Sue Pimento

As I stood there before friends, family, colleagues, and the people who had actually agreed to come celebrate a book I wrote, I found myself thinking about how all of this had become possible. There it was my name on the cover. A real book. Something that had started as a vague idea, survived several versions, considerable self-doubt, and a few grammatical interventions, and somehow made it into the world. People frequently ask me about the process. How did you write a book? Where did the idea come from? How did you actually get it finished? The honest answer is that I didn't really know what I was doing. I just kept going long enough to figure some things out. So, in honour of the launch, I thought I would share the formula. I call it The Algebra of Writing a Book. A quick disclaimer before we begin. This is a personal formula, based on a sample size of one, occasionally supervised by a patient editor and a ten-pound she-dog named Dottie, who treats every writing session as a personal invitation to stop working and pay attention. It has not been peer-reviewed by an actual mathematician, unless being an MBA student now qualifies me to turn every human experience into an equation, whether it wants to cooperate or not. The inspiration came partly from Scott Galloway, whose The Algebra of Happiness and The Algebra of Wealth take complicated subjects and distil them into memorable formulas (Galloway, 2019, 2024). What I admired was not the formula at the end of each chapter. It was the discipline behind it. He takes a messy human subject, studies it long enough to understand the mechanics, and then gives readers something they can actually use. For years, I have spent at least a couple of hours a day reading or listening to people who think more clearly than I do. I don't just want to know what they think. I want to understand how they got there. How did they make that point? Why did that sentence work? What did they leave out? Where did they slow down? A surprising number of the ideas I now think of as my own started somewhere else. I turn them over, pull them apart, mix them with my own experience, and, if I'm lucky, they come back sounding like me. I think of them as my thought babies: borrowed genetics, raised in my household until they develop a personality. Research + Experience + Curiosity = Original Ideas At least, that was the theory. Then life decided to test it. At 65, I lost my job. Financially, I was fine. Thirty years in financial services had taken care of that. Emotionally, however, I discovered I had built a surprisingly large part of my identity on a business card. Take away the title, the office, the meetings, the responsibilities and the people who needed you to make decisions, and suddenly you are left wondering who exactly you are supposed to be on Tuesday morning. Naturally, I responded in the most emotionally healthy way I could think of. I built a business case for my reinvention. There was a timeline. There were measurable deliverables. There may even have been a Gantt chart. Picture it: a newly unemployed woman trying to project-manage her emotional recovery as though grief were a product launch. Phase One: Feel Better. Phase Two: Discover New Purpose. Phase Three: Become Inspiring. It was a spectacular failure. A few weeks later, I was sitting in my car in a grocery store parking lot with the engine off, unwilling to go inside and buy milk like someone who actually had somewhere to be. My beautifully organized recovery plan had collapsed somewhere around Phase One. It turns out grief has very little respect for bullet points. What I needed was permission to be a mess for a while. So I gave myself one small instruction: write something five days a week. Not something good. Not something publishable. Not something anyone besides Dottie and I would ever read. Just something. I did not commit to writing a book. I committed to trying. I gave myself permission to be terrible at it for as long as it took. That turned out to be the important part. Somewhere in all that low-stakes trying, I fell in love with writing. I became fascinated by how a good writer can take an idea you’ve been carrying around vaguely for years and suddenly put exactly the right words around it. You read the sentence and think, yes. That's it. That's exactly what I've been trying to say. Stealing Homework David Brooks once described writers as “beggars who tell other beggars where they found bread.” He used the phrase in a 2023 Persuasion interview with Yascha Mounk, calling it one of his favourite sayings about writing (Mounk, 2023). I loved it because it gave me permission to stop pretending that every good idea had originated in my own head. I started paying attention not only to what good writers said but also to how they built an argument, why certain words carried more weight, and how a simple metaphor could sometimes accomplish what three pages of explanation could not. I carried a notebook everywhere. I wrote down phrases that stopped me. I noticed metaphors the way other people notice good haircuts. Patricia O'Conner's Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English quietly repaired decades of my grammatical freelancing as I tried to figure out why six words could sometimes explain something better than six paragraphs. Then came Christine. Two years and three complete versions of the manuscript later, I had something that vaguely resembled a book. That was largely thanks to Christine, a PhD, teacher, and four-time published author, who agreed to help a woman whose writing experience began and ended with mortgage disclosure statements. Christine was smart, generous, and wonderfully direct. She was also a regular in my GoodLife Fitness classes, which meant she had already watched me botch choreography in public before she read a word of my writing. I had very little dignity left to protect. Her first editorial assessment was concise: “Sue, your grammar sucks.” Fair enough. Her second question was why I insisted on capitalizing the word Mortgage as though it deserved the same reverence as God or Beyoncé. I still don’t have a good answer. But Christine's most important contribution had nothing to do with grammar. My manuscript was full of financial information and professional jargon. It was smart enough, but it wasn't human enough. Buried inside it was Clara, a character representing the ordinary people I had spent my career trying to help. The truth was that I had trouble accessing the human side of aging, finance and retirement. It was much easier to talk about the process and the products than to be vulnerable about what I had actually gone through. Christine kept pushing me. Tell the human story. Go deeper. Be more vulnerable. Stop hiding behind your expertise. She was right. Slowly, Clara became more real. As Clara became more real, so did I. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being an author trying to protect my professional credibility and became a woman willing to be seen. That changed the book. It also changed me. It helped me heal some of the wounds I hadn't realized I was carrying. And somewhere in the middle of all that editing, Christine and I became better friends. I didn't want to disappoint her, which turned out to be a far better motivator than any deadline. Finishing the manuscript didn’t feel like a triumph. It felt more like handing someone something soft and unfinished, hoping they wouldn’t drop it. As long as the book was unfinished, I had an excellent excuse: “I’m working on a book.” Very impressive. Very aspirational. Very safe. Once it was finished, there was nowhere left to hide. So I hired an agent and let him absorb the rejection on my behalf. He sent the manuscript out. Three responses came back. One publisher said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Two said yes. Suddenly, a woman with three decades in mortgage lending, a character named Clara, and an unapologetic attachment to writing was going to be an author. Which brings me to the actual algebra. Curiosity + Permission to Fail + Consistent Effort + Time = A Finished Manuscript Notice what is missing. There is no talent requirement. No inspiration variable. No line item for knowing what you're doing before you start. There is simply a small, repeatable behaviour applied without judging the results too harshly. And here is the part I especially want to emphasize: I was 65 when I lost my job, and 70 when my book was published. Five years. Is five years too long to reinvent yourself? I doubt it. We have somehow convinced ourselves that reinvention should happen quickly, preferably between lunch and the afternoon news. But some things take time. Five years gave me time to learn, write badly, rewrite, improve, find my voice, work with Christine, survive rejection, heal old wounds, and eventually become an author. Five years earlier, I would never have put “write a book” on my list of things to do. At 65, I was trying to figure out who I was without the job that had defined so much of my adult life. At 70, I was standing in front of friends and family, holding a published book with my name on it. Here is the link to the the launch party interview if you have 37 minutes (or 24 minutes at 1.5x).  We spend a lot of time planning for retirement as though we are planning a trip. We think about where we will live, how much money we will need, and what we will do with our time. All important questions. But life doesn't always follow the itinerary. Sometimes the thing you think is the ending turns out to be the beginning of the next chapter. My other formula became: Loss + Curiosity + Permission + Action + Time = Reinvention My two background mantras throughout all of this were simple: It is never too late. If not now, when? They sound almost embarrassingly obvious, but obvious does not mean easy. I have watched too many people postpone the things they want to do until some imaginary future when they will have more time, more confidence, more energy, or fewer obligations. There is always a reason to wait. I had plenty of them myself. You cannot get to “one day” without committing to “day one.” For me, day one wasn't about writing a book. It was about writing one thing. Then another. Then another. Five days out of seven. Eventually, those small acts of showing up became a manuscript. The manuscript became a book. And five years after losing my job, at 70, that book became real. And I became a better human. Scott Galloway gave me the idea of looking for the algebra beneath a complicated subject. David Brooks gave me permission to admit that writers borrow, learn from, and build on one another. Christine gave me the courage to stop hiding behind my expertise and to let the human story into the book. Dottie gave me a very reliable reason to stop writing and go for a walk. And a 65-year-old woman who had just lost a huge part of her identity gave herself permission to be bad at something new. Five days out of seven. For long enough. Apparently, that was enough. Today, Your Retirement Reset is out in the world, on bookshelves, in libraries, and with readers across Canada. More than fifty blog posts have grown out of the same process, a considerably better showing than that Gantt chart ever managed. If there is something on the back burner that you keep telling yourself you will do someday, don't start with the big plan. Try something small. Give yourself permission to be terrible. Then show up again. Make tomorrow your day one. Because sometimes reinvention doesn't arrive with a grand announcement. Sometimes it quietly wanders in while you're busy doing something else. That is how I wrote a book. And perhaps more importantly, that is how I discovered I wasn't finished becoming whoever comes next. It is never too late. If not now, when? Sue My Book is Available for Order: I hope you will consider ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for yourself, a friend, or someone you love. Published by ECW Press and is available through Indigo or Amazon and McNally Robinson. If you like supporting Canadian booksellers, check with your local independent bookstore too. Most can order it.

It started with the sweating. Not the kind you get after a workout, or the kind that shows up when you realize you're late for a job interview. This was different. Our patient, a perfectly healthy 48-year-old man, would be sitting quietly at his desk when a wave of heat would roll over him out of nowhere. His shirt would stick to his back, his forehead would glisten, and he would find himself wondering if his wife had quietly turned up the thermostat. Then came the mood swings. One minute he was fine. The next, he was irrationally furious because his wife had asked what he wanted for dinner. "I DON'T KNOW!" he shouted. "I'VE BEEN MAKING DECISIONS FOR THIRTY YEARS! CAN SOMEONE ELSE PICK FOR ONCE?" Then came the 3:17 a.m. panic attacks, always at 3:17, as if his subconscious had set an alarm. He would wake with his heart pounding, one thought looping through his mind: what if I don't have enough? Enough what? He couldn't say. Enough money, enough retirement savings, enough time, enough health, enough golf. He wasn't taking any chances. By 4:03, he was calculating the future value of his RRSP. By 4:27, he was checking his house's value. By 4:41, he was browsing real estate listings in Portugal. By 5:15, he had determined he could not, in fact, afford Portugal. By 5:22, he was oddly angry about a country he had never planned to move to. His wife finally insisted he see a doctor. The doctor listened carefully, ran the usual tests, folded his hands, and delivered his verdict. "I know what's wrong with you." The man sat up straighter. "Is it serious?" "I'm afraid you're suffering from Peri-Retirement." "Peri what?" "Peri-Retirement." "Is it contagious?" "No." "Curable?" "Not exactly." "Am I going to die?" The doctor paused for a long moment. "Eventually. We all will." "That isn't particularly reassuring." "Sorry. The good news is that Peri-Retirement is completely normal. You're 48. You've spent 25 years building a career, raising a family, paying down a mortgage, and accumulating money. You've simply reached the point where you're starting to wonder what comes next." Welcome to Peri-Retirement. And yes, unlike Peri-Menopause, this one is refreshingly inclusive. It affects men, women, and everyone in between, because apparently anxiety about money doesn't check your chromosomes before it shows up at 3:17 a.m. Maslow Could Have Used a Sequel In 1943, Abraham Maslow published his famous hierarchy of needs, the pyramid every psychology student eventually draws on a napkin. It charts the climb from food and shelter to belonging and esteem, all the way to self-actualization, the state of finally becoming the person you were capable of being all along. It's a genuinely useful map of human development. I just think Maslow wrapped it up about one life stage too soon. After decades of working, raising kids, building a career, and accumulating enough assets to make an accountant blush, most of us hit another transition Maslow never got around to charting. Retirement stops being a hazy concept involving golf and starts feeling uncomfortably real. I call that first stage Peri-Retirement, and I'd put it roughly between ages 45 and 60, the years when retirement starts creeping into every quiet moment. When can I actually retire? Will I have enough? What will I do with my Tuesdays? Can I afford to travel? What happens if I live to 95? And the question that keeps people up at 3:17 in the morning: who am I if I'm no longer working? After that comes Pre-Retirement, roughly 55 to 70. For many Baby Boomers, working until 70 has quietly become the norm, so the old assumption that everyone retires neatly at 65 is starting to look about as current as a rotary phone. Then comes Retirement itself, which turns out to have three distinct acts. There are the Go-Go years, when health and energy are still on your side and people travel, renovate the kitchen, take up pickleball, or try to figure out why everyone suddenly won't stop talking about it. Then the pace naturally shifts into the Slow-Go years, when spending and activity ease off. Eventually come the No-Go years, when health or mobility start setting the boundaries. Retirement, in other words, can run for three decades, and the financial life of a 65-year-old looks nothing like that of an 85-year-old. Which brings us to a problem the industry has grown remarkably comfortable ignoring. The Gap Between Net Worth and Cash Flow We have all become fluent in net worth. We know what our homes are worth, down to the last renovation; we track our RRSPs and TFSAs like box scores; and we celebrate or panic depending on which way the portfolio moved this week. Net worth and cash flow, though, are two completely different animals. Net worth tells you what you own. Cash flow tells you what you actually have available to pay for your life. You can be asset-rich and cash-flow poor at the same time, sitting in a million-dollar house while stressing over the hydro bill, because the grocery store still hasn't rolled out a "pay with bathroom renovation" option. That gap between paper wealth and usable income is one of the biggest problems facing retirees today, yet it gets a fraction of the attention it deserves. Turns out I'm not the only one losing sleep over this at 3:17 a.m. I co-authored a paper with EY called Canada's Retirement Evolution, and the numbers we pulled together read like a diagnosis. About 30 percent of Canadians are already 55 or older, and that share could climb to between 35 and 40 percent by 2030. Layer on top of that a trillion dollars in wealth moving from Baby Boomers to their Gen X and Millennial kids between 2016 and 2026, with roughly 70 percent of it tied up in real estate, and you get an entire country full of people who are asset-rich, cash-flow-anxious, and one awkward Thanksgiving dinner away from an intergenerational conversation about the house. We Got Very Good at One Half of the Job For decades, the financial services industry trained us beautifully in exactly one skill: accumulating. Save into your RRSP, max out your TFSA, diversify, pay down the mortgage, build the portfolio, grow the assets. Most of us became excellent students. The trouble is that the assignment eventually changes. At some point, accumulation has to hand the baton to decumulation, and we're suddenly expected to figure out how to convert decades of saving into income that can fund the rest of our lives. Ideally without draining the account, spooking ourselves every time the market dips, or spending our seventies squinting at investment statements at 4 a.m. We get thirty or forty years of coaching on how to put money into the machine, and then almost none on how to dispense it safely. That's exactly where Peri-Retirement gets interesting. What If the Income Conversation Started Earlier? The Peri-Retirement crowd is sitting on an asset most retirees have already spent: time. These are people still working, often earning meaningful income, with savings, home equity, and years for that money to compound before they need it. That's a real opportunity for the financial services industry; one it has largely left on the table. What if retirement income wasn't something we only started thinking about the week before the retirement party? What if there were products built specifically for the Peri-Retirement years, ones that let people work toward predictable, guaranteed income for life, starting at an age they choose? The idea deserves serious attention. Waiting until retirement to solve the income question means giving up years of compounding and cramming an enormous decision into a painfully short window. Starting earlier lets people build that income gradually, while a paycheque is still coming in to fund it, and it changes the whole conversation. Instead of only asking "how much money will I have when I retire," we could start asking "how much income will I actually need, and how do I build it before I get there?" That's a fundamentally different way to plan for retirement, and it might be exactly what Peri-Retirement is for. Our 48-year-old patient may have shown up with hot flashes, mood swings, and a standing 3:17 a.m. appointment with his own anxiety, but his body wasn't betraying him. It was trying to get his attention. Peri-Retirement might be the moment we finally understand that retirement was never just about the number in the account. It's about knowing exactly how that number translates into a life you can afford to live, for as long as you're living it. That's the question I wrote Your Retirement Reset to answer, including the one that trips up almost everyone: how do you turn what you've accumulated into sustainable income and cash flow for the years ahead? The book hits stores and libraries on September 29, and you're welcome to grab a copy directly from me. If you have a parent circling retirement, buy two. Retirement has a funny way of becoming a family sport, whether anyone signed up for it or not. As for our patient, the doctor sent him home with a retirement plan, a firm suggestion to stop checking his RRSP before sunrise, and strict orders to close every tab related to Portuguese real estate. His prognosis is excellent. He has Peri-Retirement, and now, at least, he finally knows what to call it. The financial industry, meanwhile, is still mostly asleep at 4:03 a.m., and it's about time someone woke it up! Don’t Retire… ReWire! Sue My Book is Available for Pre-Order: I hope you will consider pre-ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for yourself, a friend, or someone you love. It arrives September 29, 2026, published by ECW Press, and is already available through Indigo or Amazon. If you like supporting Canadian booksellers, check with your local independent bookstore too. Most can order it.

My friend from the gym has a recurring nightmare, not the usual one about showing up to spin class without pants. In hers, she is sixty-eight, broke, standing on her parents' porch with a suitcase, ringing the doorbell of the house she grew up in, hoping they still remember her. In the dream, her parents are somehow both alive and completely unbothered, as though this is a perfectly ordinary Tuesday. She wakes up in a sweat every time. She has told me about this dream more than once, usually mid-hill climb, which is not when I do my best financial counselling. For her, it is not a silly dream, it is the shape of her deepest fear, failure. Not being able to afford her own retirement feels like proof that she did something fundamentally wrong. Father Time does not send polite reminders. He taps his watch, and her subconscious taps back. A few months ago when she started making progress on the construction of the laneway house in her backyard, I expected her to feel lighter. Instead, she cornered me by the water fountain, looking as if she had personally lost a boxing match. "I should be in my accumulation years," she said, "and instead I am pouring every spare dollar into a construction site." She said the word construction the way other people say audit. Here is what I told her: she had this exactly backwards. This is peri-retirement, a phase I coined to describe the stretch that can hit anywhere between forty-five and sixty. It is the point when most of the accumulating happens, and savings should be well underway. The kids are at school. Retirement is coming whether you are ready or not, and peri-retirement is the stage when that fact finally gets your attention. It deserves its own post, coming soon. For today, back to my friend and her Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC). Spending feels like money disappearing. Investing is money that goes somewhere. When you spend money, it is gone in a way you can feel immediately: dinner is bought, eaten, and now there is only a receipt. When you invest money, the dollars leave your hand but do not vanish. They convert into something: a stock certificate, a retirement account, or, in my friend's case, a fully legal, income-producing rental unit thirty feet behind her kitchen. The trouble is that every invoice looks the same, whether you are buying a vacation or a foundation. Her brain filed the whole project under "money disappearing," no matter how many times I explained that a rental suite generates a cheque every month for the rest of her life. What made this harder to accept was her HELOC. She had spent years throwing every spare dollar at her mortgage so she could stand at her front door and say "paid" out loud to nobody in particular. Now she watched a home equity line of credit climb back up to pay for two-by-fours and a very opinionated contractor, as if undoing decades of discipline in one renovation season. But debt taken on to build an income-producing asset is a different animal from debt taken on to buy a car that loses value the moment you drive it off the lot. The couch is delivered, comfortable, and will never write you a cheque. An investment costs money up front and, if structured well, pays you back for years. A laneway suite is not a couch. It is a very slow, very stubborn vending machine that eventually hands you rent instead of snacks. Numbers make this less abstract. A laneway or garden suite in a city like Toronto typically costs three hundred and fifty thousand to six hundred thousand dollars plus to build.  The rent can range from two thousand to four thousand dollars a month. After property tax, insurance, and maintenance take their cut, most homeowners break even in ten to fifteen-ish years, still slow compared with a twenty-five-year mortgage, but faster than it sounds. After that, it is simply income, for as long as you own the property. What exactly is an ADU? An Accessory Dwelling Unit, or ADU, is a separate, fully equipped living space on the same lot as your main house, giving its occupant their own front door, kitchen, and, mercifully, their own bathroom. The basement apartment is the classic workhorse of the category and the more accessible option: no backyard or laneway access needed, and usually a smaller cheque, making it the realistic starting point for most homeowners before they ever consider the trendier laneway or garden suite. The rules vary by city. Vancouver has allowed laneway houses, once called coach houses, for years, with a permitting framework it has published. Toronto came later, introducing Laneway Suites in 2018 and Garden Suites in 2022, with its own permit process outlined here. My friend started her project after hearing some version of "build it and they will come," hoping to eventually have her mother move in or to have a space ready for her own child. A laneway suite can also become a studio for a retirement passion project, or even the retirement plan itself, with the homeowner moving into the smaller suite and renting out the main house, a modern spin on downsizing, as one Toronto homeowner described in a piece worth reading. Using rental income to fund retirement is not new. Landlords have long understood this math. What is new is that many homeowners in their fifties are realizing their house is their largest asset and possibly the centrepiece of their retirement plan. Now for the part nobody puts in the glossy brochure. Building an ADU is stressful in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not lived through a renovation. Contractors have a nickname for the fine grey powder that coats every surface in a house under construction. They call it divorce dust. I did not make that up, and I did not need to ask why. My gym friend has had the full tour: Committee of Adjustment (COA) hearings, legal agreements between neighbours causing permit delays, a contractor who went MIA with her down payment, the other contractor who went MIA for 3 weeks and a neighbour, silent about the fence for eleven years, who suddenly developed passionate opinions about sightlines the moment scaffolding went up. Building one is still worth doing. It just means staying vigilant after the ribbon cutting, too. A rental unit does not run itself: there is vacancy to plan for, tenant relationships to manage, insurance to update, since a standard homeowner policy will not cover a rental suite, and rental income to declare at tax time. It is genuinely not for everyone. But with the resilience to weather the dust and the landlord duties that follow, the payoff is a long-term, appreciating asset that can steadily fund a big piece of your retirement. Governments have finally noticed. Different levels of government are working to make these suites easier to build, with mixed follow-through. In 2024, the federal government announced an expansion of the Canada Secondary Suite Loan Program, offering up to eighty thousand dollars at two percent interest over fifteen years, though it never launch. Some municipalities like County of Simcoe, have launched their own Secondary Suites Program. Other programs currently in place, Homeowners can refinance an insured mortgage to cover a secondary suite, up to ninety percent of the post-renovation value. A Multigenerational Home Renovation Tax Credit for a suite built for an elderly or disabled family member.  Recently there was a quiet launch of a GST and HST rebate eligibility for laneway and garden suites starting construction between April 1, 2026, and March 31, 2027. This is a step in the right direction, but needs more clarity and longer timeframe. It is estimated that Toronto alone has around twelve hundred active permits for these suites, with roughly five hundred completed (Source). If curiosity is winning out over fear, skip the contractor for now. Call your city's planning department to find out what your lot allows, then speak with a mortgage broker or accountant about how a HELOC or refinance fits your finances. Ten minutes on the phone beats an afternoon scrolling through laneway house photos. Back to the nightmare. My gym friend is going to be fine. Better than fine, actually. She already sees the win for her family: the parent who gets to stay close or the tenant who covers a meaningful chunk of her expenses. What she needed was permission to stop grading her HELOC statement like a report card and to start seeing it as the price of admission to a retirement plan that pays her back for decades. I keep thinking about that dream, the suitcase, the porch, and her bewildered parents opening the door. Here is the twist she has not clocked yet. In the upcoming year, when the suite is finished, occupied by her mom or rented, and quietly depositing a cheque into her account every month, she will have built the one thing that makes that nightmare impossible. She will not be the one showing up on a porch with a suitcase. She will be the one handing someone else the keys and locking her own front door behind her without a second thought. Don't Retire...ReWire! Sue My Book is Available for Pre-Order I hope you will consider pre-ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for yourself, a friend, or someone you love. It arrives September 29, 2026, published by ECW Press, and is already available through Indigo or Amazon. If you like supporting Canadian booksellers, check with your local independent bookstore too. Most can order it in without any trouble. Important: This article is general information and commentary only and does not constitute financial, mortgage, tax, legal, or investment advice. Before making decisions about your retirement or home equity, consult qualified, licensed professionals who can assess your personal circumstances.