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Tag: early retirement

“It was the 90’s!”* OR: On nostalgia (1 of 3)

“It was the 90’s!”* OR: On nostalgia (1 of 3)

Watch out, sweet thing, a change in the weather is all that you bring
–Love Spit Love

Because I have a case of the olds now, I tend to have a LOT of past to look back on. Mr. Tucker and I often reminisce about how we were young and (very) poor but despite it all, we did manage to have a good time when we were younger. A lot of it centred around friends and hanging out because that’s all we could really afford.

There were a lot of late nights with friends, drinking coffee at people’s houses, staying up all night playing games, listening to music, making music or painting, watching movies and a lot of walking and biking (we couldn’t afford bus fare). We’d go to bars and coffeehouses with change in our pockets and buy the one drink we could afford, and nothing else.

The one thing that separated me from many other people though (including Mr. Tucker) was that I was an early adopter of technology. I didn’t come by it honestly, instead I just happened to know a LOT of geeks and by virtue of knowing them, I had my first Freenet account when they were still in the B’s. I still remember when there was a magazine called MONITOR that listed all of the BBS’s in the area (of which my friends ran quite a few) as well as tech news and computer ads. At the risk of sounding misty-eyed, we were all super hopeful about how technology had the opportunity to bring the world together and how it could level the playing field for everyone to communicate.

Online you could speak to people from all over the world via IRC and usenet. I loved every moment of it and delved deep into niche communities of varying interests. I did often just stay close to home though, making friends on the Freenet IRC and staying up all night to chat with them**. We often found ourselves deciding to hop in our cars at 2am and we’d hit the 24-hour Perkins in the east end where we would drink coffee and smoke cigarettes until dawn. Those were some of my favourite years and I am still close friends with some of those people to this day.

I feel like every generation has a time that they are nostalgic for. A time where things seemed simpler, where you felt more connected with friends, before the demands of life got in the way. But of course, if we are honest with ourselves, we are only really romanticizing the good parts. I remember poverty being an absolute shackle, keeping me stressed about a series of shitty minimum wage jobs and worrying constantly about paying rent and trying to stay fed. I remember the relentless calls of the bill collectors and the awful way they would make you feel so small. It was frustrating to be bone tired and still not have money to do things. There were some genuinely horrible moments where I felt so stuck that I could barely breathe.

Strangely, my salvation came from an unlikely place: a book of the month club. Like it’s more famous cousin, Columbia House (full disclosure, I also had CH!) was for music, BOTMC was for books (obvz). The premise of all these club was the same: get X amount of products for a Y amount of money and then promise to buy Z amount of products at the regular price. For those of you young enough not to know, these companies practiced what is known as negative option billing. That means if you didn’t send in a postcard saying you didn’t want that month’s selection, you got sent the selection and were billed for it (usually, at a higher price than retail). Being young and stupid, I regularly did not send in the cards and I ended up with a lot of books I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise. One of those books was The Tightwad Gazette II. It changed my life.

Arguably, the TWGII is the least interesting of the three TWGs but it opened my mind to this radical idea: you could reduce your expenses by making better choices and end up with the same lifestyle for less money. Cooking at home was cheaper than eating out. You could save on your energy bills. You could buy everything you needed on the secondhand market. I know this all sounds low stakes in 2023 where every second personal finance blog extols the virtues of frugality but to 18-year-old me in the early 90s, it was a revelation. When I finally got to TWG III I discovered Your Money or Your Life in an article and my life has not been the same since.

Clearly, we know how this story ends: I retired at 42 with a disability pension. We recently paid off our house, the kids are thriving, and shortly Mr. Tucker will hopefully be retired as well.

But this means that it is also the start of a new story, which we will start with a wee bit of a segue… in the next post, to be released on Wednesday, August 9th.


*with apologies to Kevin J Thornton
** Freenet had this thing where it eventually moved to only giving you 2 hours a day in 1 hour increments – and then it would kick you off and you would have to call back. It had become so popular that in order to balance the load, you could only have unlimited time between 11pm and 7am so we all hopped on during the unlimited time.

The History of work & the fallout

The History of work & the fallout

On our flight back from Puerto Rico in March, I ended up watching a documentary on overwork. It’s a very basic overview on the issue but I found it a good primer. It’s only 50 minutes long and you can find it online here:



Until I was diagnosed in 2018 I ran a blog that was loosely based on early retirement. Even before that, I had a livejournal that was personal but that also discussed frugality and Simple Living. I think I was lucky in the fact that when I was 18 years old and poor as shit, I came across The Tightwad Gazette which led me to Your Money or Your life – the de facto standard on early retirement. Since then, it was my goal to work as little as possible, save as much as possible and hopefully be out of the rat race fairly early in life.

I mean, GOAL ACHIEVED! C’mon, you HAVE to laugh: the universe has a cruel sense of humour.

(I have already discussed this origin story in this post if you are interested in the long version)

Of course, I would have loved to have continued working and been able bodied for a long, long time but given that this wasn’t an option, being able to keep some semblance of a salary plus benefits was a close second. As Tyrion Lannister said, “If you’re going to be a cripple, be a rich cripple.” While I’m not rich, I am also not struggling which is a gift.

So once we adapted to this we started working on Mr. Tucker’s escape from work but then he changed his mind. Since then, he’s received a promotion with a substantial raise, which is great considering how much inflation we’ve seen lately (and our appliances are dropping like flies, which is a post in itself).

Still, I am still interested in the idea of early retirement and working less because I feel it’s something that our communities (and the society at large) as well as the environment need. I think it’s absolutely bonkerstown that we can’t figure out how to make permanent part-time work…work. It’s interesting to watch Canada move towards universal dental care in the next couple of years with universal pharma care maybe not far behind it. These stressors are what make people panic about not working full time even though if more people worked part time there would be more work for everyone. Of course, since it’s an employees market right now, there may be room to negotiate these better hours for people.

The pandemic has really shone a light on how much we are stuck on that idea of workplaces as factories. There has been a battle between employees and employers over the past two years and despite the success of WFH some people still want to go back to the office. Employees who’ve generally enjoyed their time and money back from not commuting, not buying food out, not buying work-related clothes would like keep some flexibility in working from home. Employers on the other hand are still stuck in this 9-to-5 panopticon office mentality where they feel everyone should “put in their time.” The problem is that studies have shown that for knowledge work, it’s mostly task-based, not time based and that not all hours of the day are productive ones. It seems to me that if you are getting paid for your education, experience and output, that it is completely backwards to treat the workday like a factory you have to punch in and out of.

Of course, the flipside is that a lot of knowledge workers work in tech and tech has a vested interest in you sitting at your desk for as long as possible. People lauded Google for supplying their employees with such benefits as free meals, in-house doctors, hair cuts, oil changes etc. but as a friend who worked there once said to me, “Do you know why they do that? Because if you need to go to an appointment, that is a couple of hours of you not going “ticky-ticky” on your keyboard for the company. It’s cheaper to provide these services to employees to ensure they aren’t away from their desks for too long.”

In Ontario, where I live, they treat knowledge work like factory work – with the exception that there is no overtime pay for certain workers: IT, law, accounting, medicine and the entertainment industry. Also of note, many manual labourers who work in agricultural settings such as growing mushrooms and various other plants and trees for the retail trade (which is usually piecemeal work done by labourers brought into Canada on agricultural visas). Oh, and of course teenagers. So I question the factory model of “putting in the hours” when it’s clear that the output should be the yardstick of successful work.

But watch the video. I found it interesting and I especially enjoyed David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work for more comprehensive introduction to work theories. My only wish is that he had explored more of the case studies in the second half of the book.

* * *

I ended up taking out some of the books written by the interviewees of this documentary as well. So far, I have received:

– Team Human by Douglass Rushkoff.
– The Refusal of Work by David Frayne.
– McMindfulness by Ronald Purser (which I haven’t started yet).

I haven’t read anything by these folks also featured but will in the future:

– George Monbiot (whose website seems to have some interesting blog posts).
– Guy Standing who writes a lot on Universal Basic Income (UBI). A list of his books can be found on his website
– Jason Hickel who focuses on global inequality etc. website.
– I’ve seen a lot of Carl Honoré’s work because his books are pretty popular. His website.
– Faiza Shaheen has a book coming out in 2023 titled Know Your Place: how society sets us up to fail.
– Grace Blakely who writes about leftist politics in books and for the New Statesman
– Bredan Burchell (who hasn’t really written anything recently but is a professor at Cambridge).

People I couldn’t find any info on:
– Margaret Anderson, University of Michigan

My RRSP, Mr. Tucker’s RRSP or house payoff?

My RRSP, Mr. Tucker’s RRSP or house payoff?

This is my question of the day: which one of the above should I prioritize, in which order, over the next three years?

Basically we both have contribution room in our RRSPs, and Mr. Tucker is in a tax bracket that is higher than mine, so on the surface it makes sense to prioritize his RRSP for the tax savings. However, I don’t want to use all of his contribution room up in year one and year two and then have him left with not enough to go down a tax bracket in year three.

I think the sensical approach is to a> make the 20% prepayment on the mortgage; b> put enough money into Mr. Tucker’s RRSP to bring him down a tax bracket; and then c> siphon the rest into my RRSP. We can use the tax refund to add to the savings to pay off the house.

I need to make sure I use up all his contribution room over the next 3 years so that he maximizes tax savings. After year 3 he won’t have an income so any savings we can continue to put any savings in our TFSAs and/or my RRSP.

It also means that we will get a larger Canada Child Benefit (CCB) as our gross income will be reduced. I need to make sure that year three his income is really low so that we get a larger CCB in the following year as his income will be zero.

Of course, since we are already living off my income and putting his away, we will already be used to it so it won’t feel any differently (except we won’t be putting a ton of money into savings!).

Anyway – happy Friday! The kids have a PD day so they are off cramming in more device use as they have an extra day in which to do it!