This is the main Blog category. Will change it once we’ve decided what categories Tara wants.
In the post-pandemic world as we careen towards a recession, it only makes sense that social media would pivot to a more gentle marketing. In an attempt to gain back some social credit, influencers are now turning to Deinfluencing.
How the ‘tax’ on singles has people who live alone feeling the pinch
Economies of scale are clearly cheaper to manage, so in one sense: yes, there is a singles tax.
But reading through this article, the thing that really bugs me is this idea that “someone should do something” when people aren’t helping themselves. Jenn could get a roommate to reduce her costs or even get rid of her car as she lives in an area with great transit. But instead, she’s complaining about the high cost of living in the urban core.
The thing is, to live in an urban core we need to accept smaller spaces. When I was in my 20s and early 30s I always lived with roommates. We split the bills and sometimes even split food. It never occurred to me to live alone because even when rents were way cheaper than they are now, we didn’t want all of our money being eaten up by rent.
Then when I met Mr. Tucker we moved into a 510 square foot condo with our dog. It suited us just fine and got us out of the house for walks 3x a day and we spent an hour at the dog park every night after work – rain, shine or snow. We also walked or used public transit because owning a car in the city is just ridiculous. We did consider car-sharing companies but we didn’t follow through. Unless you were leaving the city on a trip, almost everything could be found in an urban centre and if we needed something outside of that, we just took cabs.
From the article:
“The average one-bedroom is now $2,458, according to a national report from rentals.ca in February. An apartment with a little more room and some backyard space for the adopted rescue mutt she dreams of would run her closer to $3,000 — and that’s a hefty price tag for just one person.”
In that same report however, a 2 bedroom would cost $3324 – or $1662 per person AND she could get a dog – if she got a roommate (who likes dogs). It is just flabbergasting to me that she lives in 595sq ft and is whining about how hard it is even though she has clearly not considered any money saving alternatives (get rid of the car, get a roommate who likes dogs and rent a larger place for cheaper). I respect if she chooses to live alone because she doesn’t want a roommate but she needs to own that choice and not complain about it.
There is the fundamental issue that I feel people in Canada and the US haven’t come to terms with: you are not entitled to have a lot of living space at a low cost in a great area. Of course, we all want this but it isn’t feasible because…we ALL want this! But in order to make livable, walkable cities we all need to make concessions and one of those concessions is space.
In 1910 the average square footage of a house in the US was 800sq ft and now they are 74% larger. The average size now is $2430 sq ft. Our expectations are higher now than they’ve ever been and we want these homes at a low rate. Our expectations are really entitledness at this point.
For a comparison, our last home was 1200sq ft and our kids had to share a room because Mr. Tucker works from home and he needed an office. Our current home – a midcentury modern – is 1300sq ft and has a partially finished basement with an office and a rec room, which probably brings it closer to 1900sq ft. The bonus here is that we now have a powder room and both kids have their own rooms.
While I am coming down hard on people’s expectations when it comes to housing, there is a definite truth when it comes to food. Grocers do reward multiple buys of products which could lead to people buying things they don’t need and just letting the extra go waste because it’s cheaper. I also sympathize with anyone who is raising kids or taking care of a loved one on one income. Those are definitely challenges that need myriad policy-driven approaches.
In Canada at least, the government could get back into the affordable housing business again. This is not a party-specific issue, either: multiple governments have ignored housing issues for the past 20 years and the clever solutions that all levels of government are proposing aren’t clever at all and in many ways are increasing the problem. On top of that, we are poised to let in more immigrants over the next few years without even knowing where they’ll live. While I definitely support the move, we need to think of how the infrastructure of this country will handle the influx.
What I think we need to accept is a tempering of our own inflated expectations. We are trying to live in a Friends world on a Roseanne budget. For our finances, our cities and our resources we need to look to places like Amsterdam with its great public infrastructure and to other European cities where they’ve normalized smaller spaces and where car ownership is just so incredibly expensive that everyone is invested in public transport and public spaces. Urban sprawl is not the solution to this issue, learning to live with less, is.
When I was in my mid-20s in the early 2000s, a friend of mine mentioned that she had purchased $800 frames for her glasses. Considering how incredibly frugal this friend was, I asked her what made her decide to pay that much. What she said has stayed with me to this day, and that was, “I wear these on my face EVERY DAY, It’s the face I put out into the world and so I want to buy the ones I want and the ones that are comfortable and look the best.”
Since then, I have often applied those parameters to my own life. While I like to save money, I try and save money in areas that don’t matter to me. But in areas that matter? SPEND!
Mr. Tucker has not been getting much sleep lately. He suspects that the cause is that his pillow has lost some of its firmness causing a restless sleep and a sore neck. So he has been researching pillows online. Ideally, he would like to go somewhere and actually physically hold the pillows but so many things have moved online during the pandemic that nothing he wanted to check out were available locally. It sucks but many places have great return policies so I’ve encouraged him to just buy them, try them and then return them.
What I soon discovered about his search though was that he was actively dismissing some pillows due to their cost. Now, usually I always search by price and then add in other parameters as I see fit. But I feel like Mr. Tucker actively was discounting ones that fit all of his criteria but that he considered too expensive. But it soon came to pass that there were no pillows that filled his needs so he either had to deal with buying a cheap but subpar pillow or spend more.
If this was a case between no name brand frozen peas and name brand frozen peas, this would be a no brainer (how do peas know if they are no name or name brand anyway?!). But we are talking about quality of sleep here. We spend ONE THIRD of our lives asleep and a good night’s sleep is one of the best predictors of overall health. In other words: don’t go cheap on your sleep! So I encouraged Mr. Tucker to find the best pillow for him and not worry too much about the cost of it. Even a $350 pillow that only lasts one year is still only a dollar a day!
Worth it.
So while I encourage people to always balance their spending, you should never cheapen out on things that will add to your quality of life. Mr. Tucker ended up buying (& returning) one pillow and just bought a 4-pack of Canadian-made pillows which we should get shortly. The hunt continues.
A couple of years ago a man in Toronto with a professional job bought a house. Of course, this story plays out across the country every day: many people buy and sell houses all of the time. But Sean Cooper not only bought a house but he also had the nerve to rent out his top floor and live in the basement, work three jobs and ride a bicycle everywhere in order to pay off his mortgage in three years. Naturally, the internet’s reaction was swift: how dare he.
I subsequently read Sean Cooper’s book about his experience …and discovered nothing of note. Basically his plan was simple: be young, single, child free, able-bodied, know how to live frugally, have a high paying career, be able to give up what makes life worth living and have enough energy to work multiple jobs. It’s hardly rocket surgery. Obviously, not everyone is able to tick off all of these boxes on the “pay off house quickly” list. Few of us – if we’re honest – are able to do more than a couple of things that he did, let alone all of them. But outliers make for great copy so he soon found himself clenching onto his 15 minutes of fame in his paid-off house.
An (ex) friend of mine wrote a particularly scathing commentary about the article denouncing him. In fact, many people did including this particularly vitriolic piece in Slate. When I asked my friend why he cared what other people did, his response was that if everyone did this than capitalism would expect us all to do this! I didn’t think that was true but I let it go. What I find hilarious is that in retrospect, when all this was going down we were in one of the largest Bull Markets in history. For most people, life had never been better: interest rates were low, equities high and compared to today real estate was way more affordable. In fact, reading that Slate article as we claw our way out of a global pandemic feels almost quaint.
Here is the rub though: I think that Slate article is bang on. Individual actions not structural inequalities drive our morality when it comes to money and it shouldn’t. Yes, absolutely I would love to see some real change, some real support for people who are struggling. But let’s also be realistic: only people who are like Sean Cooper in every way have the ability to do what Sean Cooper did. But only them. Being angry at Sean Cooper for his accomplishments is like being angry at David Beckham for being better than you at football.
The real issue is that we are extrapolating his very constricted set of circumstances and trying to apply them widely. Clearly, a single parent of two children in an expensive city with a minimum wage job is not going to be able to pull this off and no one is saying that this is what they should aspire to. Similarly, I – as a middle-aged disabled woman – will never be a famous footballer. That’s why it got any press at all: he accomplished something only available to a select few people. Cooper was featured because he deviated from the norm and deviation from the norm gets eyeballs on your news pieces which in turn generates advert dollars. That’s all. But even if we can’t apply every single idea into our lives there is still a lot of value to see people doing things differently. We can extrapolate a few ideas instead. Maybe someone reading that article will realize that they rarely use their car and that they can give it up and instead buy themselves the model railroad they’ve always wanted. Who knows?
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Marie Kondo get raked against the coals for daring to say that she isn’t as tidy anymore now that she has three kids. No duh. Of course, the internet jumped all over this. The same thing happened when her book (and subsequent Netflix show) came out. My facebook lit up like a Christmas tree at the fact that she only had fifteen books. “JUST FIFTEEN!” people lamented, “That’s bullshit! I could never live like that!” But she never claimed that everyone needed to have a maximum of fifteen books. She stated that fifteen books was the right amount of books FOR HER. If rooms full of books “spark joy” for you, then her perspective was: you do you. The catch was that you needed to actually watch the shows and/or read the book to know that she wasn’t insistent on just 15 books. Instead people succumbed to internet outrage and social media soundbites. But her recent decision that tidying was a lower priority for her now that she had three children set the trolls ablaze. “AHA! was the collective response to the news, “clearly it was all bullshit!”. Really though, her choice not to prioritize tidying over time with her small children in no way means her system doesn’t work. It just means that right now spending time with her kids “sparks joy” more than a tidy house does.
Finally, this week I was unsurprised to watch the trolls come out in full force when I read the comments about this Vancouver couple. While some of the comments are cruel, some of them are just nonsense. “Well she isn’t retired now, is she?” Well maybe she doesn’t want to retire yet. “There is no way they can retire on 800k.” Had they used the BTSX strategy, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation pegs the dividends at over $40000/pa. “They won’t be able to travel on that kind of income.” Geographic Arbitrage is cheaper than living in Vancouver full time, for sure.
Unfortunately, a lot of online interaction leads itself to Crab Bucket mentality: because I can’t have it, I’m going to drag you down. Like the metaphorical crab who sees another crab escaping & stops them, people in similar circumstances who won’t do the work end up in comment sections dragging the people in the article down. Their goal is to shame people who do things differently and hope that other people agree with them. Groupthink is incredibly powerful and the message is, “if I can’t have it, you shouldn’t either!” We love watching successful people get dragged in what the Australians/New Zealanders call Tall Poppy Syndrome.
People are completely missing the point of all three of these examples. They’re just ideas, tools and goals that these individuals used to give themselves options. Maybe their lifestyle isn’t for everyone but SURELY they have to have some insight that we can potentially apply to our own lives? Also, we make the assumption that we are the audience for every article when clearly we are not. These articles have value because there are people out there who don’t know that they can pay off the mortgage early, or that there are better ways of folding t-shirts or that a high savings rate is achievable for mid-income folks with a few short cuts. But smart people realize that there are nuggets of wisdom everywhere so they take what they can from a resource and leave the rest. I see this a lot in popular personal books (PF) that are written for an audience outside of the author’s country. Inevitably there is always a review that says, “ONE STAR: this doesn’t apply to me because I don’t live in that country. You need to write one about my country.” But I’ve read personal finance books from all over the world and inevitably I take some gems out of all them. Most PF books are US-based but I just swap the terms for Canadian versions, IRA to RRSP for example. I don’t need to be spoon fed every single detail about my particular situation, I can just apply the larger idea to my own life by adjusting it.
The reality is that no matter how often you get angry that your house isn’t tidy enough, or it’s not getting paid off as quickly as you’d like, or you feel stuck in your life with your finances awry, no number of negative comments you post will change that. Sure, you may get a little shot of dopamine when someone agrees with you or you can get jacked up on the arguments with the people who don’t agree with you but it adds zero value to your life. You would be better off taking notes or figuring out who else is achieving the goals you’d like to achieve and reading their books or blogs.
I didn’t pay off my house in 3 years, it’s an absolute tidiness disaster with two kids and two dogs and I certainly don’t have close to $700000 in investments. I am still grateful for these people who’ve given us a window into their lives. The value in reading these stories is not making a carbon copy and applying it to your life, its value comes from seeing that maybe you could try and do things differently and that it could be life-changing. When you have applied some of these tips and tricks the value becomes one of seeing that you aren’t alone – other people are doing it to!
So I encourage everyone to get out of the metaphorical crab bucket. Glean the wisdom that may be helpful to your life and focus on how you can make your situation better. It’s much better time spent.
You may have come across the Canadian study this week that no amount of alcohol is safe. It’s been heavily reported everywhere and, naturally, there has been a lot of pushback and a myriad of opinion pieces have been writing either denouncing the study or lauding the study. But in the end I think that all the chatter about alcohol consumption is good, people are starting to review their own habits and question them and I think that is important.
My own relationship with alcohol is a strange one. I drank a bit as a young teen and then I drank rarely until I was about 22. If I am honest, by the time I met Mr. Tucker when I was a month shy of 27, drinking had become a huge part of my life. All of our friends went out a few nights a week to bars and we always binge drank. By the time I was 30 I felt that I had a problem with alcohol and felt that it had become an unstoppable force in my life.
Making the decision to get pregnant is what completely halted all alcohol in our lives (Mr. Tucker mostly quit with me). I didn’t drink during my pregnancies but I did continue to drink afterwards. For a lot of my kid’s younger years we still were pretty social drinkers hanging out with neighbours a lot and cracking beers. But never did I again reach the worrisome levels of drinking that I had in my late 20s. I think because our environment and priorities changed so much that over time we just drank less and less overall but weekends we did engage in a lot of binge drinking. Wine Mom culture was strong during those years.
When we moved into this house and had our first summer with the pool, we found ourselves hosting quite a few parties. Over time though, our desire to do this waned and the party atmosphere went with it. As our kids got older as well, we found ourselves driving to activities and hosting sleepovers so naturally drinking fell by the wayside. We were still drinking a lot the odd evening and weekend but it was way less than our previous habits and we found ourselves drinking higher quality alcohol.
Then the pandemic hit and like many people we soothed our anxiety with alcohol. In fact, during the pandemic alcohol sales shot up & increased by 2 million dollars a day in our province. Like many people, we also saw our alcohol consumption skyrocket. By the time October rolled around Mr. Tucker and I realized that our consumption had become a habit, that we didn’t really enjoy it as much anymore and that we felt crappy and lethargic. So on October 31, 2020 we made the decision to quit drinking for one year.
In general, the first couple of days of drying out were just boring and flat but we got over it quickly. In fact, my skin got better, my spasticity got better, I slept better and we weren’t exhausted and cranky all of the time. We also found ourselves more productive and we ended up reading more books and doing more creative things. Sure, there were times where it was difficult, such as when we rented cottages with friends (we quarantined beforehand) and Christmas was a bit strange but overall it was a really good year and we saved a ton of money and I shed quite a few pounds.
Halloween 2021 saw us consuming alcohol again but we never really got back to our previous levels of consumption. We had a small Christmas in 2021 which was drinks and cards with family, more outdoor social events over 2022 with friends that were punctuated with drinking and so most of 2021 was phases of drinking followed by weeks of non-drinking. By the fall the shine had worn off on our consumption just around the time we ran the numbers and discovered that we had spent $5500 on booze that year, or about $105 a week.
$105 a week doesn’t sound like much and indeed for what we drink, it really isn’t. It’s about 2 cases of 24 beers, or 4-6 bottles of wine, depending on what kind we buy. Given that we have also hosted a bunch of pool parties and dinners with family, that doesn’t seem like a ton. We also tend to be pickier in our old age and don’t want to drink cheaper alcohol so that adds a premium to the bill. That amount includes the wine I got on my wine tour in Prince Edward County (including Christmas gifts) but not the drinks we had when we ate out (which were few, due to cost).
The truth of it all though is that alcohol just doesn’t work for us anymore. In middle age the hangovers are brutal and long – sometimes even multiday. We also find it gives us low-grade depression, lethargy and crankiness if we drink multiple times a week. In my case as well it causes my muscles to seize & gives me horrible spasticity. In the end, we can find a ton of other ways to get value out of $5500 than to buy alcohol with it.
So are we planning to be teetotalers forever? No. While I don’t see us drinking regularly again I do plan to travel in the future and that travel will probably include some alcohol. It’s also nice to have a drink on holidays, birthdays and other celebrations. What I do realize every time we have chunks of time where we don’t drink alcohol is that I find myself less enamoured with it overall. I prefer feeling clear minded and doing other stuff with my time. Of course, the fact that it can cause even more health problems than the immediate ones should encourage everyone to drink as rarely as possible.
I am not the boss of anyone by all means but like everything else in your life such as consumption, budgeting and investment strategies it’s worth doing a periodic review of things to make sure that they are still serving you instead of just doing things out of habit.
I am simultaneously jealous of all of the sunny destination pictures my friends are posting on social media and not envious of all the people getting stranded, delayed or otherwise inconvenienced by airline issues. When we made the decision to stay home this winter I should have also made the rule to stay of social media to avoid the lovely pics. Today is a beautiful, sunny winter day but when it’s this sunny it also means it’s super cold. It’s beautiful from the inside, I keep telling myself as I wrap another blanket around me.
It’s funny to see how accessible travel is these days for the average person. When I was growing up in the 80s almost no one traveled south or overseas in the winter. The odd person may have driven down to Disney or traveled home to see relatives but travel wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today. I remember having one friend who went to Greece when I was about 10 years old and it felt like a crazy adventure to me! The 90s saw travel had ramp up a bit but by the 2000s it had exploded. Even after 9/11 when travel took a dip due to fear and increased security measures, I was on a plane a month later visiting a friend in Ireland and traveling to Scotland with her. By the end of the decade, it felt like everyone was hopping on planes to vacation.
Now I miss it if we don’t go away in winter but there was a time that it wasn’t even on my radar. I am trying to bring that feeling back: the feeling of moving with the seasons and coping with the weather around me; changing my activities to suit the season; embracing winter sports and staying indoors by the fire with a cup of tea and a good book. Still, like a petulant child I find myself having temper tantrums in my head because I can’t go somewhere warm. It’s amazing how humans adapt: what was once a rare treat available to few, I now feel somewhat resentful for when I can’t have it – even though it’s self-imposed! Having two kids at home who are invested in school has also meant that they don’t want to take any school off to travel, either. It’s strange to me but clearly I am weirdly proud of their dedication. In the end there are so many factors that keep me grounded – in every sense of the word!
But back to poor, misunderstood January! Yesterday was Blue Monday, which is said to be the most depressing day of the year. But it can’t be all that bad because New Order has an excellent song by that name. Also, January is apparently National Breakup Month. Oooof, poor January.
BUT!
January is also the best time to reflect and go inwards. I don’t know how people in the southern hemisphere feel but up here the cold, dark days post-December revelry is a good time to stop, reflect and take stock of things (especially after all of that feasting and merriment). It’s a period of calm after the chaos that allows you to just be calm for a bit and maybe dry out, eat better and give new routines a whirl.
As for myself, I am trying to catch up on reading all of my library books (who am I kidding: I have never been able to balance these! If I read one, one more gets added to the pile. It’s truly an embarrassment of riches), get back on the meal planning train (the #1 tool in my arsenal to not waste and to save money), and I’m keeping an eye on our budget as EI and CPP start getting taken off of Mr. Tucker’s paycheques again just as I am trying to load our RRSPs in time for the tax season.
In the meantime, for those of you who are having difficulty embracing the cold, dark days of January, I highly recommend Katherine May’s book, Wintering to help you see that even the colder months are special and have something to teach us.
Through Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s newsletter, Scéal I discovered the tradition of Nollaig na mBan, or Women’s Christmas. Set on January 6th (also see: Twelfth Night, Little Christmas & Epiphany) it is a day where women and men reverse roles: the women go to the pub or have parties with each other for a day and the men take care of chores. It seems to be the most popular in counties Cork and Kerry. I love this excerpt from Irish Central:
Speaking to the Times, Irish scholar Alan Titley remarked that the tradition was most common in the west of Ireland in a litany of different ways. “Most women in west Kerry would have raised five or six turkeys for sale at the Christmas market,” he said. “They kept the money – like egg money – and if there was anything left over after Christmas, they spent it on themselves.”
A common phrase was “Nollaig na mBan, Nollaig gan mhaith” (“Women’s Christmas, no good Christmas”), referring to the lack of plentiful feasts by the time January 6 came around.
Siobhan Fahy, from Ballyferriter on the Dingle Peninsula, told The Irish Times: “But us women would go visiting that afternoon. It was a very simple celebration, just eating a slice of currant loaf in someone’s house and having a cup of tea and a chat, but that was the day you’d do something for yourself and have a rest after all the Christmas work.”
I just find these little traditions so charming because in our modern world we often don’t give thanks in this way, or even have many days to slow down. In fact, it’s been estimated that the Medieval peasant received 8 weeks to half a year off for feast days, a far cry than the 10 days most people in North America are allotted. Clearly, no one would prefer to be a Medieval peasant but I love the idea of incorporating these little regional traditions into the chaos of everyday life.
If you can get a hold of a copy, I also adore Mrs. Sharp’s Traditions. It’s a (US-centric) fictional book on Victorian activities for families to celebrate the seasons and holidays throughout the year.
(I would have embedded the instagram post here but the function doesn’t seem to be working. See & Support HONY, HERE)
It’s the start of the new year and I figure it’s a good time to take stock of some of our investments and savings (ok, the end of December is better but it’s chaos and I forgot to do it then). One of the things that is good to know is how much grant (and bond, if it applies to you) money you’ve received for each kid in your Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP).
If you don’t have an RESP you can find all the criteria for the program at the Government of Canada’s Canada Education Savings Program (CESP) website. Even if you are low-income you can get up to $2000 in bonds from the government. Otherwise, the government will give you 20% of your contribution in grants, up to $500 a year to a lifetime maximum per child of $7200. Also, if you can’t put the full $2500 a year in to get the $500 grant, you can always play catchup later for a maximum of $1000 worth of grants from the government, per year. The money grows tax free until you take it out to use for school. Of course, go to the link above and read all about it yourself as there is a lot more info than I can give here.
Of course, with most programs offered by the government, third party financial managers will try and convince you that it’s too difficult to manage on your own. They will try and tell you that it costs nothing to use their services and that they will manage the program for you. But there is no such thing as a free lunch and usually they get kickbacks by managing high-fee investments for you, limiting your overall returns and eating away at your savings. In fact, there is no reason why you can’t manage your own with a discount broker (such as Wealthsimple or Questrade) or through your own bank.
There are three types of plans single, family or group. If you have one kid, single (or group) are your options. If you have multiple children, a family plan is best because if one child decides not to pursue post-secondary, the other child(ren) may use the money. Group plans are usually sold via third party financial managers and are usually considered a poor product (read more on this post by Moningstar).
Having said that, I mentioned in a previous post that when my kids were young and unaware, we used to ask family for money for their RESPs instead of gifts for their birthdays. This worked out well. We also had very limited income when my children were younger so we only contributed $80 a month ($40 each) to their RESPs. Since 2020 however, we have been maxing their yearly contribution and maxing their catchup amounts.
Today I called the CESP to see where we were in terms of maxing out that money. For the eldest I can contribute $5000 a year in 2023 and 2024 and then another $635 in 2025 to hit the maximum grant. For the youngest, I have the $5000 max for the next 3 years and then in 2026 I can contribute $2000 to get the maximum grant.
Unlike plans like the Registered Disability Savings Plan (RDSP) which sends me a letter telling me how much I can contribute to get the maximum grant for that program, the CESP does not. So you will have to call. Before you call, have with you:
1 – The plan owner’s Social Insurance Number (SIN). I am the plan owner for my kids.
2 – Your child(ren’s) SINs/dates of birth/address on file
3 – To get this information, the plan owner will need to call the Canada Education Savings Program (CESP) toll-free line at 1-888-276-3624, between the hours of 8am and 5pm (ET), Monday to Friday
Make sure you ask how much grant money each individual child has received. You can also ask how much contribution room you have left for each child as well. The maximum contribution room per child is $50000 but you are only eligible for grant money for $36000 of that. We aim to save the $36000 per kid to get the grant money but after that we don’t plan on contributing.
Mr. Tucker and I didn’t have family money to see us through school so we both had to take out student loans. While I don’t regret my decision as it led to a great career, I really felt the weight of the student loan payments when I was just starting out in the working world. We’ve been lucky to be able to have the extra money to save for our children’s education but we have told our children that we expect them to also contribute either via work or scholarships. As I mentioned previously, we also have enough money, currently, for each of them to do a 4-year university or college degree if they live at home. We’ve also discussed that if they want to go away for university they will need to fill in the gaps with scholarships and/or work. Either way, they will hopefully graduate with an undergrad with a lot less debt than I had.
When I started this blog I made the decision to not put advertisements or links where I get kickbacks. In part, this was because it’s a lot of work and I would then feel obligated to post on a schedule like it was my job. But this blog isn’t my job, it’s a passion project. It’s also a lot of work to manage SEO and income streams and engage with people all day. Since leaving my job IN social media, I didn’t want to make my hobby my job. I also had seen how the online world was already infringing into my daily life so the goal was to pare back, not lean in.
In the early aughts when livejournal was still a thing but no real social media company had broken through, you would only see banner ads sporadically. I remember when a webcomic I used to follow started offering a banner ad at the top of the daily comic. The ads back then made sense because it was individual companies and artists buying the space. The ads were typically relevant because they were audience-based: a real person had to enjoy the website and pay to advertise with the owner. But google changed all of that and now every site has banners in every corner, above, below & in the middle of the page. Often, sizing becomes a problem because the ads pop-up, close and resize whenever they flip to a new one (don’t get me started on auto-play videos!). It makes reading most websites almost impossible as it’s two sentences, a video, two sentences, an expanding banner etc. Unless you have a robust ad blocker installed and use the reader (provided it hasn’t been disabled) most blogs and websites are so user-hostile that I’ve given up on them completely. Even using an RSS like Feedly has become difficult because often you have to click through.
This is, of course, because I am old and because I was an early adopter of the internet (relatively speaking). When I discovered the online world in 1993 I had so much hope for the future. It was dubbed, “the information superhighway” for a reason and it promised a future of connectedness and free information. We were so hopeful! Granted, I was still technically a teenager but it was such a great place to interact, share opinions and learn new things. I guess we underestimated how pervasive businesses would be at leveraging the open source world and our desire to connect into surveillance capitalism. Now we have become the product and they use myriad shifty psychological tactics to keep our eyeballs online and keep those ad dollars rolling in.
One of the reasons I have been so successful at quitting social media is because it reached a point where the value I was getting out of sites like facebook had tipped over into being too much effort for the time I was putting in. I don’t even bother checking my main feed now: I just go directly to the community groups or pages I want to read. The algorithm’s attempt to only show me my notifications sporadically so that I keep checking back often has caused me to completely check out. There are too many ads and too many repeat showings of the same posts. It is effectively so useless to me that I can go on once a day and not go back until the next day – I used to spend hours on there!
Don’t get me wrong: I am not upset that individual people want to get paid for the time and effort that they put into running a blog or website. It just needs to be balanced with being user-friendly. But let’s also be honest: a lot of websites and blogs now offer courses and consulting and other products that you can buy. While I don’t begrudge people selling their expertise, I wonder how much expertise they really have. I can think of a handful of people I know who sell their services as life or job coaches – one of whom became a job coach after losing their own job when they couldn’t find another! In the world of flexes, that is a blue ribbon contender. Caveat Emptor.
Truth be told: we did it to ourselves. We engaged with the internet with the expectation that everything could be free forever but in reality someone had to pay the bills. We didn’t want to pay a yearly fee to use a blog service or pay for servers so we agreed to give our attention up to advertisers and secretly use ad blockers. So now it’s another layer of complexity as we play a cat-and-mouse game of disabling ad features with updates and updating our ad blockers to disable those features.
I actually love Patreon for this because often you can get basic content for free and then pay for special extras, or if you really like the content, you can subscribe. If you don’t want to sign up, you can also make a small one-time donation. This makes objective sense to me instead of pushing potential readers away with a website that looks like space invaders meets google adsense. I find myself more often signing up for various Patreon newsletters or prioritizing blogs that are more about sharing and engaging than making a quick buck. In fact, I’d say that the more ads on a site, the more useless the information is. Like the experiments done with monkeys doing drawings for rewards: the quality goes down when you get rewarded for quantity over quality.
To be sure, algorithms on social media sites favour quantity over quality and I’ve often seen small businesses complain that their context gets shadowbanned if they don’t, say, produce enough reels for Instagram or get enough likes, saves and shares. It is a ridiculous world we live in when we sign up for content on social media sites but don’t get that content served up to punish creators for not producing enough of, or the “right” content. Social media is addicted to mediocrity as long as enough content is posted, the quality seems to be irrelevant.
But let’s also take a step back and question the quality of the ads we’re also getting on sites and social media. Often, it’s dropshippers who are paying for these ads and as you can see from the images on this post: it’s absolute insanity how many of these garbage businesses there are out there selling the same product as unique to them. Drop shipping has become a get-rich-quick-scheme in recent years promoted as a work-from-anywhere business that appeals to people who want to be Digital Nomads. Unfortunately, most of the money to be made has already been made and the only real cash being made now is from websites offering courses and seminars on how to get into dropshipping. The market clearly is saturated, judging by the images in this post of ads I’ve been served from Instagram this past month.
Sadly, it’s often stolen ideas from actual artists who are selling on websites like Etsy who have their work copied & reproduced without credit or compensation. I have made it a point to never, ever buy anything from an ad that gets served up to me via social media. The reason for this is that I recently had a run-in with a company that looked legit and so I went ahead and bought two products from them as gifts. To make it short and sweet, the following happened:
1 – I was charged more than the invoice stated
2 – I was charged in a different currency than the invoice stated
3 – The name of the company was completely different when it came up in my credit card transactions
4 – I canceled the order within one hour of placing it and within the TOS cancellation guidelines
5 – They replied after I canceled in incredibly broken English and told me to accept the product anyway and if I wanted to return it, I could return it
6 – I did a chargeback on my credit card after they refused to cancel
7 – The product was supposed to ship through the UK but shipped from China via the US
8 – I received the product and it was incredibly low quality (think: dollar store)
9 – Seller refunded my money after the credit card company engaged them
Dropshipping is technically not illegal but copyright theft is. Because the original owners are usually small artists and the products are being mass made in countries with lax copyright laws, it’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole. It doesn’t help that websites like Etsy also don’t give a crap about dropshippers using their platform, either. They get their cut. Just go to Etsy and search for any item you’ve seen in an ad lately on social media and a plethora of results will appear. For example, go to Etsy and search for “6 bird pun coasters” and you will find a bunch of options at varying price points for the images featured in this post. Isn’t Etsy supposed to be for original artists and craftspeople? What gives with all of the duplicates? But this isn’t a surprise to most people who use Etsy. Since replacing the CEO and laying off staff in 2017 the general consensus is that it has also become hostile to the creators and customers it serves.
It feels like everything is a race to the bottom these days. Let’s not forget that even amazon itself is copying products and then rigging the results so that only their brands come up in searches. The way the algorithms on amazon are also obfuscating the fact that search results are indeed paid ads for certain companies has led to consumers losing confidence in the platform. I will shop ANYWHERE but amazon if I can because it’s impossible to determine if a company is really who they say they are. To not pick on Amazon either, many companies from Walmart to Best Buy have allowed 3rd party resellers on their site who sell absolute junk at bargain prices that often isn’t even what was described in the ad. Most of these are dropshippers who hope that the average consumer won’t fight back about a small purchase. Get enough people to do this and you have a pretty profitable business built on people’s unwillingness to fight over a $20 product they have to send back by paying $10 in shipping to return it.
I think I just want to try and carve out my own little niche on the internet the best way I can. I know that I will never be free from online advertising, google’s web crawling and algorithms but I also know that I don’t have to encourage it either. I find I trust information and websites more if they aren’t inundated with ads and things they are trying to sell. I didn’t want my personal blog to turn into I RETIRED AT 43 – ASK ME HOW! Besides, the real answer is: have a really good disability plan at your work and get a motor neuron disease. That may not be the solution people will want to hear if I sold them a course or a consulting session.
Post-pandemic I am really trying to shop at brick and mortar stores or purchase directly from the artists instead of 3rd party websites like Etsy. Sure, you may not be able to divest yourself 100% from these platforms – heck, I had a friend amazon prime me a scooter charger to Puerto Rico! I drove around the island and couldn’t find one but I needed to charge my mobility scooter to get home. I feel absolutely zero shame about making that purchase. But trying to make the world a less hostile, jarring place is never a bad thing. So some day I may put one of those “buy me a coffee” buttons on this site. Maybe not. But I do know that I like the peace of an ad-free website and since I only have control over the one wee corner of the web that I can control, it remains ad free. I hope you enjoy it too.
