Jerry Millionaire

07/09/2026

Even Med Techs need financial guidance.
This week I had some blood work done. The Med tech made small talk, asking me what my plans were for the rest of the day. I told her I was going to be printing books.

"Books? What are they about?" she asked.
I told her that I'd HAD IT! with traditional financial advice at age 40 and researched every get-rich-quick scheme and investment strategy I could find in order to retire comfortably in a reasonable amount of time.

As she worked I told her about the money that I had lost sorting the losing strategies from the winners, and how I was able to put together a plan that had me retired in 16 years. Once retired, I started telling people what I had done and the most common question I got was, "What's the number one thing I need to know to retire richer, faster?". I told her there wasn't one, there were nine. That's why I wrote the book.

She was definitely interested in exiting the working world early so she could enjoy her life. She asked me for a copy.

I said, "I'll do you one better. Here's my card. Visit this link:
https://www.jerrypenner.com/fire_educator.html
and check out my free resources.
Then go here:
https://www.jerrypenner.com/fire_educator.html

and send me an email requesting:
+ my e-book 'The Nine #1 Things You Need to Know to Retire Richer, Faster',
+ my Money Ed Super Secret Financial Summary Template,
+ and my Money Ed Super Secret Budget Calculator

and I'll get those to you for free, a $30 value.

Read the book, fill out the Financial Summary template and the Budget Calculator to the best of your ability and get that to me. Do that and I'll give you a one-hour consult to help you find direction in your retirement plan. This is a $100 value."

She was thrilled to have met a financial coach in such an unorthodox way. I look forward to hearing from her.

I extend the same offer to you. I look forward to hearing from you too.

07/05/2026

Today's task? Fixing my printer and industrial stapler so I can print books. Want a copy? www.jerrypenner.com/fire_educator.html and click on Books and Spreadsheets

07/04/2026

Vending at pop-up events not only satisfies my desire to bring useful and pretty things to people who didn't know they needed them, it also fits in with the Rich Dad philosophy. How does it do that?

Over the past 2 weeks I have been getting caught up on making stuff. I have a number of pop-up vendor events coming in the next few months and I want to make sure I have handmade items to fill my booth and delight old and new customers.
It's been awhile since I've spent much time in the shop and I miss it. Shop time brings a sense of peace to my soul when I turn a pile of disparate parts into something nobody has ever imagined before. Beautiful order from chaos. Treasure from trash, putting together things that aren't supposed to go together.

I'm not the kind of person who can spend a vacation holding down a beach towel. I have to be making *something*. Years ago when I went camping with my S.O. and there was nothing to do, I made a tool to tend the fire, and another tool to get cooking pots on and off the fire. I can't sit still.
Even in my vending booth I bring stuff to work on.

Robert Kiyosaki taught me that poor and middle class folks spend money on vacations. Rich people make money on vacations.

He talked about traveling to different states and countries to buy land, rental properties, gold mines, and oil wells. Traveling to actually see the assets he was considering and evaluating them in person as well as on paper. The asset pays for the trip.

I do the same thing with pop-up events. I get to enjoy music festivals, medieval festivals, camping festivals, and pagan festivals for less than nothing. If I bring the right products and services, the customers pay me to be there and have a good time.

One of my most favourite festivals is a 10 day camping event in a 200 acre evergreen forest with 500 like-minded folks from around the globe. I set my own vending hours, enjoy live music, drumming and dancing circles, any any number of varied workshops and discussion forums. If I want to attend a workshop or discussion, I put up a "Back in an Hour" sign and participate.

When I return from my vacation I come back with less stuff, more cash, and plenty of great memories. I can't imagine vacationing any other way.

06/25/2026

This week I was asked, "What stock should I buy and hold long-term for dividend investing?".

If you like stability, BMO.TO is tough to beat. It meets 5 of my 6 investment criteria.

BMO.TO has:
+ A 2.79% dividend yield. I prefer something with at least 4%. If your desire is to replace your income and you are making the average of $60,400 annually, you'll need $2.165 million bucks ($60,400 / 0.0279) working for you to do this. The good news is that if it continues to increase its dividend yield by 11.5% annually, the money you invest now will be working harder for you in the future.

+ Increased is dividend annually for the past 5 years by 11.5%, beating my requirement of 4% minimum.

+ A payout ratio of 50.69%, well under my limit of 80%. More than 80% is a danger signal. More than 100% and I start wondering what sort of stupid accounting games they are playing to fund the dividend. If the payout ratio drops below their historical average, that can signal a dividend increase.

+ A stock price that has risen in the past 5 years. As of this writing, it has almost doubled its stock price. A company whose stock price falls is just trading capital gains for dividends. I want to get paid while I watch the stock gain in value.

+ Hasn't missed a dividend payment in 140 years. This is superhero territory. I can't think of any other stock with a longer unbroken dividend history. That covers both world wars, the 1929 stock crash, and every financial crisis and conflict since 1886. That stability indicates they know what they are doing.

+ Is traded on the TSX, making taxation rules simpler than if it were traded on a foreign exchange.
If your plan is to buy and hold forever and live off the dividends, this should be in your portfolio.

That's only one. Want 6 more so you can diversify? Go here:
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06/18/2026

Who is right, Kiyosaki or Ramsey?

Kiyosaki describes the difference between good debt and bad debt. Good debt puts money in your pocket, bad debt takes it out. One feeds you, the other eats you.
Borrowing money to buy a rental property that returns more than all expenses combined? Good debt. Borrowing money to buy a house to live in? Bad debt.

Ramsey says all debt is bad debt. He likes quoting biblical scripture: "The Borrower is slave to the Lender.". He advocates getting out of debt as fast as you can, starting by selling things you don't need, things whose value are depreciating faster than the debt can be paid, and debts that won't go away even if you declare bankruptcy.

I can see the reasoning for both men's arguments. With the Ramsey method, there is a certain mental freedom that comes with not owing any money. People will sometimes throw a Mortgage Burning party when they have made their last payment.
When buying rental properties with borrowed money, there is always the possibility that Something Stupid will happen. Mortgage rates might spike, tenant may stop paying, major catastrophe that isn't fully covered by insurance may come up, or the place may sit vacant for reasons beyond control. Kiyosaki remedies this with the Law of Averages. Buy 10 houses that have positive cashflow on each at 100% financing. If 1 property experiences Something Stupid, the other nine will carry the tenth. For a small-time landlord with one rental property the risk of going bust becomes greater; one tenant not paying is 100% of property income not coming in.

Buying stocks on borrowed money rides the same double-edged sword. As long as the interest payments are less than the dividend income, all is well. If the bank boosts the interest rate, or the stock stops paying dividends and the share price tanks, or the bank suddenly calls in the loan, there is a problem. If the stock stops paying dividends and the share price tanks, selling the stock to pay off the loan is not going to completely fill the hole. If the bank boosts the interest rate or calls in the loan, selling the stock and zeroing the loan brings the ride safely to a halt. Arbitrage works great, until it doesn't.

What's my take?
Borrowing money to buy stocks is a dangerous game. I've paid the equivalent of 4 university degrees to learn that. I now remember to do my due diligence every time when analyzing a stock or rental property and ask myself, "What's the worst that could happen?", because it probably will.

When I started buying properties the plan was to buy 1 a year for 10 years, then spend 10 years paying them off. Then the federal government started mucking with the lending rules and made it difficult for me to do that. I had a squatter not paying for a year before I could get him out, then had a $20,000 mess to clean up before it could be made habitable again. I didn't have 9 other properties to pick up the slack and it hurt. Bad.

Thoughts?

06/11/2026

"I've Had It!"
That was my exclamation back in 2007. I'd had it with mutual funds, company-sponsored retirement plans, and calls from junior stockbrokers in some bullpen selling whatever trash of the day was on their desk.

I started learning about different types of investments, and not from the people selling them.

Greg Habstritt's book, "The RRSP Secret" tells us that mutual fund managers get paid whether my money gains or loses. describes that. The buyer takes all the risk, puts in all of the money, and gets a taste of the reward.

Company-sponsored retirement plans are another trap. The "But it's FREE MONEY!" crowd doesn't know that long-term self-managed investments can make a better return than an employer co-funded plan because of the fees.

The random call from the junior broker? Robert Kiyosaki reminds us that the reason they are called "Brokers" is that they are "Broker than me". Do I really want to take stock buy and sell signals from someone who hasn't gotten rich from those signals themselves?

Tony Robbins taught me to find someone who had done what I wanted to do, and do whatever they did. His book "Unshakeable" talks about the frequency of market crashes and once I knew they were not only expected but regular, I could plan for them instead of panic-selling when they happened.

I wanted to build a retirement plan that made sense and had me out of the working world by 60. That gave me 20 years. I read Robert Kiyosaki's book "Rich Dad Poor Dad" and applied the lessons. His in-person weekend course was very helpful.
I found a realtor who understood the concepts taught in the book and worked with him. Other realtors who didn't understand Kiyosaki's concepts told me that what I was looking for didn't exist.

The Globe and Mail ran a stock picker series that sliced and diced the stock market a different way each day, showing which stocks made that day's list, and the performance of that group based in a 10 year back-test. After months of watching I noticed which companies kept popping up. When they ran a filter describing good paying dividend stocks, they were all there. Now I had my stock strategy.

After studying the benefits of investing in a TFSA, I bought dividend stocks in there. The strategy is to buy only good-paying dividend stocks, never spend the capital, only spend the dividends. Kevin O'Leary taught me that.

Blogger Pete Adeny at MrMoneyMustache showed me the total amount of cash I would need working for me in order to retire. It's grade 5 math. He retired 9 years out of university, so I'm certain he knows what he's talking about.

Now, I'm here to help you. It took me a long time to learn all this stuff. I can save you time and money in reaching your own retirement richer, faster. YOu don't need to step in the same gopher holes I did and pay for your education with hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.

Want to find your own exit from the rat race? It's not locked. Let's talk.

06/08/2026

Money amplifies character. If you're a dumbarse with a little, you'll be a bigger dumbarse with a lot.

06/04/2026

What vice is inhibiting your early retirement?

I'll start.

I drank booze. A lot. Over the last 5 years of my drinking career I drank $25,000. At the time, the equivalent of a brand new small truck.
If I had instead invested that $25K in BMO.TO in a TFSA instead of drinking it all away, and contributed nothing more than the original $25k and reinvested the dividends, in 20 years I would have had $162,000 generating $41,000/year, tax free. That's equivalent to a pre-tax job income of $56,300 in Ontario.

05/28/2026

Doing it the way my parents did it didn't work.

When I got married I figured that my financial life would be handled the same way my parents handled theirs. Pop went to work, brought Ma his paycheque every two weeks, she gave him gas and beer money, and she took care of the rest.

Sounds pretty simple, right?
It worked for them so it should work for me, right?
Nope.

It seems my wife worked on the assumption that if there was money in the chequing account it meant she could spend it. I didn't realize she had this type of thinking until I started getting phone calls from creditors wondering when they could expect to be paid. This happened entirely by accident because one day I happened to be standing closer to the phone than she was when a creditor called.

I had no financial literacy at that point, but I knew that getting phone calls from creditors demanding payment was bad.

I asked my wife what else she was hiding. After uncovering the whole mess I took over the finances.

My plan? Work my arse off, make a payment plan with each creditor, put our spending on lockdown, return anything we had purchased that we didn't need and could get refunded. I held the purse strings, and she was the one getting gas and beer money.

I worked 60 hours a week. 1 full-time job, 2 part time. She worked full time. All minimum wage. I made arrangements with each creditor to ensure we had a payment plan we could stick to and that satisfied them. I ruled with an iron fist. Wife didn't like it and the marriage eventually ended because of it.

The key takeaways?

+ Married folks, monitor your accounts jointly. This will expose any issue quickly. The two of you need to be on the same page financially.

+ Have a conversation about your money styles before getting married. 68% of couples cite financial issues as a leading source of conflict, and about 25% of couples cite money problems as a primary factor in their divorce.

+ Neither your employer, nor your government, nor your family, nor your bank are going to get you to a comfortable retirement. That's on you. What worked for your parents may not work for you. Learn not only what they did, but why.

+ WYAO (Work Your Arse Off) and giving every dollar a job was the way out for me.

05/21/2026