My Story:
I am the little kid in this picture, in my Mom's arms, born in Istanbul over seven decades ago. See below for some of my childhood stories. I will be adding more over time.
In short, I moved to Canada at age twenty. I enrolled at the University of Toronto and graduated as a Mechanical Engineer in 1975. I started working and at the same time taking my Master of Engineering degree.
I wrote my first book ("Commission-Free Investing") in 1996 about Canadian DRIPs and SPPs, to share my personal strategies and experiences with this form of low-cost investing (before the invention of ETFs). I also started writing articles regularly for a local personal financial planning magazine called Canadian MoneySaver and met many great people at their onshore and offshore conferences.
In 1999, my wife asked me a very simple question: “Do we have enough money for retirement?” Noticing the lack of literature on this subject, I developed the math of distribution and noticed how it differs from the math of accumulation. I created my aftcasting technique. This gave birth to concepts like the Sequence of Returns and Inflation, Time Value of Fluctuations, The Luck Factor, and so on. I was on a roll, writing one article after another expanding on these concepts.
In 2000, I wrote my first book on retirement income planning, “High Expectations and False Dreams - One Hundred Years of Stock Market History Applied to Retirement Planning”, which I published in 2001. My first article in this topic, Roadmap to Where? won the article award from the CFP board in Denver. The following year, my article Right Road, Wrong Map was published in the Financial Planning (U.S.A.) magazine, won another award. This gave me the encouragement to continue writing. I created my website to share my concepts, www.retirementoptimizer.com
My concepts about the sequence of returns, the luck factor, and pooling the risk (annuities) were all too new for many financial planners and academics. I thought I was the only village idiot with my funny concepts. Meanwhile, I was traveling across the country, giving talks to advisors about the math of retirement. It took several years before mainstream academics started understanding these concepts. About six years after my first publications about the sequence of returns, I started seeing articles "introducing" strikingly similar concepts and strikingly similar graphs. Finally, I stopped feeling like the only idiot.
In 2009, I completed and published my 525-page book Unveiling the Retirement Myth - Advanced Retirement Planning based on Market History. In 2020, to make it easier for the financial planners, I converted my 8-hour CE course to a book, Advanced Retirement Income Planning.
I retired in 2018. Occasionally, I give workshops on advanced retirement income planning to CPAs. I have been learning creative writing. My better half and I spend our winters in Thornhill and our summers in Niagara-on-the-Lake.