My Retirement Plan Is NOT Based on the Canada Pension Plan

Unlike the retirement plans of many Canadians, my retirement plan is not based on the proceeds from the Canada Pension Plan.

There are many reasons — but the main one is that this is just plain dumb.

Sure, the Canada Pension Plan is better than the American Social Security system in that it is a true trust fund where the American Social Security system is not (See Social Security Is a Secure Way )

Lately there has been a lot of debate in Canada about coming up with more retirement pension programs so people are better prepared for retirement.

Sociologists, bankers, and government officials are worried that the majority of Canadians won't have enough in their retirement plan portfolios to retire comfortably in the new retirement.

Some people have suggested expanding the mandatory Canada Pension Plan and others are suggesting a new voluntary retirement plan for the self-employed and for workers without a company pension plan.

This was one of my comments to an article regarding the Canada Pension Plan (CPP):

This was one of my comments to an article about the Canada Pension Plan in the Edmonton Sun:

"No doubt Ted Morton will get a great pension and that is a disgrace.

In fact, the generous pensions that all government workers get is a disgrace.

Plain and simple, the Canadian Pension Plan does not have to be expanded.

The worst part of the Canada Pension Plan is that it is a form of taxation.

If a single person pays $100,000 into the plan and dies at 59, the person's estate only gets a death benefit of $2,500.

Why expand the Canada Pension Plan when it rips people off?

Ultimately, a person should take full responsibility for their retirement and not rely on the government in any way, shape or form. That is what I have done. Any money that comes in is a bonus, coffee money, in other words.

Ernie J. Zelinski
Author of How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
(over 125,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)

Someone took issue to my comment and made these comment under the name "Don't Listen to Ernie":

Just where did "Ernie" find someone stupid enough to publish his book?

YMPE (the maximum amount of income one has to pay into CPP) for 2011 is going to be 48,300. The current contribution rate is 9.9% split between the employer and employee.

The ONLY that someone can contribute $100,000 is if they worked 42 years. But, oops, CPP only counts 35.

This person is obviously very ignorant.

So I posted this additional comment"

To: "Don't Listen to Ernie"

As a self-employed, I pay both the employers' and the employess' portion into the Canadian Pension Plan.

At 9.8 percent of maximum earnings this is $4,781 per year.

Multiply $4,781 by 35 years and the total is $119,542.

So who is the stupid person?

Regarding my book How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free, it is the best-selling retirement book on Amazon.com in a saturated market, beating out name brand retirement books like the AARP Retirement Survival Guide and the Wall Street Journal Complete Retirement Guidebook.

How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free has sold over 130,000 copies for a reason.

Word-of-mouth advertising for this book from satisfied customers is what sells the book and will keep selling it for years to come while most retirement books are lucky to sell 5,000 copies in their lifetime. Many sell only 100 copies in their lifetime - and that is to family and friends.

In other words, results don't lie!

My retirement book rocks — not because I say so — but because the people who buy retirement books say so.

I have earned $550,000 in pre-tax profits from How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free and will earn hundreds of thousands more over the next few years.

Not too bad of a source of retirement income for my retirement plan — wouldn't you say?

I don't know about you, but I sure think that there are sure a lot of ignorant people out there.

Ever wonder about how these people get through life? They sure aren't sensationally creative, are they?

No wonder there are so many government programs and why certain factions feel more retirement planning programs are needed including expansion to the Canada Pension Plan.

Here are a few quotations about retirement and money saving tips to help you achieve your retirement number and prepare for a prosperous retirement:

Make money your devoted servant; otherwise, it will be an overbearing master.
— Italian proverb

"People who don't respect money don't have any."
— J. Paul Getty, Billionaire Oil Tycoon

"He who buys what he does not need steals from himself."
— Anon

"Getting money is like digging with a needle. Spending it is like water soaking into the sand."
— Japanese proverb

"Money will appear when you are doing the right things in your life."
— Michael Phillips

"When it comes to making more money, most people look at the world and see the same opportunity they’ve seen before: typically, a job. Because they don’t awaken their mind and expand their vision, they don’t see other opportunities. Yet opportunities do exist. So how do you change your thinking so you can see them? One way to jolt the brain out of its preconceived category thinking is to bombard it with new experiences."
— Joe Vitale

"He that lives upon hope will die fasting."
— Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth

"We have 14 children, our primary backup for our retirement. The best investment ever."
— Anon, in response to article "Four ways 60-year-olds can save their retirement"

"With money you're a dragon; without it you're a worm."
— Chinese proverb

Ernie Z.

Book Marketing - Learn from the Best

Due to the success of my book How to Retire Happy, Wild and Free, I occassionally get e-mails from authors of other books including retirement books wanting me to give them my secrets for book marketing including my viral marketing techniques.

Here is an e-mail that I recently sent to one of the authors;

Julie:

If you want to be more successful at book marketing, just be different than everyone else with your marketing and question what everyone else is doing. Create opportunity from situations where no one sees any.

See this great blog post by Bob Baker about book marketing.

I couldn't have said this any better myself in a hundred years.

Also, read my comment at the bottom of Bob's post.

Pay partcular attention to the point of how much I respect John Reese for killing his Facebook Account with 5,000 so-called "Friends" and his Twitter account with 25,000 followers, I agree with John that social media has to be the biggest time waster for most people. It will also contribute to why most people will never write a book, let alone spend time doing some true creative marketing.

But the most important thing is to learn from the best.

My hero and mentor is Brendon Burchard, from whom I have taken both his Partnership Program and his Experts Academy Program. I will be using both to increase the sales of my books, particulary How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free so that it reaches 500,000 copies sold.

Brendon actually got $500,000 in Sponsorship for his second book before the book was even written.

I could also tell you about Eben Pagan and John Reese from whom I have taken incredible programs and from whom I also have learned a lot, but I find that most people are not prepared to pay for their programs. So often my advice is wasted. These two quotes are relevant:



If small money does not go out, big money will not come in.
— Chinese proverb

People that pay for things never complain. It's the guy you give something to [for free] that you can't please.
— Will Rogers

In short, Brendon is the best teacher out there and offers incredible value. If you want to learn some amazing things, take his Experts Academy Program. If you want to be like the majority, then just forget about it and settle for mediocre results. Spend your time looking for the meaning of life instead of book marketing.

Ernie J. Zelinski
Best-Selling Author, Innovator, and Creativity Consultant
Author of the Bestseller How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
(Over 125,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)
and the International Bestseller The Joy of Not Working
(Over 250,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)

Retirement Places, Success, and Self-Publishing

A recent article in a major publication discussed some of the best places to retire outside the United States.

The writer of the article had a note toward the end of the article about how no other country could compare to the United States:

This was the comment that I left:

This a great article with a lot of valuable advice, much better and more than
most people could ever offer.

I must take issue with this statement, however:

"Understand that no other country on earth is as comfortable or as convenient as the United States of America."

There have been many international studies done that don't have the United States as the top place to live. Far from it, in fact.

For instance, International Living Magazine ranked 194 countries to reveal the Best Places to Live in its 2010 Quality of Life Index.

It considered things such as Cost of Living, Culture and Leisure, Economy, Environment, Freedom, Health, Infrastructure, Safety and Risk, and Climate.

International Living Magazine placed the United States as #7 behind Switzerland, Germany, France, Australia, Luxemberg, and New Zealand.

Being #7 is a bit of a distance from being #1, wouldn't you say?

In a different vein, I came across a Squidoo Lens lately that had a few quotations about success on it.

This was my commment:

These inspirational quotations about success are okay:

There is one that is not here which is my favorite success quote of all time, however:

"There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way."
- Christopher Morley

Like you, I have several collections of quotations on several websites

The quotation by Christopher Morley is the one I placed as the #1 of the Top-10 success quotes on my webpage of Sensational Quotations about Success for Smart People Website.

This quotation more than any other reflects my philosophy that I write about and which has helped my becoming a successful international best-selling author, published in 28 countries, with 650,000 copies of my books sold worldwide.

Ernie J. Zelinski
Author of The World's Best Retirement Planning Book
(Over 125,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)
and The Joy of Not Working
(Over 250,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)

In still another vein, several people on a LinkedIn discussion group have suggested that self-publishing should be banned.

This was my response:

My guess is that the people who are against self-publishing are people who themselves are too lazy or too inept to make self-publishing work for themselves.

Many books such at Mutant Message Down Under and Rich Dad, Poor Dad were first self-published. When the books proved themselves by selling hundreds of thousands of copies, major publishers gave big advances to take them books over. If these great books that sold millions had not been self-published, they would never have been published.

At the same time major publishers have published tens of thousands of books that, according to their success in the marketplace, shouldn't haven't been published in the first place.

These two quotes apply:

It's not creative unless it sells.
— David Ogilvy

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
— Henry Ford

In the end, it is the book buyers who will decide which books should have been published and which shouldn't have been published.

That is the way it should be — it's the book buyers' money. The book buyers should be the ones who have final say on what succeeds and what doesn't.

Ernie J. Zelinski, Living Smart in a Crazy World
Author of Book How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
(Over 125,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)
and The Joy of Not Working
(Over 250,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)