Travel with Kevin and Ruth: Almost time to retire

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Almost time to retire

We've actually been semi-retired since 2007 when at age 45 we sold our house in Canada and bought a motorhome. I actually used to call it pre-retired... or my own made up word "pretired".

But the problem was that we didn't have enough money! Pretty tough to retire when you have no way to support yourself.

We had sold our house in 2007, but we still had a mortgage on it, and of course house prices were a lot lower back then. So we had the proceeds of that, and a little bit of savings. But we were also still putting our son through university in the United States, so we had some expenses as well.

We ended up going back to work in Kingston, Ontario for a year when Ruth's mom had Alzheimer's. She eventually passed away in the fall of 2010, and we hung around that winter to help out her dad.

Guanajuato at night.

I tried various things over the years to make money online. Sometimes successfully, but it wasn't enough, and it was very inconsistent. We ended up going to work in Saskatchewan for five summers from 2013 to 2017. We could make fairly good money, and didn't have much in the way of expenses so we were able to sock most of it away while still being able to travel during the winter.

We also ran three different RV caravans to Mexico. The money wasn't great, but it was enough to pay our expenses for our winters in Mexico.

This blog also became popular enough that we could get some advertising income. While again, not very much money, but averaging probably $500 USD a month.

After trying many things over the years to earn online, something finally clicked in late 2016 and we were able to start making a decent income being an Amazon affiliate. It started slowly, but once we crossed the $1,000 a month mark, it grew over the years to average $4,000 a month. This income combined with the other things we were doing meant that we were making far more than we were spending, and were able to save quite a lot.

Of course we still file and pay taxes and public pension contributions in Canada, but with income sharing, our income is still quite low by Canadian standards. But we also have much lower expenses than Canadian standards.

For several years between 2018 and 2023, the Amazon job was taking up about two hours a day. Pretty good money for not much work, and of course I could do it from anywhere in the world, while adjusting for time changes.

But during Covid, our daughter found herself with some free time and I began training her to take over the Amazon job. She's done really well at learning the ropes, and over the past two years I've slowly passed on more of the responsibilities (and more of the income) to her. She now does it 5 days a week, and I do it two days a week.

In the meantime, we've been quite successful with our savings. I've always been a bit of a gold bug, and have been heavily invested in the undervalued and out of favor gold miners for the last six years or so. It's been up and down, but the last year has been excellent, and I believe there is a sector rotation underway out of the SP500 and into the precious metals. There will be a bull market in gold and silver and the miners for the next ten years or so, while the general stock market flounders.

On top of that, Ruth's father left her a small inheritance a couple of years ago which we haven't even touched. We took advantage of the run up in equities during Covid, but I saw that the market was getting overvalued and got us out of that in early December and it's now invested in relative safety, and growing slowly, and we're fine with that.

And, we're both 63 years old now, and when we turn 65 we plan to collect both the CPP (Canada Pension Plan) and OAS (Old Age Security) here in Canada. So, less than two years to go. We have no other pensions.

There were some lean times over the years that we've been living this alternative lifestyle, but somehow we made it work. Feeling pretty comfortable that we are financially fine for the rest of our lives.

Okay, back to the our regular scheduled programming...

Yesterday evening, our friend Doug invited us to join him with his friends Keith and Louise, an expat couple from England and Australia who have been here in Guanajuato for about three years. Also joining us was Doug's Spanish teacher Martin.