By Jonathan Chevreau on May 22, 2026 Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

How are FIRE adherents making out?

By Jonathan Chevreau on May 22, 2026 Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

We check in on some champions of early retirement nearing their own finish line of financial independence.

In the increasingly specialized world of financial blogging, there’s a subgenre of so-called “FIRE” experts, who expound on the acronym FIRE. FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. Some proponents are in their 40s or 50s and practising what they preach, having either reached financial independence or are almost there. We describe some of them in this column.  

My own semi-retirement project, FindependenceHub.com, often republishes FIRE-related blogs. Recently, I ran one from the MyOwnAdvisor blog by Ottawa-based Mark Seed, who announced on his site in April that he had finally retired in his early 50s, after 17 years of blogging about it. For this Retired Money column, I interviewed Seed on Google Meet to learn how he did it.  

For most FIRE gurus mentioned here, the term “retirement” means no longer being a full-time salaried employee with all that entails: commuting to an office, bosses, meetings, and so on. The emphasis is on the Financial Independence aspect of FIRE more than outright Retiring Early. Like most FIRE believers, Seed plans to keep writing and blogging and stay mentally and professionally active. He is practising the acronym he coined: FIWOOT, which stands for Financial Independence, Work on Own Terms. He says he’s retired from the workforce but continues to “putter-away at stuff. I will run the blog for a few more years. We shall see. I might work at a golf course in a few years too… But I no longer have any Monday-to-Friday job—all gone… My wife retired last fall at age 52. Still hasn’t worked.”

One “accelerant” in reaching Findependence in their early 50s is that Seed and his wife decided not to have children. In other words, to use the vernacular DINKs, they are Double Income No Kids. As he explained in the Google Chat, “that was a personal choice for us, which may or may not be aligned with other peoples’ lifestyle decisions.” As a result, even before formally retiring, the couple was able to travel a lot in their 30s and 40s: to Europe, Latin America, and across Canada and the United States. 

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While Seed spent his formative years in Toronto, he’s been in Ottawa for 25 years. Initially, the couple rented their home, but their well-paying jobs enabled them to buy a house even as they simultaneously contributed to RRSPs—he started contributions to his RRSP when he was 22 with just $25 a month—and started contributing to TFSAs upon inception in........

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