Optomizer vs Satisfier

Optomizer vs Satisfier


Here I am satisfying my need to consume university-priced pitchers at a local brewery last night at book club. It was a $20 night out, which never happens!

I am not an Optimizer. Granted, I LOOOOOOVE reading blogs that get into the weeds with detailed tax, investment and savings strategies but I am not that person. I enjoy a rousing debate and when personal finance keeners bring out the calculators and start fighting, I make some popcorn and watch. But I am not that person.

I don’t budget down to every penny. I don’t know the asset allocation of every ETF available on the market. I just see which ones have the average allocations that represent the markets/indexes/regions I want (and the fees I don’t) and then I push the BUY button. I know that this makes some people deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

But here is the thing: I know SO MANY PEOPLE who just walk into a bank/sign up for a salesperson to take 1% of their money (whether they are good at making YOU money or not) and then they just wipe their hands and walk away. They feel confident that a “professional” is taking care of their money when they are truly getting scammed.

Conversely, I know people who are DOING NOTHING. Scared of the stock market, they let their cash accumulate in accounts where their cash is being slowly eroded by inflation. Even sticking that into a 5% GIC would be at least doing something that would at least be stemming the hemorrhage of your buying power to inflation.

Both of these kinds of people are doing the exact same thing: they don’t trust themselves enough to learn the basics and they are scared that they will lose everything. So they make the most inefficient decisions possible because it feels comfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, I think money psychology is super important. You have to make decisions that help you sleep at night. But I feel like you can only make those decisions if you have all of the facts and oftentimes people don’t. They try and play it safe because they don’t know (or don’t want to learn) the basics of how to invest and in the process they allow themselves to fall victim to a predatory financial sales community or lose their money as it gets eroded by inflation over time. Sure, it may feel good to be stagnant and/or ignorant today but what this means is that you will lose your access to a secure or even bountiful retirement. The longer you wait, the more you lose.

People often get the impression that I know the ins-and-out of the stock market because I do enjoy discussing it, either in our Money Mondays group or with friends. But in reality I only really know how the basics work. And more controversially, I truly believe the following things:

1 – Most Financial Advisors don’t know more than you could learn on your own by reading a few books. Still scared? Get a fee-only FA. They are worth the money to help build you a plan without draining your nest egg.
2 – The average person doesn’t need to know much more than the basics of the stock market (although, I do recommend they learn as much as possible!).
3 – Inflation is like losing money every year. We tend to feel good psychologically if our $100000 stays at $100000 from one year to the next. But, realistically you can only buy $97000 worth of goods this year with that money when inflation is at 3%. That’s actually a $3000 loss that you don’t see.

Things that you do need to know:
1 – Invest regularly, preferably you can set it up to automatically fund your accounts and then forget it(ish).
2 – How ETFs/Index funds (and maybe even Robo-Advisors) work.
3 – Know what tax shelters are available to you in your country and learn how to use them (ie: retirement accounts)
4 – Only look at your accounts once a year.

Some people are on the cusp of having a coronary just reading that. But I am not an Optimizer, I am a Satisfier. I am satisfied to point myself in the right direction and then hobble down that road. I am not sprinting to some ridiculous goal of making my bajillions on stock tips, I am looking to make a decent decision (buying the index for an average return) while minimizing my losses (fees, inflation). The average return of the S&P is 11+% (1957-2021) and the average return of the TSX is 9+% between (1960-2020). So logic dictates what Jack Bogel introduced to the world: if you buy the entire thing as an index fund, your returns will follow the market.

Of course, I am simplifying things (and nothing works out 100% of the time) but that is the beauty of it: it’s that simple! You don’t need through reams of company reports and a deep knowledge of how every company you buy works. You just need to know that you are heading down a road that even when it gets winding and rocky (when the average return is down, like last year) will eventually take you to where you are going. As a satisfier, that is good enough for me. You give up huge gains for steady growth and the ability to sleep at night.

I do my budget the exact same way. I lay out all of the mandatory things (bills, savings) and set it up to come out of my account as much as I can. Whatever is leftover is mine to do with what I want. I don’t do a zero-budget where every single penny has to be allocated like an Optimizer would. Being a Satisfier, I just have to be concerned about my obligations and then the rest is mine to toss around. Of course, I am frugal in many ways (how does a green bean know that it is a generic vs name brand green bean?) and that allows me to save more in my day-to-day life on things I don’t care about. But that means I can just allocate more to my more expensive habits, like travel.

“BuT tUcKeR, aRe YoU sAyInG pEoPlE sHoUlD bUy InVeStMeNtS tHeY dOn’T uNdErStAnd?”

No. I am saying that they only need to know the basics, not become experts*. Historically, over time, the stock market always goes up**. If the bottom falls out of the entire economy, we won’t even have to worry about our investments because we will need to grab our leather thongs and fire guitars and wander out into the Mad Max desert.

If you are still worried, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE read JL Collins’ book, The Simple Path to Wealth which will give you more info to change your life than any other book out there.

*I am not a Financial Planner nor do I play one on tv. Quite frankly, they’re probably acting too.
**It doesn’t mean it always will in the future but again: we’ll have bigger problems if it comes to that…

The shocking realization you’ve reached your goals

The shocking realization you’ve reached your goals

Tax season brought us a huge refund which we will use to payoff the mortgage

I realized this week that some personal finance adages are true. I suppose that I always knew this intellectually but I managed to say this out loud (and by “out loud” I really mean, “in a Signal chat”) this week and once I said it, the weight of what I had accomplished came into sharp focus.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Mr. Tucker’s work was recently acquired by another company. This required him to sign a whole new slew of legal documents, some of which were a bit unclear. Fortunately for me though, I have a friend who is an incredibly brilliant employment lawyer who is licensed to practice in Ontario AND in California. Those are two very challenging jurisdictions to get licensed in (and she has a ton of experience with tech companies) so clearly, the woman is a GD genius. Luckily for me, she is also a lovely friend who read all of Mr. Tucker’s new documents before he signed them.

When all was said and done, she asked me about how things were looking for him at work, personally…and that’s when I took stock and realized that … IT DOESN’T MATTER! We are finally at a point in our lives that while it would be shitty, a layoff wouldn’t decimate our finances.

Having her ask that question made me go through our accounts and made me realize the following:

– Our mortgage will be paid off by July (two months before schedule!). The house is currently worth high 6 figures.
– Mr. Tucker’s retirement accounts will meet our target by the end of 2023.
– Any layoff would result in a severance enough to carry us through to the end of the year.
– The kid’s RESPs are currently funded enough to get them a 4-year undergrad degree + books at a local university. We’re still funding it but even if we stopped putting money in it today, they’d still be fine!
– We are currently mostly living off my income, which is private disability insurance indexed to inflation until I am 65.
– I have a small pension + lifetime benefits (Mr. Tucker would get half of it should I die as well as half of my CPP and the kids would get an orphan’s benefit as well until they are out of school).
– On top of regular tax shelters, I also have an RDSP which gives me 100% return on investment via government grants until I am 49 (and can grow tax-free in investments until I am 59).
– Should either of us pass away, we have sufficient life insurance and investments to carry the surviving spouse and the children.
– We have a secondary property that is currently rented to a family member at-cost but that has a mortgage on it at around 1/3rd of its value.

When I wrote all of this in a message I realized quickly that even though I had spent some time worrying about the company acquisition, there really is nothing to worry about. While we wouldn’t be living high on the hog, the decisions we made have been good ones.


We do a monthly game night with friends but for Easter we decorated eggs

So, those true adages? Consistency does beat intensity AND time in the market beats market timing. Let’s look at one example, our kid’s education savings accounts:

Consistency beats intensity
I didn’t end up opening an RESP until my eldest was around 3 (12 years ago). Up until 2020 we could only afford to fund it to the tune of $80 a month ($40 each) because we had a pretty high child support payment and I stayed at home with the kids until the eldest was 4.

But what we did do when they were younger was that we asked family members to give us money for their RESPs instead of buying gifts for various holidays. So for about 5 or 6 years (until they wanted to spend their birthday & Christmas money), we were able to throw in an extra $150 twice a year for their education.

Time in the market beats timing the market
When I go back and look at what we put in vs what we actually have, we see an almost 40% increase over the last 12ish years (investments + grants – so 20% each) in the original accounts (we do still fund these with the same $80 monthly).

Conversely, we also started a new RESP in 2020 using a Robo-advisor because we wanted to play catchup on our contributions and get the grants for previous years. In those 40 months we have seen a 24.6% return in that account – 20% of which is grants, so really we have only made 4.62% on our money since 2020. Not bad (but not great) considering how awful it’s been.

So even though we have been putting more away every month the long game has paid off in spades when you look at the return. We also aren’t done yet, I will continue to put money into the account until we run out of grants available to each kid AND it will also compound for at least another 3 years.

No matter what the market does, we just continue to fund our registered accounts. Dip in the market? Fund it monthly. Market overvalued? Fund it monthly. I just cannot be bothered to think about these things and even through it may or may not be the most perfect way, dollar cost averaging has often been my long term strategy. I used this strategy because it was easier to set up our budget and make savings come out of our accounts every month like a bill rather than have to constantly think about it.


Spring chorin’ has begun

Hoisted by my own petard
I was saying to Mr. Tucker the other night that while we intellectually know that we make good money and have assets, we sometimes feel a bit like money is tight. The reality is though is that we have structured our budget to feed money into two kinds of goals. Regular goals such as putting money away to buy a car with cash every 10 years, education savings, emergency savings etc. Then we also have stretch goals, which is basically saving almost everything Mr. Tucker makes into vacations, retirement accounts and paying off our house early.

So we feel poor sometimes when I have to say, “No, sorry, we are out of pocket money this month so we can’t have take out.” Because really, we live off of a bit over what a median household income is in Canada. But we don’t actually ever have to make really hard decisions, so it’s all in our heads and is guided by our goals. The things we end up denying ourselves is junk food, more subscription services or weird baubles at the dollar store. We don’t deny ourselves the things we really enjoy, such as travel and going to concerts. The kids also have all sorts of cool lessons and activities. But this is self-restriction for a higher goal. We’re actively making choices to deny ourselves shit we don’t really need in order to reach…well, apparently we’ve pretty much reached it…OUR LONG TERM GOALS.

It’s just absolutely wild to me that we can see the finish line after years of just putting in the effort. Of course, Mr. Tucker still wants to work until the end of 2024 but it is nice to know that we have a backup plan should things go south.

It’s so funny that one little question from my friend would lead to such a heavy weight being lifted off of me. But here we are!


Another fine book club was had

The Wordle is my love language

The Wordle is my love language

I am in a group chat with some of my oldest and dearest friends. We all met in our early 20s thanks to the internet & a friend who had a 200 acre farm in eastern Ontario. I was a relatively early adopter of the internet in 1994 (with my wee 2400 baud modem), when I was 18. It wasn’t that I was particularly good at computers but that everyone else around me was. My farm-dwelling friend had a local BBS and frequented Usenet where she had met all of these other like-minded people.

In the mid-90s she decided to start something called The Freak Family Picnic where she invited all of her internet friends to descend on the farm for a weekend for camping, bonfires, games etc. People came from all over the US and Canada – and pre-9/11, a guy even flew his plane into the local airport. In the end, she hosted a summer Solstice FFP open to everyone and a winter Solstice FFP that was only open to close friends. For years, this was our twice-yearly ritual and of the core group of people, almost no one missed coming.

Sadly, all good things come to an end and the end of the FFP was abrupt and traumatizing. My friend moved away from the farm, got remarried, traveled the world and is now settled in upstate New York. Happily, the core group of people from that time still remain friends to this day even though many of us have moved states, provinces and even continents. Bless you, internet.

When I medically retired from my job in social media I started to pull back and cull my SM accounts but I still wanted to keep in touch with friends. So we all downloaded Signal and started a group chat with 3 other friends who I’ve stayed close to since the FFP days. The timing for this couldn’t have been better: soon after the group chat ramped up, the pandemic set in.

During the pandemic our group chat was a lifeline. We also had our weekly Trivial Pursuit nights and finally last year we were all able converge in Denver for an in-person visit, which is the closest we really got to the “middle” of where we all lived considering we are in Mountainview, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Denver, CO and I am up here in Canada. It was a great visit and we had all missed each other a lot.

I think that outside of my family, I speak to these three other people daily, even if it is only to share our Wordle score. I’ve slowly come to learn that our Wordle score is our love language. Some days we talk all day long, some days we don’t chat at all but almost always without fail, we always share our Wordle score. It’s become a low-stakes stand in for us to say to each other: hey, I am here. I am alive. We’re connected.

I suppose I didn’t really appreciate this connection until recently when we had a power outage. Of course, when mother nature shows you that human technology is no match for her power, it’s always an adjustment. Sitting eating dinner by lamplight I realized just how amazing it was that some of the closest people in my life could be scattered across two countries and coasts. I realized that even that small connection of doing the Wordle daily left a big hole when I didn’t have it in my life.

We’ve talked a lot about what relationships and social activities look like in a post pandemic world. As a disabled person, this has been an ongoing conversation since even before 2020. In a world that isn’t exactly accessible, our social lives can become burdens as we navigate things no one else has to think about. Having been able-bodied previously, I absolutely understand what it is like to just grab your purse and run out the door to meet up with friends. Now, it is a question of making sure that a place is accessible, that the bathrooms aren’t downstairs, that there are hand railings for me to use. It is even more effort for people who are more disabled than I am.

So in one sense, the pandemic just made us all suddenly think about how interacting with others looks like when you actually have to stop and to think about safety. On the other hand, I think we all realized just how having 100% of our social lives online really is lacking. Much of our communication as humans is non-verbal: it’s about the contagious laughter, the look of sadness in a friend’s eyes, it’s about how being around others makes us feel. While words on a screen are a great way to stay connected, it isn’t the most fulfilling way.

So yes, the Wordle is my love language: it lets my friends know that I am here and that I am available to chat about things big and small. But conversely, the Wordle is no replacement for our get together in Denver last year. Words are important but so is being in the same room with friends. It’s about the dumb jokes, the weird thing that happened at the restaurant that we’ll still laugh at 20 years from now. It’s about the connections, shared meals, ridiculous travel stories.

I don’t know what the future will hold but as we edge further away from the worst of the pandemic, I find I crave the in-person company of my friends more and more. It seems that everyone is still in varying degrees of worry about the pandemic as well. Some people believe the worst is over and have gone on with their lives normally and some people are still terrified of catching it and worry about the long term effects. I don’t think there is an easy answer here. If anything, we should all be kind and accommodating to everyone’s needs. With summer on the horizon, I plan a bunch of social events that we can hold outside to ensure that everyone can feel included. Of course, for my local friends that continues to be at least an option. Even with our horrendously cold, dark, long winters spring always comes eventually.

But for my dearest old friends further out, I’ll keep sharing my Wordle score.


Saying goodbye after defeating Blucifer

Is Deinfluencing a sign of the times?

Is Deinfluencing a sign of the times?

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.

Is there a “Singles Tax?”

Is there a “Singles Tax?”

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.

The Pillow

The Pillow

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.

Check out the crabs in the bucket

Check out the crabs in the bucket

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.

A year of temperance

A year of temperance

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.

Blue Monday and January

Blue Monday and January

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.