Featured Post from Retire with Equity

I’m Seventy. Try to Keep Up

May 26, 2026

10 min

Sue Pimento

Seventy


There it is. Just sitting there. A number that tends to land somewhere between “good for you” and “are you feeling alright?” And before you answer that, let me tell you I am more than alright. I am thriving. Loudly. Definitely with dancing. And with just enough attitude to make a few people slightly uncomfortable, which I have decided is a sign of a life extremely well lived.


But first, let me tell you about the plan.

⁂


The Plan Was Magnificent. It Lasted Eleven Minutes

The plan was to retire gracefully. Ease into a slower pace. Read more. Maybe garden. Drink better wine. Finally, work through all those documentaries piling up in my queue with the quiet confidence of someone who had absolutely earned the right to nothing.


Here is what actually happened. The documentaries stayed in the queue, and the garden did not get planted. I did, however, read one book. Just one. But it turned out to be exactly the right one.


David Brooks wrote The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, and I picked it up the way you pick up something that does not look urgent, only to find you cannot put it down. Brooks argues that we spend the first part of our lives climbing what he calls the first mountain: the career, the credentials, the identity, the whole elaborate structure of proving ourselves. And then something happens. You reach the top, or you fall off, or the mountain turns out to be considerably smaller than it looked from the bottom. Either way, you end up in a valley, slightly winded, wondering what comes next.


And that, Brooks says, is where real life begins. The second mountain. The one you climb not for yourself but for something greater. The one where the question shifts from “what do I want?” to “what does the world need from me?”


I read that while sitting in my living room and thought: that is the whole story, right there.


There is a phrase I use throughout this blog: try to keep up. I say it because seventy feels faster and fuller than I ever expected, and because it is an invitation, not a taunt. You still have tread on your tires. I mean that warmly.

Try to keep up.

⁂


The Valley Was Not Optional

My valley arrived without warning or invitation: I lost my job unexpectedly. No graceful wind-down. No farewell luncheon with a tasteful card, no parade! Just the particular silence that follows the end of something you had not quite finished.


Nobody glides gracefully from mountain one to mountain two, no matter how it looks on social media. What nobody tells you about retirement, voluntary or otherwise, is that stopping is quite difficult. Not the logistics. The identity. You spend thirty years answering the question “What do you do?” and then one day no one asks anymore. We carefully plan the money. We almost never plan for the morning when your calendar is empty, your inbox is quiet, and no one expects you anywhere. That morning is its own kind of reckoning.


Brooks calls this the valley experience, and he is right that it is unavoidable. It is where you shed the old self so a new one can emerge. There are no shortcuts. I tried several. But then I hired a coach. Not just any coach. A thought leadership coach, which sounds very impressive but turns out to involve a great deal of uncomfortable self-reflection and at least one conversation in which the coach tells you to write a blog. “Do your research,” he said. “Find your niche. Share what you know. And honestly, you should probably write a book.” (Thank you, Peter!)


I nodded. I smiled. I thanked him warmly. Then I went home, sat down, and had a completely private, entirely dignified meltdown that I will describe only as spirited. Action absorbs anxiety, so once the spirited moment passed, I got to work.


Try to keep up.

⁂


The Second Mountain Has a Name. It Is Retire with Equity

I started writing. Article after article, something unexpected happened: I found my voice. It turns out my voice is part educator, part agitator, and part hilarious, where kitchen-table logic meets a spreadsheet. I began calling her Aunt Equity, and she has been absolutely delightful company ever since.


A word on naming your alter ego after a financial product: no one recommends it. No self-help book has a chapter that says ‘step three, create a persona rooted in home equity solutions and give her a sassy name.’ And yet Aunt Equity arrived fully formed, with opinions, a logo, and an inexplicable amount of charisma. She is part brand, part character, and entirely my fault. I am keeping her.


For Brooks, the second mountain is a calling, not a career move. For me, it is a community. The Canadian retirement community. The people who built this country, paid into it, raised children in it, and are now quietly panicking about whether they have enough to keep going. That community. They are my people, and this is my mountain and I have built my company, Retire with Equity to support it.


And I will be honest: this mountain is considerably steeper and way more fun.


Try to keep up.

⁂


What Is Your Second Mountain?

Here is where this stops being about me and starts being about you. The second mountain is not one thing. It is not a prescription. It is not reserved for people who write blogs, build platforms, or have particularly spirited meltdowns. It is waiting for you, wherever you are, whatever you are carrying, whether you are fifty or seventy or somewhere in between and still not entirely sure you are allowed to want something new.


The second mountain looks different for everyone, and that is entirely the point. Also, a feature, not a bug.


For some people, it is family. Really showing up for grandchildren in ways that a demanding career never allowed. Being present, not just present-ish. Taking the grandkids to school on Tuesdays because Tuesday is your day now and the best day of the week. Becoming the person in the family who holds things together, not because you have to, but because you finally have the time and the wisdom to do it right.


For others, it is community. A neighbourhood organization, a cause that has been pulling at you for years, or a faith community that needs exactly the skills you spent a career building. Brooks tells the story of a woman who was moving out of a rough Chicago neighbourhood, looked out the window, saw little girls playing with broken bottles in an empty lot, turned to her husband, and said: we are not leaving. She ended up running a major community organization. She did not set out to build a movement. She just decided not to look away.


And then there are the callings that have been patiently waiting in the back of a drawer since approximately 1987. This is my personal favourite category because it is full of people who surprise themselves completely.


Andrea, whom I see every week at the gym, spent her late fifties doing something most people her age were emphatically not doing: she went to law school. In London, England. A yearning carried for decades, quietly set aside while she built a career and raised a family. Then one day she stopped being polite about it and went. She is one of the most alive people I know.


David discovered painting. Not dabbling. Painting. He picked up a brush at a class a friend dragged him to, and something clicked open that had apparently been waiting for that exact moment. He paints almost every day now, and the look on his face when he talks about it is that of someone who found something he did not know he had lost.


If you are sitting there thinking you have left it too long, or that your moment has passed, that is a you problem, and I say that with complete affection. The door is still open. Walk through it.


Brooks calls it the place where your deep gladness meets a deep hunger in the world. I think of it as the morning when you wake up and you are not just filling time. You are fulfilling a purpose.


Try to keep up.

⁂


What Actually Works (And What Dottie Has to Do With It)

I have a ten-pound dog named Dottie. She is the canine embodiment of purposeful living and, frankly, an unsolicited life coach. Full speed, tail up, no apologies. I take notes.


The retirements that work, the ones people describe as genuinely meaningful rather than merely solvent, share a few things in common.


They move. Consistently, enjoyably, sustainably. The body is not a liability to be managed in retirement. It is an asset, and it responds remarkably well to being treated like one.


For me, part of that meant I needed a break from drinking, and the origin story is not glamorous: I woke up one morning and could not remember how the movie I watched the night before ended. That was the moment. What began as a one-month experiment quietly became almost two years. I sleep better, think more clearly, and no longer find myself wide awake at 2 am doing mental arithmetic about nothing. I feel sharper and more energized at seventy than I did a decade ago. The fifties, it turns out, were not the peak. They were the warm-up act. And for the record, I still cannot remember how that movie ended some mornings. Some things are beyond even sobriety.


Physical vitality expands your options. Financial clarity reduces your dread. Purpose gives both of those things a reason to matter. Tend to all three. Not perfectly. Just intentionally.


Dottie, for what it is worth, nails all three before anyone else in the house has had coffee. If she is the bar, she is not wrong to set it there.


Try to keep up.

⁂


A Confession. Then a Celebration

Almost five years into this accidental, exhilarating, occasionally terrifying reinvention, I still do not have it entirely figured out. The documentaries remain unwatched. I still cannot tell you how they end.


What I do have is this: evidence, personal and otherwise, that the second mountain is real and better. Not easier. Better. Because when you are climbing toward something that matters beyond your own resume, the climb itself changes. The effort feels different. The setbacks feel survivable. And the view, when you get there, means something.


You do not need to have it figured out before you start. You just need to take a step. Then another. Then hire a coach, have your spirited moment, and remember: action absorbs anxiety. Say the number out loud, whatever it is. Forty, fifty, sixty, seventy. Say it. Then decide what it means, because that part is entirely up to you.


The first mountain shows you what you are capable of. The second one shows you who you actually are. If you have not read David Brooks’ The Second Mountain, put it at the top of the list. The documentaries can wait. I have confirmed this from personal experience.


The Friday night of my birthday week, there was an epic dance party at a local brewery, organized by my wife Bonnie, the woman I met on a dance floor thirty-three years ago and have been dancing with ever since. Bonnie deserves more than a shout-out here. She deserves a medal, a monument, and honestly, serious consideration for sainthood. For over three decades, she has lived with my schemes, my pivots, and my absolute certainty that each new thing is the thing. She has never once wavered. Bonnie is the reason any of this works, and the reason that dance floor was full of people who love me. I am, by any objective measure, an extremely lucky person. I am also aware that she will read this, so I want to be clear: yes, I mean every word, and no, this does not get me out of whatever I am currently scheming.


The glow of that party remains, and I know I have truly arrived because there was even a party crasher. I named her Mona. Mona could not resist the pull of that much joy and some absolutely kickin’ eighties music. The story of Mona, the early thirties party crasher, is being reserved for another time, but know this: if your birthday celebration attracts a stranger named Mona, you are doing seventy exactly right.


The second mountain, it turns out, has a very good playlist. And if you are worried you are not quite ready for it, or that the moment may have passed, I want to leave you with this: you still have tread on your tires. So does everyone in this community.


And if you cannot keep up, at least come dance. You might surprise yourself. Just ask Mona.

I am seventy. I am on my second mountain. Come find yours.

Try to keep up.

⁂


Sue


Don't Retire...Re-Wire!


My Book is Now Available for Pre-Order

I hope you will consider pre-ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for you, a friend or loved one. It's available September 8, 2026 - You can now order on the ECW Press site here. And if you love supporting Canadian booksellers, please also check with your local independent bookstore. Most can easily order it for you.

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Sue Pimento

Sue Pimento

Founder | CEO

Writer, author & presenter focused on financial literacy and retirement strategies. I advocate for the health, wealth & purpose for retirees

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Peri-Retirement, Divorce Dust, and the Investment Hiding in Your Backyard featured image

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Peri-Retirement, Divorce Dust, and the Investment Hiding in Your Backyard

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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. 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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.

Parenting Your Parents: The Stuff We Don’t Say at Dinner featured image

9 min

Parenting Your Parents: The Stuff We Don’t Say at Dinner

Every family has an elephant it keeps meaning to talk about, and in my family, that conversation always seemed to circle back to dessert. Someone would work up the nerve to raise something serious, and right on cue, someone else would ask if anyone wanted more pie. The elephant would quietly slip out of the room again. Dessert was sacred in our house, which is probably why my dad ate his first. We could talk about the weather, the traffic, Aunt Carol’s hip, almost anything except who would be in charge if Mom’s memory got worse or where Dad would live if the stairs ever became a problem. Here’s the thing about elephants. Silence only makes the room darker, and everyone ends up bumping into more furniture while trying to avoid the thing nobody wants to name. Instead, turn on the lights and look at it together, out loud, as a family, preferably before an emergency forces the conversation to happen at full volume in a hospital hallway. Part one of this series was about the everyday chaos of parenting your parents, the cordless phones, the clumpy milk and the mystery meals from the freezer. This part is different. These are the conversations nobody brings up willingly, the ones that involve lawyers instead of laughs. But they come from exactly the same place and matter just as much, maybe more, because they’re the ones that keep a family from falling apart the moment something goes wrong. The Power of Attorney Huddle Start with a power of attorney, the single most practical and least romantic gift you can give your family. Most people assume it is one document that covers everything. In Ontario, it is two separate things. A Continuing Power of Attorney for Property covers money, bills, and anything linked to a bank account. A Power of Attorney for Personal Care covers health decisions, housing, and day-to-day well-being. Other provinces use slightly different names for the same idea, so check your own, but the concept holds everywhere in Canada. One person can hold both roles, or you can split them between two people, whichever fits your family better. Nobody wants to picture a parent developing dementia or Alzheimer’s, but that is precisely why these documents exist. The time to set them up is now, while everyone involved is still sharp enough to have an opinion. Once capacity is gone, the chance to choose is lost. Families who skip this step often end up applying to court for guardianship instead, which costs more, takes longer, and does nothing about the emergency sitting in the hospital bed. Do not let AI draft these documents. This is the kind of paperwork that needs to hold up at two in the morning in an emergency room, so it needs a legal professional who knows your province and your family’s particular version of complicated. Have the conversation as a family first. Ask Mom and Dad honestly who they want making these calls, then take that to a professional who can build something that will hold up when it is needed. Splitting the Shift, and Supporting Whoever Carries It If you are an only child, feel free to skip this part, mostly because you never had a choice in the matter to begin with. Every ounce of this responsibility lands on your shoulders alone, and if there is a special corner of heaven reserved for those who carry it entirely by themselves, I hope it comes with better snacks than the rest of us get. For everyone with siblings, the question of dividing the work is really a workload question, and workload questions go sideways fast when nothing is written down. I know it sounds painfully formal, like drafting a treaty instead of helping your mother, to put who calls the doctor, who handles the finances, and who takes the overnight shifts into an actual document. But clarity is the entire point, because when something goes wrong, and it always eventually does, families get frenetic, pointing fingers or freezing instead of deciding anything. There is an old line about the best time to negotiate a prenup being on the honeymoon, when everyone still likes each other and no crisis is pulling at the conversation. The same logic applies here. Do this work while everyone is calm and well-rested, not standing in a hospital hallway, because the alternative is doing it during the worst week of the year, with all the extra tension thrown in for free. Even with the fairest split, the person carrying the heaviest share still needs support of their own. Caregivers have a real talent for arranging support for everyone except themselves, scheduling pills, appointments, and grocery runs for someone else while quietly running their own tank down to empty. I did plenty of that myself. The exhaustion was never a badge of honour, just a warning light I mostly ignored. Support in Canada varies by province, but it is available. The Ontario Caregiver Organization offers free counselling, peer support, a helpline for when you need someone to talk you down, and help finding respite care. Caregivers Alberta provides resources, mental health support, and education for Albertans caring for family members or friends. The Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence tracks support nationally and points you to programs wherever you live. Eligible individuals may qualify for Employment Insurance (EI) Caregiving Benefits. There is also a federal tax credit worth asking an accountant about, since most people qualify and never claim it. None of this replaces an actual break, and a break is not optional, no matter how capable you feel. Respite care exists so you can sleep, see a friend, or sit in a coffee shop without your phone buzzing about a missed pill. Asking for it isn't a weakness; it's what keeps you able to show up for your parent at all. Feet First or in a Box Somewhere in every family, a parent eventually announces their exit strategy. I’m not moving. You can’t make me. The only way I’m leaving this house is feet first or in a box. It’s delivered with total confidence, usually while standing on a knee or hip that clearly objects to the plan. Here is the distinction that matters most in this conversation. The children don’t get to decide where Mom or Dad lives. They get to help their parents decide, and that difference changes everything about how the conversation should go. Instead of announcing a verdict, ask open questions. How do you picture your retirement? Where do you see yourself in five years? What would need to change for you to still feel safe here? Then sit with the answers instead of rushing to fix them. For those of you with a difficult relationships with a parent, a complicated family tree or a family with illness or any form of abuse, my heart is with you. Thank you for even reading this far. I know this is an even more delicate topic and I don't have solutions for you. I do know that the same questions and conversations would apply but perhaps would be better delivered by a neutral 3rd party individual, trusted friend of the family or local pastor. Patience matters here more than almost anywhere else in this series, because older Canadians have earned the right to be stubborn about their front door, and pushing too hard usually only produces more stubbornness in return. What matters is that you talk about what happens if the stairs become a problem, the garden becomes too much, or living alone starts to feel isolating. Sometimes the answer is small: a gardener, a chairlift or safety bars in the bathroom. Sometimes it is a little sneaky with a housekeeper once a week, who conveniently expands to caregiving assistance on additional days. Sometimes it is bigger, such as moving in with a family member or trading the family home for a one-level apartment that does not require a hip replacement just to reach the mailbox. Whatever shape it takes, it works best when the whole family writes that next chapter together rather than one person handing it to the rest. Wishes and Wills The last set of conversations covers what your parents want if they get sick, what they want when they die, and what kind of care setting they would choose if they ever needed one, as well as which community they want to be part of and what matters most when choices become hard. These are not questions you settle in one sitting over coffee. They build slowly, over several conversations, and some of it needs time to sink in before anyone can respond honestly. If a conversation stalls, let it stall. Somewhere in all of this, the subject of a will comes up, and it is worth asking plainly whether one exists, where to find it, whether it is up to date, and whether it is legal. Sometimes parents want to walk you through every detail. Sometimes they would rather keep the specifics to themselves, and that is entirely their right. It is their money, their wishes, their life, and being an adult about it means respecting the boundary even when you are curious. What matters is that the conversation happened at all, not that you know every line of it. There is also a very modern wrinkle to all of this: passwords. A will can name exactly who gets the rocking chair, but it says nothing about who can unlock the phone to find the photos in the first place, or access the email, or access online banking once nobody remembers the password to the password manager. Write down the important logins somewhere real, not just in someone's memory, and tell a person you trust where to find them. I have friends in their fifties and sixties who found a genuinely clever way through all of this. They told their adult kids about their wishes and what was in their wills via a family group text, agreeing to save the real questions for when they were together at the cottage for the family vacation. Nobody had to maintain composure across a formal dinner table. They just laid it out in writing, then filled in the details around campfires and silly card games. Then, at the next big family gathering, actual Post-it notes started appearing on furniture around the house. Someone had written their name on artwork. Someone else claimed the good armchair. What could have been a heavy, tense conversation turned into a full-blown Post-it war, with siblings calling dibs on Grandma’s lamp with the same energy usually reserved for calling shotgun on the front seat. Turns out you can talk about who gets what without anyone needing a box of tissues in the room. Same Family, Different Kind of Love None of this is easy, and none of it should be. If it were simple, someone would have written the manual I was looking for in part one. But easy was never the goal. The goal is to show up for the people who showed up for you, with enough light in the room that nobody has to keep pretending the elephant is not there. Part one was about the everyday chaos, the stuff that makes you laugh even as it drives you slightly insane. This part is about the quieter, harder stuff: the paperwork and the conversations that do not come with a punchline. But it all comes from the same place. Every bit of it, the freezer-burned shrimp and the power of attorney alike, is really just love wearing a very inconvenient disguise. So have the conversations, write things down, and get a real lawyer to make it official. Ask the open questions, then listen to the answers. And when it is done, or as done as these things ever get, go ahead and have dessert first. Life is too short and far too unpredictable to save the best part for last. Warmly, Sue My Book is Available for Pre-Order I hope you will consider pre-ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for you, a friend or loved one. It's available September 29, 2026 published by ECW Press - You can now order at Indigo or Amazon. And if you love supporting Canadian booksellers, please also check with your local independent bookstore. Most can easily order it for you.

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