1036 Pape, Gordon. The Retirement Time Bomb: How to Achieve Financial Independ- ence in a Changing World. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada. 329p. index. $30.00pa. ISBN 0-14-305073-7pa. CCIP. DDC 332.024'01.

“You can’t take anything for granted when it comes to planning for your future” is the key message of Gordon Pape’s latest guide to retirement planning. In the book, the prolific financial author and commentator outlines tried-and-true principles of personal financial planning while stressing the need for current and future retirees to closely monitor developments in the retirement landscape (especially those pertaining to anticipated crises in private pensions and health care).
        It’s sound advice. Canadians are still experiencing the aftershocks of the Conservative government’s decision — made on October 31, 2006 — to lower the boom on non-REIT income trusts by eliminating their preferential tax treatment. In this era of low interest rates, income trusts have played an increasingly prominent role in Canadian portfolios, and their expected demise has left retirees and other yield-starved investors scrambling for alternatives. Inevitably, the Harper government’s Halloween surprise seriously undermines The Retirement Time Bomb’s coverage of income trusts; no one’s going to devote 50% of an RRIF portfolio, as the author does in one of his examples, to this seemingly doomed asset class.
        As in Pape’s previous books, the target audience is not frugal eco-freaks looking to drop out of the rat race and embrace early retirement, but rather Canadians who want to spend their golden years indulging in “such expensive luxuries as travel and a Sunbelt winter residence.” To that end, Pape details the attractions of Florida and Mexico as retirement destinations for SAD-afflicted Canadians. The rest of his book offers sensible advice on everything from the limitations of market-linked GICs to the non-suitability of RRSPs for low-income Canadians. Inexplicably absent from his chapter on mutual funds is any discussion of — and caveats about — fee-laden wrap accounts.
        The income-trust debacle painfully illustrates Pape’s point that “the only constant in life is change.” Luckily for his readers, the retirement planning strategies outlined in this book are timeless.