Mike Drak (Milner, 2019), or my very own financial novel (Trafford, 2013). As I often used to clarify, once you’ve enough money and reach the day of economic independence, all the pieces that happens after that might be called a “victory lap.”
But it isn’t my intention to advertise those books here, aside from to say that I immediately understood where RetireMint was coming from. So back to this system. RetireMint’s mission statement is: “We help Canadians retire better, faster and better prepared.” It also bills itself as “Your Guide to Modern Retirement.”
What RetireMint does and doesn’t do
Donovan sent me a PDF with some key points for the web site and in addition gave me access to the software. In late August he also wrote a guest blog on my website, FindependenceHub.com, with the apt title “Retirement needs a new definition”.
There he explains: “Retirement is so closely linked to financial planning and associated with ‘old age’ that they are virtually inseparable. But in reality, retirement is a stage of life, not a date on the calendar, not an amount in your bank account, and certainly not a death sentence.”
Donovan is just not claiming that financial planning is the cornerstone of retirement planning because “without it, you can’t even think about retiring.” But the difficulty is far broader. As he puts it, this broader definition “must break free from the rigid association of financial planning alone.”
Who is CEO Ryan Donovan? And does RetireMint offer investment advice?
How did Donovan get all this retirement planning expertise? He was never actually a financial advisor, but he worked as a product manager in a wealth management firm. Together with the corporate’s advisors, he developed products and communication tools for retirement planning.
