My own semi-retirement project, FindependenceHub.com, continuously republishes blogs on the subject of FIRE. Recently, I ran one from the blog of Mark Seed from Ottawa, who announced on his side in April that he had finally retired in his early 50s after blogging about it for 17 years. For this column, I interviewed Seed on Google Meet to learn the way he did it.
For a lot of the FIRE gurus mentioned here, the term “retirement” signifies that they are not any longer a full-time worker, with all that entails: commuting to the office, bosses, meetings, and so forth. The focus at FIRE is more on the aspect of monetary independence than on direct early retirement. Like most FIRE believers, Seed plans to proceed writing and blogging and staying energetic mentally and professionally. He practices the acronym FIWOOT, which he coined and stands for “Financial Independence, Work on Own Terms”. He says he’s retired from the workforce but continues to struggle with things. I’ll proceed the blog for just a few more years. We’ll see. Maybe in just a few years I’ll be working on a golf course… But I not have a Monday to Friday job – all gone… My wife retired last fall at age 52. Still hasn’t worked.”
An “accelerator” on the road to Findependence in her early 50s was that Seed and his wife decided to not have children. In other words, to make use of the colloquial DINKs, it’s Double Income No Kids. As he explained on Google Chat, “This was a personal decision for us that may or may not align with other people’s lifestyle choices.” This enabled the couple to travel extensively of their 30s and 40s, even before their official retirement: to Europe, Latin America, in addition to across Canada and the United States.
While Seed spent his adolescence in Toronto, he has lived in Ottawa for 25 years. Initially, the couple rented the house, but their well-paying jobs allowed them to buy a house while also contributing to RRSPs – he began contributing to his RRSP at age 22 with just $25 a month – and commenced contributing to TFSAs upon founding in 2009. He invested in Mutual funds from 1995 to 2008, but began investing seriously throughout the 2008-09 financial crisis, when he bought his first stock: Enbridge. He regularly began switching to ETFs, first with XIU (iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF), an exchange-traded fund that he now owns for extra diversification.
As for real estate, the couple previously owned a 2,400-square-foot, three-bedroom bungalow on half an acre of land in south Ottawa. But seven years ago, they downsized the property to a condominium with half the space. That was the plan all along: to have a lock-and-leave home as they approached semi-retirement and began traveling more.
Pay yourself first – 10% to twenty% of net income
Like any good FIRE couple, they paid one another not less than 10% of their after-tax income “first,” sometimes as much as 20%. They paid off the mortgage in January 2024 and after a period of part-time work, Mark’s wife finally quit in October 2025. Mark switched to part-time work at the start of 2025 fairly than leave the world of labor. The couple doesn’t own a vacation or investment property, but their family owns a vacation home. As for vacation homes or rental properties, he says, “I just don’t want to take on any liability. I think a house is enough these days.”
Travel plays a bigger role within the couple’s plans. So far their longest stay has been three weeks, but in the approaching years they plan to increase the holiday time to 4 weeks.
Seed began the web site in 2009 and now writes and posts a few times every week. The name of the web site sums up what he considers his brand: his journey to becoming his own financial advisor. “I wanted to be my own financial advisor and have knowledge not only on the investing side, but also in tax, insurance planning, risk management, debt management and estate planning.”
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He is usually self-taught. “I always thought I could do this without having a ton of labels or letters after my name,” he says. However, he doesn’t rule out the potential of becoming a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) sooner or later. The only advisor he ever had was a typical representative of a big financial institution with whom he rarely met. However, he says: “I don’t begrudge people paying 1% – nothing bad if you get something in return.” Seed believes asset allocation ETFs have democratized investing and made business tougher for the asset management industry. “She [advisors] I actually have to think beyond the investing part. It’s not nearly selecting an ETF, because anyone can try this lately.”
Seed plans to proceed within the near future; It helps him “look back and see my thoughts (on a stock, a fund, or a particular asset allocation) and remember what the hell I was thinking… I use it as an online diary to record the good, the bad, and the indifferent.”
A hybrid investment approach
Seed’s website advocates a largely “hybrid” investment approach: a mix of low-cost ETFs and predominantly dividend stocks. He says he got here across a “pretty good formula” where he invests 45% in individual stocks, 45% in ETFs and 10% in money or money equivalents. That’s a reasonably aggressive 90% equity weighting. Its individual stocks at the moment are exclusively Canadian. He sold his individual U.S. stocks to make room for more of his favorite global ETFs: the iShares Core MSCI All Country World ex Canada Index ETF (XAW). As the name suggests, it’s a worldwide equity ETF excluding Canada. For US stocks it’s 64%.
Unlike many other financial bloggers, Seed is less keen about all-in-one asset allocation ETFs because his personal risk tolerance is so heavily skewed towards stocks. He’s too young to fret about Registered Retirement Income Funds (RRIFs), but expects to tap into the Canada Pension Plan and retirement advantages at age 65. He views these state pensions and his small employer-sponsored defined profit pension as “inflation-protected big bonds.” To be on the secure side, his personal financial projections date back to the age of 95.
He gives some public speaking engagements on the subject of investing, reminiscent of regular talks with the local Ottawa Share Club, and has been a guest speaker at several financial institution webinar series on the subject of do-it-yourself investing, together with features on “do-it-yourself investing.” He hasn’t written a book yet, but says he’s “tempted to write an e-book at some point, but I’m not sure what it’s about. There’s a lot of stuff about ETFs and stocks.”
Seed’s definition of retirement is comparable to private finance columnist Rob Carrick’s definition when he announced his retirement from his full-time position on the newspaper. We wrote about it almost a 12 months ago in Retired Money, where Carrick revealed that, on the then age of 62, he would proceed to freelance two columns a month for the magazine and in addition pursue other recent projects, including a Substack column.
When asked for an update, Rob said this via email: “My approach to retirement is that I have become independent. I work for myself and my own pace rather than for my old employer. I loved my years, but what I’m doing now is a great fit. I’ve started a business.” Substackwhich is continually expanding its paying and non-paying subscriber base. I also do speaking engagements, some consulting, bi-weekly columns, and two podcasts. One of them is “Stress Test,” where I co-host three episodes per season. The other is The Findustry, which I co-host with CFP Shannon Simmons. The audience is financial planners and advisors.”
Tawcan blogger plans to FIRE in his 40s
While Seed doesn’t know that a lot of its readers are reaching FIRE at 40, a younger generation is already blogging about it. Bob Lai, the blogger behind Tawcan, is 43 years old and is already planning to retire early before 2030, while still in his 40s. In one current blog post He outlines the steps he’s taking this 12 months to be sure that final result.
