Tag: savings

Posted on

RESP status – 2023


The youngest’s school. The posters say UNLEARN.

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.

Posted on

When you’re a saver, it’s hard to be a spender

We have a lovely older couple who live across the street from us and who have lived in this neighbourhood since the 1970s. Our neighbour, let’s call him Bill, is almost 80 and is the caretaker of his developmentally disabled daughter and his wife, who has dementia. Bill is an absolute treasure and unlike so many people his age, he has a positive outlook on life. One of the things he always says is, “I see every day I am here as a gift!” His life isn’t easy but he is grateful for everything he has and he’s a real inspiration to us youngins’.

Bill doesn’t have a cell phone and will often just pop in for a coffee. Today he dropped in and the conversation turned to how expensive everything is with inflation. He laughed because his last pair of “good” shoes were 30 years old and they had fallen apart. He said that the last time he went to buy shoes they had cost him $29.99 and looking at a recent flyer that came in the mail, it looks like now he’ll have to pay $80 for a similar pair.

He then went on to tell us that he had spent his entire life saving money for a good retirement only to discover he couldn’t spend it. “I have enough for all of us to spend and live comfortably for a long time but there is nothing I want to buy,” he said. Bill lives a really good life, too. He doesn’t deny himself, he takes the odd trip with the family, and spends money to maintain his house and yard (with pool). “My wife used to buy all of my clothes but honestly, I haven’t needed to shop much for clothes for years because they have lasted.” Bill isn’t a miser, either. He often buys my children little gifts like backpacks for school, and flower kits you can grow indoors. He’s just discovered that he doesn’t need – or want – to spend money.

The New York Times recently wrote that research suggests that this is common.“As people age, they report less satisfaction from travel, as well as from new cars, clothes and appliances. The decline is strongest in people who say their health is poor. People who say they’re in excellent health say their enjoyment from travel and leisure is actually greater than it was six years earlier. People in excellent health also report more satisfaction from giving financial support, which goes against the notion that those who expect to live a lot longer are worried about running out of money.” I would also say that after years of saving and learning how to get the things you want on a reduced budget that you just continue this even when you retire. Bill is a retired teacher with a pension, his house is paid off, his car is paid off and he has enough for a really good life for the three of them. So his savings keeps growing while his lifestyle stays similar to what it has always been.

This got me thinking about our own budget. We currently save a huge chunk of our income for our house prepayment, retirement, and our children’s education – not including “planned spending” items like buying a new car every 10 years, which is more “saving to spend.” Our life is a really solid middle class life: roof over our heads, food on the table, bills are paid and there is money for extras. We also have a category for leisure and travel that is well-funded. But I do know from my calculations that once our mortgage is paid off next year, we will be able to easily live off of just the money I bring in.

According to research, we’re also in our peak budget years as the kids are t(w)eens. They will also be here for at least 5-7 years (more if they go to post-secondary in the city). That means our expenses are relatively high. We pay for very pricey activities and save a huge amount towards their RESPs – not to mention the basic costs of feeding and clothing them. We are so used to having this money go to them that when (and if!) they leave home, I wonder if we will feel like Bill. Having everything for a good life already, will we want to spend more?

Despite our current moratorium on air travel, we probably would like to travel a bit more in the future (PLS willing!). I suspect that over time we will find ourselves like the people in the above NYT article: unwilling to travel due to disability. We will also find room in our budget to help the kids as they try and build an adult life for themselves. Still, our coffee with Bill reminded me that having spent a long time saving for the future, we probably will find ourselves in the same position: having enough.

Posted on

Eating out, value and tipping in a post-lockdown world

In the early pandemic restaurants pivoted to curbside take-out and delivery and at least here, they also had the option to sell alcohol which was a first for this province. In appreciation for the risk and to support local businesses people became more patient and tipped as they would have had they eaten-in. When restaurants re-opened they came out in droves, happy to get back to some semblance of a normal life. Patios everywhere were packed.

But all wasn’t well. Customers seemed to demand more from overworked staff who were working harder and longer due to staffing shortages while being burdened with ever-changing pandemic rules. So while the mentality was “back to normal” the reality was anything but. Then on top of this, the war in Ukraine started, inflation exploded as supply chains were strained & central banks responded by raising interest rates and suddenly everything got more expensive. Many restaurants plan to raise their prices by 10% to 15% this year.

We weren’t really comfortable eating out except for a handful of times but for Mr. Tucker’s birthday this year we wanted to try for a nice dinner with my stepson and his girlfriend. So we chose a high-end dining “steak and seafood” restaurant in The Market that had good reviews. Now, I spent 10 years working in restaurants, my stepson is a chef and his girlfriend is a server. Knowing the state of the restaurant business in 2022 we brought with us an incredible amount of patience. Still, we were only one of two tables the server had that evening and “disinterested” is the nicest way I could describe her. She took ½ hour to take our drink order, forgot a bunch of things we ordered, only took half of our dessert orders before walking away and came to our table so seldomly that we had to flag down other servers. The food itself was ok but the tasting menu was incredibly lazy: just smaller portions of things that were on the main menu. All the other staff were lovely, which is why I tipped well knowing that they were getting a cut. Still, I regret not tipping less because the service was so abysmal and I shouldn’t have sent the message that that was an ok way to treat customers. On top of this, the entire restaurant was infested with flies. Not just one or two buzzing around – which is expected for the summer – but throngs of them. It was impossible to keep them off your food.

In the end, the meal for 4 people was almost as much as my monthly grocery bill. Now, we love a good meal and I absolutely don’t mind paying for a fine dining experience. We won’t spend money on fast food but we will absolutely pay hundreds of dollars for an excellent meal with the service to match. As is usual for people who have worked in restaurants, we always overtip as well. But we were all just appalled at how absolutely lazy the entire experience was. Clearly, we will never go back there.

After that experience Mr. Tucker and I sat down and discussed how disappointed we were with the meal. We had eaten out at a few other places this year as well and while they were ok experiences we both agreed that they weren’t really worth the money we spent on them. I absolutely feel for businesses that are struggling with soaring costs and post-pandemic staff shortages but this was just such a terrible night out that we made the decision to stop eating out completely. We just don’t want to spend money to have a mediocre time, let alone a terrible time.

Then, the other evening, friends came over to hang out and catch up. We bought a family Shawarma platter for dinner from our amazing local Shawarma shop and it was $50 for enough to feed 6+ people (fatoush salad, potatoes, rice, hummus, toum/garlic sauce, pickled veg, pitas and you can do chicken, beef or a mixture of both – what a deal!). Of course, being a small local business we always tip around 40% because we feel their food is ridiculously underpriced and the service is always fantastic! Sure, tipping isn’t expected here as it’s a take-out counter, but they are so fantastically kind and the food is all made in-house so we like to show our appreciation.

Across the country, the tipping culture debate is heating up, resulting in articles about tip-flation. During the pandemic people were happy to pay a little extra for people who continued to work and serve people under dangerous conditions but now many people feel stuck like they should continue to overtip even though we are assured everything is “back to normal,” now. Combined with the higher costs of eating out, many people are feeling the sticker shock of post-pandemic dining when the basic tipping options on POS terminals are 15% to 30%. On top of that, provinces like Ontario are ending the disparity between the minimum wages of servers/bartenders and other workers leaving some people to eliminate tipping service staff altogether.

The friends who were over for dinner the other night mentioned that when buying dessert they weren’t even given the option to NOT add a tip to their bill at the bakery. The lowest option was 10% and they were made to feel guilty for asking to have an option to pay without a tip. It begs the question: we all agree that servers should get tipped but outside of that, the rules get murky: should we tip someone 20% for opening a beer and passing us a glass when we have to go get it at the bar? For someone who disinterestedly passes us an already boxed-up cake?

This debate didn’t start with the pandemic and it will rage on for a long time, I think. Some people feel that tipping is a requirement in many cases and some people feel that it’s gotten out of control. Why do we tip hairdressers and not housecleaners? Baristas but not the people who bag our groceries? Others argue that a living wage would solve all of the problems but I’m not so sure. I can see why Europeans are rightly confused when they come here: there aren’t even rules to tipping culture! Of course historically when people complained about tipping the usual answer was to say, “well just don’t eat out then.” But unfortunately, the expectations for tipping have seeped through every industry it seems. In my case at the restaurant, I just couldn’t tip less than 20% because I felt badly for all of the staff who were doing a good job and were getting tipped out from our server. It wasn’t even tied to her horrible service, it was the guilt I felt for an overburdened and struggling industry.

In our post-lockdown world we are all grappling with questions about how things used to be, what things should change and how they should change. It will probably be awhile before we get things sorted. I was saying to Mr. Tucker that our entire trip to Toronto in the spring with friends cost less than the meal we had on his birthday. So, for us choosing not to eat out means we can redirect the money we typically allocate instead to small weekend trips over the next year. Trips we will make as a family and get real value out of. When you put it into that perspective, it only makes sense to treat the entire family to a couple of days away rather than blow it all on one meal (we typically get a hotel room with a kitchenette which makes feeding ourselves more cost effective). I do see a future in which we do eat out again – probably around the same time that we do more distance travel – but for now, we’ll stay out of the restaurants and pay down our mortgage instead.

Posted on

It’s been a hot minute – what I am up to

WELP. The idea of writing consistently here this year as a New Year’s resolution didn’t happen. Still, I’ve not really spent a lot of time on social media this year and I have definitely kicked my facebook habit (and replaced about 50% of it with an Instagram habit – oops!). Of course, the pandemic is still out there pandemicking but the kids are back in school so that is nice. We had a great summer of outdoor socially distanced hangouts, and now we are settling in to have a lovely autumn full of fun fall activities. But first, maybe a roundup of what has happened in the past 6 months since I last wrote:

Cottaging on Manitoulin island: we have probably shut the door on camping/cottaging with the two other families. Since Sprout was 2, we’ve either Glamped in Quebec parks or we’ve rented cottages. This year we had a lovely week in Dominion Bay where the kids could run around, play games and go for long walks. My friend S did her yearly craft camp for the kids & there was woodburning, leaf painting & other projects completed. I mostly read, and we even headed out to an outdoor farmer’s market (a pandemic first for me!) where I bought cozy wool socks for me, rings made out of antique spoons for the kids, and a pepper grinder from a woodworker for Nick.

Unfortunately, during the pandemic there was a run on cottage rentals and even though we tried to book for next year early this summer, there was really nothing to be had that wasn’t $3000 a week – a bit steep. Also, our kids are much older now: Sprout is going to be 12 next year and the oldest kids will be 16 and will probably have jobs. It’s been a good run but it’s time to move on. Not all is lost though! More below!

Gardening: this was our garden’s second year & like the first year we kind of took the “set it and forget it” approach. Still, we got a lot out of it despite the chaos and have learned that we can probably sow an early spring garden, a summer garden & a fall garden. We did end up sowing a fall garden but a little later than I would have liked so who knows what will happen? Despite the cold, the tomatoes are still producing and the basil is going strong. Heck, some of our herbs – like lavender, coriander & dill – have re-seeded and are producing again. Since our goal is to bring those herbs inside for wintering under grow lights, I am happy to see it!

Hopefully we will get some cool weather crops before the snow flies! Then we will pull the dying plants, lay on our home made compost and let the beds winter. Otherwise, we have garlic to plant for next year before the winter sets in.

    Canning, preserving & gleaning: we did most of the things we had done last year that we had enjoyed,

– Horseradish dill pickles
– Tomato sauce
– Spicy dilly beans
– Strawberry and raspberry jam
– Sundried tomatoes

    Some new things,

– Both dill and sweet mustard relish (made when our cucumbers turned yellow)
– Red onion and beetroot chutney
– Marinated eggplant

    Some boozy things,

– We made Nocino from friend’s black walnuts
– We made a bachelor’s jam for Winter Solstice/Yule
– We are now trying our hand at plum wine from our friend’s plums

I am going to do an entire post on all of the things we did & some recipes sometime soon. What’s notable though is what we didn’t do: salsa or tomatillo salsa. We really weren’t going through it as quickly as I thought we would, so we focused on tomato sauce instead.

Money Mondays: this is still going strong! We’ve done sessions on a bunch of things such as the Disability Tax Credit, had a guest speaker to do a presentation on wills, and next week I am doing one on budgets.

Health: the good news is that the ALS clinic told me that I am doing well enough that I only have to come in once every two years! The nurse told me that this was the first time she’s heard the doctor tell someone that so I am pretty proud. Still, I could be doing more work on my health to be quite honest.

– Mr. Tucker and I are taking long walks (I bought a yellow tricycle, which is what I usually take) weekdays. We grab the dogs in the morning, walk Sprout to the end of the street, then we walk the Bean to her bus stop & then we head down to the river for a longer walk (or just through the neighbourhood on busy mornings). It’s been really good for us both to be forced to get up, washed, dressed and out the door. Otherwise we just lounge around the house in our jammies.
– I plan to do #folktober next month to work on my fine motor skills with painting. I bought some nice watercolour paints and I need to encourage myself to use them. Wish me luck!
– I need to clean out my knitting basket to make it more user-friendly. The Sprout reminded me that I said I would teach them to knit and I still haven’t. So again, in the interest of my fine motor neuron skills (and keeping my promise) I should pull that out again.
– My vitamin regimen has made my cycle much better and that in turn has also helped my spasticity.
– I haven’t had alcohol since October 28th, 2020.
– My skin has been just awful so yesterday I was tested for a bunch of things (celiac, thyroid) and my GP is making me appointments with two dermatologists, so we will see how that will play out. I figure this may be an ongoing saga for awhile as appointments are sparse due to the pandemic.

Finances: shockingly, Mr. Tucker has made the decision to work longer in order to put more money into some house-related projects. This means we’ve eased up on our intense budget and instead we are buying more things that bring us joy. For example, we are trying to rehire our old housecleaner again as we’ve decided that our weekends are probably not best spent arguing with the kids over chores. They both know how to clean an entire house so we’ve done our job here. They’ll still have chores, just less of them.

I have also increased our a> grocery budget; and b> our pocket money. We are still saving at an amazing rate but we aren’t as intense as we were for most of this year. We hit our prepayment amount for our mortgage & will contribute to Mr. Tucker’s retirement accounts (but to a lesser degree).

Instead we are also going to…

Travel: both near and far. When we were on Manitoulin Island this summer we made the decision that if cottages were going to be $3000 a week that we would be better off booking a trip down south instead. So that is what we have done. We have tentatively booked a vacation to Jamaica next winter (covid willing!). We booked our flights & house rentals but we did manage to get good cancellation policies so we will see where the world is at come winter.

We also have decided to treat the kids & take them to Canada’s Wonderland for the Halloween Haunt. We ended up buying season passes with another family in the hopes of going back for a couple of days next summer as well.

I would like to also do more things close to home such as heading to various Halloween-themed (outdoor) events in our area. After a year and a half of being stuck at home, I am eager to spread my social wings!

So that is about it for changes around here. Mostly my days are spent reading and parenting & watching shows or playing games as a family. I think we’ve turned a corner on covid – at least in our area of the world – so I hope that stays steady. Overall, life is pretty good.

Posted on

A short history of my personal FI success

My foray into personal finance started when I was 18 and dirt poor & living on my own. In the 90s buying clubs like Columbia House (hah! Remember them?) and Book of the Month Club were all the rage and like a fool, I was a member of both of them. But as fate would have it, one of the books that I received was The Tightwad Gazette (TWG) II. When I got it I read it cover-to-cover and then I read it again. Despite the fact that these mail order clubs were pretty awful, I probably have benefited more financially from stumbling across that book than from anything else that has happened. It lead me down a road of seeing that there was a different way of living and it gave me the power to understand that I had control over my money. Eventually I bought both TWG I & III as well as Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL), which is the book that had the most impact on me during my 20s and 30s.

Before the FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) movement with its stoicism and side hustles by tech-based workers & other high-income adherents, there was Joe and Vicky. Their vision of the for financial independence (FI) movement was one of simple living and community. Their ideas were about resource management not just for the accumulation of cash but also concerned the environment & leaving the planet a better place. It was a vision for a better world and it spoke to me. Although I have enjoyed some of the FIRE blogs over the past 10 years, I have been embedded into the YMOYL vision of FI and have found that the bootstrapping, solitary goal of accumulating money of most FIRE bloggers has struck me as mostly empty. Of course, there are those who have a larger vision but they don’t seem to be the ones screaming the loudest.

Of course, you may be thinking, “Well Tucker, learning about all of this by 20 certainly didn’t help you to retire early! You worked until 3 years ago!” While that is true, it is also missing the larger picture, which is the one of independence, or having the freedom to make different choices. By learning to be good with my money it has given me the option to make decisions that I may not have been able to make had a lot of debt or lived a large lifestyle. Here are some things that FI knowledge has given me:

– After being laid off from my well-paying corporate job I was able to join a government-sponsored small business training program that lead me to owning an eco-friendly cleaning business in my early 30s.
– After listening to my mother, I bought a condo downtown for $115k when I was 24 years old with a $5000 inheritance I received (full disclosure she co-signed the mortgage). After a couple of years I was able to remortgage & used the money to pay off my student loans (the difference was 6.5% a year!).
– After I became a parent, being frugal allowed me to stay home with my kids until they were 2 & 4 years old.
– I went back to work when it looked like Mr. Tucker’s job situation looked tenuous. But we were still able to live off of one salary.
– When I went back to work I was able to take contracts from September – May and stay home with my kids over the summer (I would have worked but student programs generally filled those jobs during those months).
– Going back to work allowed us to spend a month in Puerto Rico in 2014 & not have debt long-term.
– Saving up a huge down payment for our house allowed us to take on a smaller mortgage than we would have. We are now looking to pay this off by 2023.
– When I was diagnosed with Primary Lateral Sclerosis the waiting period for sickness benefits with Employment Insurance was a month & only lasted 12 weeks. The waiting period for my Disability Insurance to kick in was 13 weeks! Having savings & having an emergency budget for when money got tight helped us not use credit to see us through.
– Being disabled can be expensive: having a doctor fill out my forms just to apply for my benefits was $45 each time. I have great medical insurance but it only pays a portion of my mobility device costs.
– Because we wanted to travel when the kids could be pulled out of school and my mobility was still good, we are frugal in our daily lives but have visited many countries, were able to go to Disney (twice!) and Universal and are able to rent cottages with friends in the summer.

All in all, my FI knowledge, ability to switch into a tight budget, and our savings rate have all contributed to our lifestyle. Between graduating from university & my diagnosis I have worked full-time only about 10 years & the rest were part-time or were the years I was a stay-at-home-parent. We don’t have a basement full of stuff (but if you enjoy that kind of thing, more power to you), we only got a car when the eldest was around 1, we cloth diapered, we reused everything, ate a lot of beans, and didn’t buy a lot of things we didn’t need. But we did want to travel, our kid’s university savings accounts are well-funded and our retirement accounts are doing well. We also have a ton of friends in our community and the kids and the adults all have hobbies that they enjoy doing.

Overall, this is the definition of FI success to me. We don’t live life on autopilot but instead make concentrated decisions of how we want to spend our time & money to live the life we want. It’s part luck, part good choices but also making great friends, having the support of our families, and having fun hobbies to sustain us. We have even loftier goals for the next three years but more on that later!

Posted on

The Three Year Plan

When I was diagnosed everything became about LIVING FOR THE MOMENT. We wanted to do as much as possible while I was still mobile. Since we had not traveled as much as we would have liked we started there. Two years in a row we took whirlwind trips with the kids making sure they had these memories to fall back on should my decline be rapid. I don’t regret the decisions we made & we had the money to cover it so it was a net positive for our family. Two years later and my mobility has only slightly decreased, we are less panicked, and in the midst of the pandemic the smoke has cleared on a lot of our previous behaviours.

Like a lot of people though, we’ve really been able to reflect on things during the pandemic. If there is one thing we’ve become good at seeing, it’s our own patterns of behaviour. Because things have slowed down so significantly we’ve been able to finally see what needs to be changed. One of the things that has really stood out is our feast-or-famine spending style.

When things are going really well at Mr. Tucker’s work his attitude is, “Jeez, I could work here forever!” We tend to let the good times roll & spend a lot more money on extras. Then when he goes through a particularly difficult time at work we remember that if we saved more, he wouldn’t have to work forever. It’s our pattern and it’s been like that for a long time. This feast-or-famine way of managing money has worked because we never overspend but it still has left us spinning our wheels with long-term goals.

So in November we decided to sit down and plan out what we’d like to do & then we came up with a 3-year plan to achieve our goals. Here is what our list looked like:

– Finally do a will and get our estate affairs in order
– Fully fund the kid’s RESPs (Registered Education Savings Program) & buy back the missing years in order to receive the $1000 grant
– Start & catch up with the RDSP (Registered Disability Savings Plan) so to get the full $1000 grant

…and the biggest one of all:

– Live off of my income for everything and put all of Mr. Tucker’s income into his RRSPs (Registered Retirement Savings Plan)

That really is the biggest goal of them all: living on one salary for everything is a huge undertaking for us. It means we are budgeted really tightly down to the dollar with very little wiggle room. It still covers all of our needs (food, shelter, bills), many of our wants (camps, music lessons, entertainment), and all the other savings I mentioned above (and some I didn’t, such as emergency savings). We will still go to the cottage every year on vacation and still keep our hobbies but we will actually have to stop and think of spending now instead of living on autopilot. Spending in one area means that it will have to come from another place so it forces us to make decisions as to what we really want.

So why would we choose to do this? Because if things go well we can pay off our house & Mr. Tucker can retire from paid work if he wants in 3-3.5 years. That’s huge. It doesn’t mean he will retire from paid work, it just gives him the option.

One of the things about being disabled that is always on the forefront of your mind is what your trajectory will be 1, 3, 5 etc…years from now. I don’t know the future but the reality is that every day I have will probably the best day I ever will have. The other reality is that our parents aren’t getting any younger and will probably need more assistance as the years go on. Sure, we have siblings who can help as well but we really didn’t want Mr. Tucker working a high-stress job with long hours, parenting two teenagers, caring for a disabled wife, AND having to go check in on our elderly parents. We wanted to set ourselves up so that if he had to take a leave of absence, he could without having to worry about our finances.

Of course, we don’t expect that our plan won’t be without its hiccoughs but these hiccoughs will happen whether or not we are saving towards our goal. We also fully suspect that we may need to make changes down the line, which is also fine. We are totally flexible and can review how things are going a few months down the road & adjust where necessary. Still, we are both happy to have sorted a lot of our financial life out and are looking forward to seeing how well we can do on our current plan. I will keep you updated!

Posted on

Meal Planning

A interesting video series on inflation from PolicyEd The Numbers Game.

Since reading the Tightwad Gazette books starting when I was 18, I have been a huge fan of Amy Dacyczyn. Most of my financial and housekeeping skills have come from her books and I have read and re-read my copies so often that they are yellowed and falling apart. For the most part, she hasn’t steered me wrong (although, she was wrong about computers not becoming a big deal. No one is perfect!).

Because of this, I have been using “The Pantry Principal” my entire life: buying groceries to replenish my pantry as opposed to making a list of meals and then going out to buy the items on the list. The idea is that you only plan dinner for the next day the night before using anything in your fridge that may go bad. It’s sound logic. The problem is that we ultimately would forget to plan the day before and find ourselves staring at the fridge at 5pm wondering what we could possibly make. Inevitably this led to more take-out or crappy beige food. Food waste became an issue and naturally we were bleeding money.

Conversely, I have a friend who meal plans weekly. She uses the stuff they have on hand and then fills in around the edges with a grocery store run every week. All her take-out is planned and she rarely finds herself at 5pm digging for a frozen pizza. Pre-Covid, this worked especially well because she could see what the activity schedule was for the family and plan easier meals; sometimes it was even PB&J and carrot sticks in the back of the car on the way to hockey practice. But it still wasn’t fast food. She also seems to have a lot less food waste.

Of course, with the pandemic we are trying to limit trips to the store which means having to be better planners. Since we can’t just run out whenever we want, we’ve really tried to reduce our trips to one Costco run (medications & bulk), two produce store runs (fresh fruit and veg), one grocery store run (sauces/grains/milk etc), and one pharmacy run a month. This meant that I needed to work around our shopping schedule.

This past year we started buying local meat in bulk. We also started our first garden and canned a lot of food for the winter. This reminded me that The Tightwad Gazette had a really good inventory system to track garden produce so they wouldn’t eat too much of something and run out before garden season ramped back up again. Using that as a guide, I started tracking all of our freezer & canned goods to make sure we would spread their use to get through until the next bulk order was coming through.

So guided by my freezer and pantry inventory I came up with a plan. Every second Saturday I go through the inventory and plan our meals for the following two weeks. Mr. Tucker hits the produce store and buys all the veggies and fruits we need for that time. It may sound like two weeks is a long time and that food would go bad but not if you plan it right.

The key is to organize meals based on the life of the produce. So the first week may have a lot more salads, bean sprouts, green beans, as well as bananas and berries for snacks. The second week will see more apples, oranges, brassicas and root vegetables on the menu because they don’t go bad as quickly. Planning this way allows you a variety of foods in your diets but without the extra grocery trips.

Of course, the best laid plans means that sometimes we have way too many leftovers that not even lunch the next day will take care of. In that case, we just skip a meal. In fact, we didn’t have a Christmas dinner this year because we had too much food leftover from Réveillon! Every Christmas eve our family does small food (hors d’oeuvres such as mini quiches, sausage rolls etc) and a tourtière. Well, this year we miscalculated and ended up with way more food than we could eat in a night. So the next day Mr. Tucker and I decided to skip the ham dinner we had planned and just eat leftovers. We ended up making our huge meal on the 26th instead. So when that happens, you can just push meals off to the next day. At the end of the two weeks you will end up with a> a brassica which will either keep or that you can freeze, b> a root vegetable which keeps a long time, c> or you just move the last meal from this two week period to the first meal of the next two week period.

I know this sounds like much ado about food but honestly, this has been a game-changer for us. We haven’t eaten out since November, we are never left staring at the fridge wondering what to make, we waste less food, we don’t make unnecessary trips and our grocery bill has gone down. In the end, I needed to realize that even the best ideas from people I trust may not be right for me and my family. I wish I had realized sooner that this was a better way to plan meals. I guess like many things we’ve learned over the past year, it only took a pandemic to make me realize that I needed to switch things up.