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Rest in peace, Norm

Rest in peace, Norm

I have been following Norm and Tina for about 3 years now. This charming couple moved to Canada from the UK in the early 90s, raised a family and then sold their home and retired early. They then travelled and started a youtube channel: This is Our Retirement.

I came across this video when it started circulating on other channels by Financial Advisors where they broke down how to retire on just $300000, which got them a big following:

They always seemed so active and healthy: they walked every day, tried to watch their diet and they lived a generally low-stress lifestyle doing the things they enjoyed. So it was an absolute shock to me when Tina announced recently that Norm had passed away a day after his 70th birthday party, following a triple bypass surgery. I actually screamed and cried, “NOOOOO!” when I saw it, which just speaks to the power of parasocial relationships. I am devastated for Tina and their family.

But also: how great is it that Norm retired at 55 instead of 65? He had 15 years of retirement with Tina as opposed to 5 (or maybe even 0 for some folks). It just speaks to the idea that you never quite know what the future holds so you may as well take giant leaps of faith when you can.

To make it a bit about me, when I retired I was 42. I announced it to a small audience on social media. When reading all of the kind comments from friends, family and old colleagues I had the darkest thought: some of these folks who are concerned about me today may actually be diagnosed with worse things or pass away before me. This, of course, has happened in the past 8 years. I’m not trying to be edgy or goth about the entire thing so much as reiterate that there is no knowing about the future. We have to take things as they come and live our lives in the best way that we can.

In the end, I am glad Tina is carrying on with the channel and it is my heartfelt wish that she is surrounded with love and support both by friends and family. It’s also good to take a moment when these things happen and reflect on whether or not you are living your best life (given your circumstances). I wish you all, a very merry reflection on “…what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

Enjoy your weekend, friends.

Aurora borealis

Aurora borealis

Two nights ago the Northern Lights were out in full force. The Eldest and I headed outside (The Youngest wanted to sleep because she gets up early for Art School) and we OOOHed and AWWed in the dark of the backyard. It also helps that we are near the Greenbelt and we back onto a park. Mr. Tucker took these photos because my phone is an iPhone 8 which may as well be a rotary phone in 2025 (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is my motto!).


You can see the big dipper quite clearly here

Goodbye spendy summer, hello frugal fall

Goodbye spendy summer, hello frugal fall


Morning of the last dragon boat festival of the year

We’re heading into Autumn and we kissed the summer goodbye at an End of Summer bonfire & BBQ party on the Mississippi River (no, not that one) this past weekend. It was a classic Canadian fall day where you leave the house bundled up in a sweater because of the chill and then by 2pm you’re boiling hot and the sun is beating down on you. Then as soon as dinnertime hits, it’s cold and dewy again. A friend from dragon boat hosted a lovely afternoon at her house and it was nice to be outside on what will probably be one of the last warm days of the season.


Em-eye-ess-ess-eye-ess-ess-eye-pee-pee-eye

Dragon boat ended the last week of August, another season under my belt. It’s just as well: the kids were back in school the following Monday so over the long weekend we tried to get as many lingering “big” chores done as we could. Like many folks, this included cleaning out the garage and selling or giving away a few things that we no longer use. Since many people use this weekend to clean out their garages, enough folks were driving around scouring the neighbourhood for free stuff that we didn’t have to haul a lot to the dump. WIN/WIN.

Summers tend to be lackadaisical here at The Mullet. We don’t tend to eat together, we all have different activities, different schedules and different sleep patterns. The week before school starts we tend to tighten it back up slowly by meal prepping, organizing school supplies (and buying only what is needed), doing more baking for lunches, and getting to bed before midnight. The summer is also for random visits to the ice cream parlour, hot dates on patios, overspending at events, hitting the local microbreweries & food trucks, and hosting parties. It tends to be a very spendy time of year but I don’t think about it much. But the end of summer also marks the tightening of the budget.


These Ground Cherries went into into an amazing spice cake

This year we’ve been hit by a bunch of random expenses (which honestly, aren’t random at all). I have to pay quarterly taxes this year because it makes more sense for Mr. Tucker to claim most of the tax credits. The pool heater died 3 months after the warranty was up. We redid the floors in the condo, the car needed some work, we had to buy a new dishwasher (and pay a plumber to install it, we tried but the pipe needed to be cut down), and of course our car insurance doubled because The Eldest is now driving. When I say random, what I really mean is that I always have money tucked away for emergencies or for planned spending but a lot came at us at once so the accounts are on the low side. It happens.

But I also know I will feel better if I watch my spending for a bit. The kids have their own budgets to manage and I just will be a bit tighter with my discretionary spending for awhile. I have a trip planned with some girlfriends in November *and* I am throwing myself a 50th birthday bash a week later, so a lot of my discretionary spending over the next two months will go towards those two things. I find our spending ebbs and flows during the course of the year and I get more or less spendy depending on the weather.


A friend’s 50th birthday! There are a few of us this year

Now that fall has ushered itself in, so has my desire to stay close to home. It’s just as well, our garden is overflowing with peppers, tomatoes and herbs and it’s about to get busy with the processing for winter. Tonight I fire roasted some tomatoes, made a salsa and then I crushed & froze 2 litres of tomatoes for future meals. More tomatoes are ripening and I’d like to get some sun dried tomatoes done before the frost comes. We usually get bulk apples (does anything represent September more than the humble apple?) from a friend but it looks like her family is retiring from the apple biz, so I will have to hit the farm stand up the road to get some fresh apples. I like to chop a bunch up & dehydrate some for winter…and of course we eat a pile of them because they’re so good this time of year.


I am probably one of the few people who know their family eats 10lbs of fresh garlic in a year

Other than that, it’s helping the kids get organized for school & activities. The Youngest is doing her snowboard instructor training this year as well as volunteering at the library. She recently discovered that she can read books and write reviews on them in exchange for volunteer hours and so she’s over the moon! She came home from the last volunteer meeting with a giant pile so it looks like she will tackle that. The Eldest and I are still hammering out what courses she needs for university. It’s been a stressful and chaotic beginning to the school year because it feels so *dire* to be choosing what classes to take for her last year of high school in order to get into the programs/schools she wants. I’ve told the kids that nothing is set in stone and that life has many do-overs but it’s still stressful for a 17-year-old to try and figure out a path for a career she wants to spend 3-5 years in school for! She can always switch majors but I get it – it’s a lot.


The last BAC show of the season. Next year is MEH so we will be skipping

Labour day also marked one of the happiest changes of the season: it’s video game time again! I quit playing games from May to September because I like to be outside more. It’s just a good way to prevent myself from staying inside and being a mushroom with thumbs. I know that I am late to the party but I am still working on The Witcher 3. Will I finish before The Witcher 4 comes out? Stay tuned! I’d also like to play Cyberpunk this winter, it’s just sitting there on my Steam account taunting me. I don’t tend to watch a lot of tv & movies generally but in the summer it drops to zero. Still, I have a few shows to watch – like the last season of Taskmaster – which will keep me company now that sitting outside is less of an option.

I guess that’s what makes it a frugal fall: video games, tv and food preservation. But mainly, it’s staying close to home & having fewer social events as the cold weather hits. By next month Canadians realize that life doesn’t stop for weather and the transition back into social events will begin in time for spooky season.

“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.

It’s Friday – beige dinner night. Also: vacations

It’s Friday – beige dinner night. Also: vacations

Well, not all beige. Some nights – like tonight – we’re doing pizza. My favourite recipe for pizza is this Ultimate Vegan Pizza recipe by The Buddhist Chef. Even if you don’t make the cheez (which you should try as it is delicious) it is an amazing recipe for the crust alone. If you oil a square baking sheet before spreading out the crust, it’s even crispier! We’re having it with salad – so again, not beige – but it’s a Caesar salad so the green is just for show.

It’s strange to think about now but we are setting up our plans for summer vacation. Typically we go somewhere in the winter but of course no one is going anywhere this year. As much as we love travel, it’s been nice to not have to have another rushed vacation with the kids. Mr. Tucker also really enjoyed his week at home doing nothing but a few house chores during the week at Christmas. So because of that, he is going to take two weeks off during the summer: one week for the cottage week with two other families, and one week to stay home, relax, and get a few odd jobs around the house.

While these plans chose us this year, it is also nice to be able to save money by not going anywhere this year. Mr. Tucker and I have some fairly intense financial goals over the next three years and so we have actually nixed international travel for the foreseeable future (unless one of us gets an astronomical windfall or raise).

If I am perfectly honest, we’ve also seen a lot with the kids: we’ve been to Disney World twice, Universal Studios once, and we’ve seen most of the Caribbean and many countries in Central America – including a cruise through the Panama Canal. They’ve been on boat cruise in NYC on New Year’s Eve watching the fireworks behind the Statue of Liberty, and stayed in Venice Beach & walked around Hollywood. It’s enough for kids who are only 10 & 12! Besides, the Bean is in jr. high now and taking time off in winter is just not as do-able as it was when they were in primary school.

At the end of our three years of tight budgeting and saving, we can make decisions then. But until we reach the end of those 30 months, it’s going to be very lean: we will have enough to live a really good life but not a little wiggle room for anything outside that. Right now we are leveraging the fact that we can’t go out in the pandemic to kickstart our new habit to reach our goals. Nothing makes staying home easier than an emergency stay-at-home order.

So our rowdy weekend plans include homemade pizza and a movie on the big screen (the projector in our basement rec room). In fact, this pretty much looks like our rowdy weekend plans for the next 3 years – and I am ok with that. Besides, this idiot has 136 more books to read before the end of the year!

Pandemic positives – Trivial Pursuit

Pandemic positives – Trivial Pursuit

By now we are four months into the lockdown that started in March & it looks like life as we knew it has changed forever. Of course, after September 11 life changed monumentally as well but because we have 19 years distance between that event and life today, most of the changes seem normal now. Life does change, sometimes slowly and sometimes drastically but not all of those changes are for the worse. While we are still managing the fallout from recent events, some people are saying that they appreciate things like being able to work from home, not rushing from activity-to-activity all the time, and spending more time together as a family (although, some people feel the opposite is true).

One of my favourite pandemic activities has been getting together once-a-week with friends to play Trivial Pursuit. Now, I am a HUGE trivia buff but I have terrible recall. My friends on the other hand are trivia masters & one of them has even been on Jeopardy. So while my chances of winning are low, that’s not the point. The point is that I get to virtually see my friends – in three different time zones & two different countries – and we get to laugh & joke and play games. For a very small window of time I get to connect with my friends & it feels almost normal.

We all know that online meetings lack the intimacy of in-person connection but it’s better than no connection at all. I’ve gone from seeing all of them in the past year to probably not seeing them at all for at least a year. That is the problem when some of your closest friends live far away. But we are no strangers to distance: our connection was brought together because of the internet and so we are used to most of our communication being digital. So our weekly TP game is just in addition to our interaction both online and via group chats.

Honestly though, our weekly game is one of my favourite nights of the week. It can be chaotic with dogs, kids, and people eating dinner (that pesky time zone issue) but for me, it’s become one of the best things to have come out of this pandemic. I really hope that when things get normalized and when we can do other things with our evenings that we really make the effort to continue our game night on some scale. It’s really nice to connect with your friends even if it is only virtually.