Retired Money

By Jonathan Chevreau on August 13, 2025
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

By Jonathan Chevreau on August 13, 2025
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Do personal finance journalists ever really retire? Jonathan Chevreau talks to Rob Carrick and other long-time writers about stepping back from full-time work.

It’s an occupational hazard of personal finance (PF) journalism that the writers’ lives are an open book. Anyone reading Retired Money knows my age and that I recently had to convert my RRSP into a RRIF. And I’m not alone: this summer has seen the retirement of some long-time PF columnists, notably The Globe and Mail’s Rob Carrick, who I interviewed for this column via Zoom.

At the end of June, Rob left the paper after 29 years; his beat was PF for 27 of those years. But as is typical of financial pundits, he’s not really “retiring” in the classic sense—he has just left salaried employment. At age 62, he concedes my term “Findependence” is an apt description of his changed status. He plans to write two monthly columns for the Globe: one on his new retirement experience, the other on traditional PF. His popular Carrick on Money column will be written by Globe and Mail colleagues and has been renamed simply On Money.

Rob and I both look back to the pioneering work Bruce Cohen did on the Canadian PF beat, which Bruce handed off to me a few years after I joined the Financial Post in 1993. While we view him as the grandfather of Canadian PF writing, Bruce himself modestly credits two earlier PF writers for being in effect the great-grandfathers of the genre: the late Mike Grenby and Henry Zimmer.

Rob spent a decade with Canadian Press before the Globe; after joining, he sold editors on the fact that at the time, no one at the paper was covering PF the way Cohen did. The Toronto Star had Ellen Roseman and James Daw covering PF. James is now retired. I recall Ellen saying in a speech, years ago, that she does not intend to ever retire. That has not changed, she confirmed for this column. Now 78, she continues to work in semi-retirement as a financial educator and public speaker.

Unlike other journalists mentioned in this column, Bruce is one of the few who actually did truly retire: after a five-year transition, he says, he fully retired at the traditional retirement age of 65. Now 75, he lives on 50 acres north of Toronto. He cites actuary Malcolm Hamilton’s conclusion that spending and lifestyle in retirement are pretty much the same as in pre-retirement: “Ergo, most people did not need a 70% income replacement ratio. That’s been true for me, though I don’t know if it still applies to the general population as many older people seem to carry significant debt into retirement and many adult children are living with their parents.”

Back in the FP newsroom, I used to sit across from Garry Marr, who wrote on allied subjects like real estate and mortgages. Garry left some years ago, but the FP just announced he is returning as a full-time columnist to take over—you guessed it!—the PF beat. His first column appeared on August 12.

Asked for his tips via email, Marr said he’s not retiring, but those who hope to one day should take advantage of employer matches on RRSPs. “I’m returning to Postmedia with two LIRAs stuffed with employer contributions. The........

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