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Month: July 2023

Money lessons, learned?

Money lessons, learned?

As a parent, as you raise your kids you just have to cross your fingers and hope that they got the lessons and will apply the teachings to their lives. You know that not everything will stick and you also know that some things have to be experienced, not just told to you. It’s a lot of work for not knowing the outcome.

Since the eldest has started her first job, we’ve done our best to give her financial advice in a way that isn’t too finger-wagging but that still encourages her to plan for saving and future spending. She luckily was given three permanent guaranteed shifts, three days a week, or 25 hours. It’s a perfect way to start your first job, in my opinion. Since she’s started though, she’s realized that she can also pick up MORE shifts and that MORE shifts means MORE money. So she got out a calculator to figure out how many shifts a week she could reasonably work. Bless her heart!

Also, because the city has had such a hard time hiring and retaining staff, they’ve also changed their NO OVERTIME policy and are allowing the wading pool attendants to get time and a half for every hour worked over 44 hours. So the eldest got her calculator out again and figured out how much she could make in a week.


Off to her first day of work

Of course, I don’t want my 15-year-old to work over 44 hours a week but I think the process is valuable. It makes her calculate – and evaluate – how much time she wants to trade for money. I think she also thought that her friends would be around much more than they have been this summer. Many of them have cottages or have gone on trips so her off time is generally spent playing video games & staying home. I think that is what has prompted her to pick up as many shifts as she can: she really wants to save enough to spend during the school year, when her friends are around and they want to go out and do things.

I would be lying if it didn’t warm my cold, goth heart when she called me into her room to tell me about the financial plan she had worked out based on a theoretical amount of shifts she can pick up over the next 5 weeks. She had stuck to my 50% long term savings, 25% short term savings for the school year and the 25% spend now plan! I was super proud of her even though I only said she had to put X amount into long term savings – she decided on her own to save more!

Of course, I did tell her that she should take her first pay and spend it all, as a treat for getting her first job. She ended up getting paid and taking her sister to the mall with her so she could pick up a few things. Sure, she spent money on things that I thought were useless but we all spend in ways that other people wouldn’t! She also kindly bought her sister a cute sweater.

What I found telling though is that the eldest also decided to buy them both lunch at the food court while they were there. When she got home with her spoils she confided in her dad and I, “I wish I hadn’t bought the fast food. It was $30 – two hours of work – and it wasn’t even that good! Oh well.”

Lesson learned, indeed.

It’s a cruel, cruel summer

It’s a cruel, cruel summer

This year we didn’t go away in winter, instead we saved our money in order to pay off our house (which we will do in September). So naturally, I spent most of the winter looking forward to the summer when I could spend most of my days in our gorgeous backyard swimming, gardening and enjoying the sun. I was also looking forward to getting back into Dragon Boat as I hadn’t been back since the pandemic.

Man plans, god laughs

The youngest child also joined a Dragon Boat team this year and we both spent Saturday of the Dragon Boat Festival racing, enjoying the company of our friends, cheering on other teams and eating fun food. We went home Saturday night and had a lovely sleep after a big day with an early start.

Sunday morning was already looking dicey with the wildfires but we headed off in a friend’s car under the glowing red ball that was the sun. I am kicking myself in retrospect but instead of changing into a pair of sneakers, I just kept my slide-on Crocs on. I should have taken the 2 minutes to change but I was eager to get to the tent and grab a coffee. We walked in the gates & I started towards the beach. Unfortunately, the grass/sand mixture was horribly uneven and I managed to clip my foot on a tree root and despite trying to catch myself, I managed to seriously hurt my foot, which started to swell immediately.

My teammates witnessed this, rushed over, got me a chair and an ice pack and a friend headed over to the first aid tent to grab one of the First Aid volunteers from the ski patrol. He came, determined there was nothing he could do and soon after I found myself whisked off to the hospital.

Poor Mr. Tucker: with the youngest and I off to the ODBF and the eldest off at a sleepover, he was really looking forward to a day to himself doing music and playing video games. Sadly, he had just sat down with a cup of coffee when I texted him to meet me at the hospital. I felt terrible.

Thankfully, we didn’t wait long to be seen and an x-ray, a CT scan and a stand-up x-ray later (REALLY? That was just mean). It was determined that I had a hairline fracture in my foot so it’s an air cast and 5-6 weeks off of my feet. A follow-up appointment with orthopedics the Wednesday of that week also saw a hairline fracture in my fibula. “You’re really great at breaking things,” said the orthopedic doc. Oh am I ever! The advice was the same for both fractures: stay off it for a bit over a month.

Teetering on the edge

The next morning Mr. Tucker went out and rented me a wheelchair which I have now essentially lived in for a month as I gaze longingly at my pool from inside the house. I would be lying if I said it has been an easy month of healing and binge watching bad tv. Instead, Mr. Tucker has now had to ferry the kids around to work and camps as well as manage day-to-day things such as meals and helping me in/out from the wheelchair. He had originally booked off two weeks in July so that we could get a bunch of house stuff done but that has been significantly railroaded by my injury.

He was cranky, I was cranky, we both feel cheated out of the summer we were looking forward to.

Going with the flow

As a distraction from all of the absolute CARP that descended upon us, I tried distracting myself in the following ways, all of which are working in some capacity:

Booking a winter trip: I contacted a local travel agent that specializes in accessible travel and started looking at a trip for March break. My life is a constant battle against the kid’s school schedules, money limitations and how my mobility is going. We’ve decided to splurge and just go on an all-inclusive trip this winter. We are still ironing out the details but it’s been a lovely distraction from having my summer being taken away from me by my injury.

Mr. Tucker and I sat down and did a financial plan – together: usually I create the plan and we sit down and discuss it. But I felt like a lot of it didn’t feel real to him and were just a bunch of numbers on a page. So we sat down with a clean spreadsheet and worked through our numbers together. It was a great exercise for him to actually help create the plan and see for himself how we can plot things for his retirement. He told me that this process made him feel a lot better about all of the bad luck. We also are both really excited about our goals!

Mr. Tucker finished the vacation chores: because things were absolutely bonkers, tasks that should have been organized and done on his vacation did not get done and he was feeling overwhelmed. So he enlisted the children and pretty much got almost all of the outdoor chores done, which allowed him to relax for the second week of his vacation.

I gave myself time and space to make a decision: …about dragon boat. In the end, I gave my seat in the boat up to a friend who is an amazing paddler and I switched myself to being a spare, if needed. I just needed someone who could commit to the team for the next festival and even if I did the full 6 weeks, it would only be two practices before I had to compete. It’s not great for the team so it just made more sense to give up my spot.

I discovered Task Master: which is a hilarious show where comedians compete against each other by doing silly things for dumb prizes. If you need to sink yourself into something hilarious and low stakes, I highly recommend it.

It’s still just horrible luck and I have another week or two until I can walk with any regularity. BUT on a positive note, I will still have a lot of August to enjoy the pool and the garden is producing quite well right now. I will still probably be able to get a couple of paddles in, and Mr. Tucker and I have been buoyed by our new goals. Life throws you curveballs and it can be super difficult to navigate them sometimes but eventually good things will happen, just wait and see.

Did the 4% rule work if a Canadian retired in 2000?

Did the 4% rule work if a Canadian retired in 2000?

I love this article from the Globe and Mail (sorry kids! Sub only!But please sub to at least one Canadian paper and one magazine a year to support homegrown content /soapbox) but here is what I think the most important takeaway is:

The bursting of the internet bubble provided a real-time test of Mr. Bergen’s “4 per cent rule,” which brings me to the hypothetical Canadian investor who started their retirement at the end of August, 2000. They began with a $1,000,000 portfolio. Half was invested for growth in the S&P/TSX Composite Index while the other half was invested for income in the S&P Canada Aggregate Bond Index.

The investor took $3,333.33 out of the portfolio to live on at the end of each month (a 4-per-cent initial annual withdrawal rate) with the payments being stepped up each month to adjust for inflation. (The figures herein are based on monthly data with reinvested distributions, but they do not include fund fees, taxes or other trading costs. The portfolios were rebalanced monthly.)



(Yeah, the 5% seems to be missing)

This is absolutely great news — unless you were that 6% guy. Ouch!