How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free: 25th Anniversary Updated Edition: Retirement Wisdom That You Won't Get from Your Financial Advisor

Ernie J. Zelinski is an international best-selling author, prosperity life coach, innovator, professional speaker, and unconventional career expert. Through his remarkable life-changing books, he has helped hundreds of thousands of individuals from all walks of life with their major career transitions and retirement planning.

To maintain his Soul, Style, and Swagger in his creative works, Ernie doesn't use generative AI.

Ernie's twenty creative works -- published in twenty-two languages in twenty-nine countries -- have sold over 1,125,000 copies worldwide.

His retirement bestsellers The Joy of Not Working and How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free together have sold over 800,000 copies and have been featured in international media such as USA TODAY, Oakland Tribune, Financial Post, Boston Herald, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

On August 20, 2026 the review site Goodreads rated How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free Number 1 out of over 1,648 retirement books. Ernie's signature book, The Joy of Not Working, was rated Number 11.

Ernie has been a ditch digger, a wheel barrow pilot, an equipment operator, a laborer, a flag man, an electrical engineer, a Simon Fraser University sessional instructor, a professional speaker, and an international best-selling author. He was fortunate enough to have been fired from his job as a professional engineer over forty years ago and to have leveraged his many years of struggle without a real job into a lifestyle of personal and financial freedom.

Erne lives by the mantra he first introduced in his Life's Secret Handbook:

"Be a LEARNER First; become a MASTER Second; and remain a STUDENT Forever."

Ernie plans to write twenty-seven books in his lifetime. He semi-retired when he was forty-one years old and had a net worth of minus $30,000. Practically everyone said this was impossible. He proved them wrong.

Today Ernie is prosperous and free. He doesn't like sitting in the cheap seats on airplanes, the symphony, live theater, or at Rolling Stones concerts. He spends most of his vacation time in Vancouver, BC; London, England; and Honolulu, Hawaii. You may see him on his daily morning runs near Stanley Park in Vancouver, in Battersea Park in London, or in Ala Moana Park in Honolulu.

Ernie lives in Edmonton, Alberta where, besides hanging around cosmopolitan coffee shops and restaurants with his laptop and meeting new friends, he enjoys running, cycling, reading, telling twisted jokes to his best friends, and traveling.