2. RICH - when you wake up, you have the freedom to do anything you want to do, and money is no object.

My new favourite lyrics.  Forgive me for saying too much or too little as I challenge myself to live up to them.  It’s a delicate balance.

1. Make a list and stick to it. Lists focus your shopping and are the single best way to save money.
   I strongly prefer to do this, not just to save money, but because grocery shopping is not a pleasurable task for me. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t particularly like it; I do it because it needs doing. A list is a way to know when I’ve done enough shopping. Not only that, making the list at home encourages us to think about what we are going to eat, not only to buy just enough, but also to be sure we plan to eat what we buy. I strongly dislike wasting food by letting it rot. Since we travel so often, we need to be especially careful about this in the 3-4 days before we plan to leave. The fact those who make a list tend to buy fewer impulse items, which helps them spend less is a happy side-effect.
2. Compare unit pricing, not box size. As with good things, good prices sometimes come in small packages.
   Since we shop 2-3 times per week, we tend to buy smaller quantities at a time anyhow, which means I only reach for larger quantities of non-perishable items when the unit price of the larger package is considerably lower. Buying smaller quantities of items means buying them more often, which means storing less at home and more easily taking advantage of deep sales.
3. If you only need a handful of items, use a basket, not a cart. Empty space cries to be filled.
   I like to do even more: we have made the ecologically-minded choice of reusable cloth shopping bags. We take 2-4 bags with us, fill them, then stop. If I can’t carry my groceries around the store, I surely won’t find it easy to carry them home. While I don’t believe that I need to fill empty space in a cart, I do know that I eat all the food in front of me, so I can’t claim to be entirely immune to this psychological phenomenon.
4. If it’s not on your list, don’t pick it up. According to Paco Underhill in Why We Buy: “Virtually all unplanned purchases…come as a result of the shopper seeing, touching, smelling, or tasting something that promises pleasure, if not total fulfillment.”
   While I don’t follow this rule in a draconian fashion, I do strongly question everything we pick up that isn’t on the list. I know this annoys Sarah, and I understand that the question “Do we really need this?” sounds condescending, but the technique works.
5. Shop at the edge of the store. That’s where the healthier, cheaper items hide.
   For me, this is a health-minded choice, rather than a wallet-minded choice. The only items we purchase regularly from the stacks include vegetable broth, canned tuna, turbinado sugar, spices, canned tomatoes for chili, honey, peanut butter, cleaning supplies, storage bags and paper products. We just don’t buy processed snack food or pop anymore, and I don’t miss them.
6. Disavow brand loyalty and swear allegiance to the lowest price.
   This is one area where our desire for good products trumps our desire to save money. If we know the cheaper product is inferior and we care about that, we buy the better product, such as when we spend $15/pound on Kicking Horse Coffee. We also buy local products where we can, which represents a longer-term saving strategy, including Giguere Farms honey (Winnipeg isn’t local, but it’s more local than the US). That said, we are not loyal to brands, but rather loyal to products that give us something great beyond the price. If Kicking Horse Coffee started to suck, we would buy Folgers. If Giguere Farms moved to Montana, we’d buy something else. In all other cases, we tend to go with the lowest-priced product that we don’t know we can enjoy.
7. Consider generics. You usually get the same quality, without the unnecessary branding.
   Since we buy mostly produce, this doesn’t concern us as much as it used to. We do like to buy bread baked in-store.
8. Learn to love coupons. With practice, you can buy almost $150 worth of stuff for $5.
   I’m not a coupon kind of guy, because too often coupons require me to buy products I wouldn’t ordinarily buy. Rather than focusing on coupons, I like to keep my list flexible enough that I can take advantage of sale prices. If we have “berries” on the list, and blackberries are on sale, I might buy more blackberries than raspberries. Perhaps we are missing out on coupons, but given the items we tend to buy, I don’t think the potential savings are anywhere near 97%.
9. Make one big shop, rather than several small ones. You’ll save on gas while inoculating against wasteful spending.
   We save on gas the old-fashioned way: we walk. This means we buy less, get a little more exercise, and think more about what we buy.
10. Buy from bulk bins. Why pay for packaging and marketing when you can reach right in and scoop out exactly what you need?
    We don’t buy much of the stuff you find in bulk bins, but when we want nuts and seeds, we head to the bulk bins.
11. Check your receipt. Don’t let an errant scan ruin your hard work.
    We shop at Safeway, who have a “club card” program, which essentially gives lower prices to anyone willing to fill out an application form for a card. Occasionally the point-of-sale system registers the regular price, rather than the club price. I try to pay attention. Given that we shop more often and buy less stuff, I find it relatively easy to remember the low Club prices and notice when the point-of-sale system has the wrong price. It’s harder to do that when you buy $250 worth of groceries at once. We buy less, we spend less on errant prices.
12. Shop alone. Science shows that we spend more when we’re with company.
    Sarah and I go to the store together, but shop separately: I take half the list, and she takes the other half. I find we spend less time in the store that way.
13. Track your spending so you can see what’s eating your money. Committed receipt hawks can spot price cycles to help guide their shopping.
    We have tracked all our spending at points in the past, per the recommendation of the classic Your Money or Your Life. We haven’t done this recently, mostly because we have kept our spending well under control the past year. We might benefit from doing this again, especially since we travel so much and we might find it easy to spend “in vacation mode” while on the road, even though when I work, we don’t exacly find ourselves on vacation!
14. Eat a meal before shopping. Shopping on a full stomach tamps down impulse spending and keeps you focused on your list.
    I have never been concerned about this. If anything, when I’m hungry, I want to buy exactly those things I want to eat right now, then leave the store. This helps me buy less, not more.
15. Shop without a car. Nothing limits spending like knowing you’ll have to carry your goods home.
    I find it sad that they have this tip last. I would put it first. Nothing limits spending in general like not having tens cubic meters of space to put all the crap you might buy, groceries or otherwise.

I hope you have found this useful. Take care, and I wish you efficient shopping!

Although they may be neither popular, nor well known, there are alternatives to the two major housing options of “buy” vs. “rent.”  It seems like every day I personally vacillate between wanting to live in a Parisian apartment overlooking local markets and wanting to live on a lakefront, almost cottage-y property.  In the first case, we’d walk everywhere we needed to go and in the second case we’d generate our own electricity and grow some of our own food.  I just can’t decide whether I want to live with people or get the heck away from them.

We’ll likely be where we are for some time to come, but Dauphin was always a calculated, strategic move.  So far it has pretty much worked according to plan.  We’re closing on houses #8 and #9 on August 1, and our rental income will provide more than we need to live comfortably there.  And for the total cost of all 9 houses we’ve purchased, we still would have been only able to buy the most entry-level of entry-level homes in Toronto. (And, that would be with us paying for the privilege of ownership, not being paid enough that we don’t have to work!)

As I said to Joe last night, although yes, we can consider ourselves “retired” from traditional careers, our “job” right now is to figure out where we really want to live next and how we will be able to afford it.  It’s not as easy as you might think, and you really do need to be semi-retired before you can tackle that task; you can’t know what you really want out of living when don’t yet have the freedom to just “live.”

If I were still tutoring, I would be too busy and preoccupied to really think about what I wanted out of a house, community or local environment.  How was I to know, for example, that I really don’t mind “cooking*” when my previous life was arranged in such a way that preparing food was nothing but a huge inconvenience?  When I had taken probably less than a dozen baths in my whole adult life (and had never seen Joe take a single one!), how was I to know that we would treasure our jacuzzi tub?  There is a lot you discover about yourself when you stop “working” and start doing what might be work for some, but is really just an activity for you.

That’s why I don’t think of it as a “failure” that Dauphin won’t be the place we live for the next 30 years.  Rather, moving somewhere that is decidedly not our retirement paradise was the smartest thing we ever did:

• We had no illusions or unrealistic expectations of the perfect life.  (It was a stop along the way - another phase of the plan.)
• We chose to move solely based on finances (including of course our required amenities and necessities) so there is less of an emotional attachment to where we live.  (Leaving Toronto was emotionally so much tougher than leaving Dauphin will ever be.)
• We put ourselves in the best position to figure out what we really wanted, and didn’t assume we already knew what that was. (How could “Rat Race Rainsbergers” even pretend to know what “Retired Rainsbergers” want or need out of life?)
• Although it wasn’t part of the original plan, travel is such a huge part of our lives that we can somewhat experience and compare locations.  Two weeks ago we were in Ireland and I’m writing this now from Malvern, PA. In August and September alone we’re projected to be in Dauphin, Winnipeg, Toronto, Oshawa, “the cottage,” Brampton, Niagara Falls (ON and NY), Chicago, Turkey, the Netherlands and Costa Rica. If we can’t find something we like, it sure isn’t from a lack of trying!

And, if home ownership in Dauphin means we get to travel like this, then maybe there’s even something to be said for not doing too much of your “living” where you live!

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* - I still hate “cooking” and will refuse to prepare anything that involves the actual cooking of meat. And, much fewer of our meals are actually “cooked” now since we’ve been eating a lot raw. So, I use the word cooking to mean “making meals.” But, what I have discovered is that I like the act of chopping vegetables, I don’t mind boiling things into a soup and as long as Joe’s not sick of honey-mustard, I’m quite happy to make our own salad dressing.

I don’t listen to many live recordings of artists, but for the last 3 weeks or so I’ve been listening almost exclusively to the “Double Dippers” show from the first night of the cruise. It was far and away the best part of the cruise for me, and several cruisers agree that this particular show was the best performance of the entire cruise.

Leave it to me to relate everything back to education, but that amazing concert was the musical equivalent of a rockin’ tutoring session. Here’s why the show was the ultimate concert going experience, and why tutoring is the ultimate educational experience:

The audience planned the show

Before the concert started, slips of paper were distributed so people could request the songs they wanted to hear. During the show, band members took turns drawing random songs out of a bucket.

That’s often how I describe tutoring. Substitute “open a textbook to any page” for “drawing a song out of a bucket” and that’s how tutors work. Unlike traditional classroom teaching, a tutoring session is student-led: the hour is driven by the student’s specific needs and goals. The result is an extremely personalized experience where no question is off-limits.

The Double Dippers concert allowed devoted fans to choose some of the more obscure songs that aren’t guaranteed to be played at a standard concert. Although our row wasn’t given request slips, others in the audience had the good sense to request Blame it on Me, Jane, Break Your Heart and yes, even Another Postcard. (I swear, it wasn’t me but I can’t say I’m disappointed!) The result was a concert lineup that I don’t think anyone could have planned in their wildest dreams. Most importantly, it was highly relevant to the audience.

The performers relied on their experience and musicianship rather than a plan or agenda

When you don’t know which songs to expect and have to be prepared to “go with the flow,” the truly talented shine. It could be a song that hasn’t been played live in years, or a song written once to go straight to recording (*cough* Big Bang Theory *cough*) or a song that predates some of the band members . . . spontaneity reveals character, and as someone once wrote about … let’s say event planning, “It’s not what you’re sure of / It’s what you don’t know.”

This concert format revealed the band’s human side and brought a certain lightness to the event. No one cared whether we had to wait a few extra minutes for Ed to tune yet another guitar. It gave the audience a chance to revel in the afterglow of the song they’d just heard and also time to get sufficiently excited for the next song.

Similarly, tutoring is a highly human (and humane) form of interaction. I would often get comments from my staff about the raucous laughter that always seemed to be clearly audible, even through my closed door, while I was tutoring. There’s a certain intimacy and casualness to sitting down, one-on-one that can make you forget that you’re screwed for tomorrow’s calculus test and allow you to calmly focus on the task at hand.

Your students also tend to be pretty forgiving if you have to take a couple of stabs at a question before you find a clean, elegant way to work it out. If we haven’t seen something in a while and you spring it on us out of the blue, sometimes we just need to gather our thoughts for a few minutes. Not only are students forgiving, but many times they are quite relieved to learn that their tutor isn’t some calculating machine, or that it really is a hard question. They generally don’t mind if the productivity seems to slow for a bit. If they’re not the type to thoroughly enjoy working through a problem with you, then they’re probably the type who are more than happy to “zone out” for a few minutes and completely don’t mind the downtime!

The musicians knew they were respected and appreciated, even admired and loved

I can’t imagine a “safer” environment for BNL to play than to a roomful of people on their second cruise with them. If ever the band felt comfortable trying new things, or just being themselves, that would have been the time for it! Short of walking out there and being complete jerks, BNL could have done no wrong that night.

And, I have to admit that being a tutor is pretty darn cool when parents and students think the world of you. You can’t get cocky about it (at least you shouldn’t) but as much as confidence is important for students, it’s important for instructors, too. One thing that can completely suck the joy out of teaching is looking into the face of a student (or worse, sea of students) who just don’t care — about you, about the math, about anything at that moment. It can really put you off your game.

Having the respect of your students (even if it’s not adoration and worship!) allows you to focus on the task at hand and put all your energy into your teaching and communication skills. You know that your audience is receptive and willing and you don’t have anything to “prove” to your student first and you don’t have any barriers to break through before your message can be heard.

I used to say I had the sweetest job in the world. All I had to do was hang out with teens and do math! I did a little more than that, but essentially I had the pleasure and honour of being the person that kids went to for help. All I had to do was respond.

It may not sound like much when you distill it down to its core element, and really, all I did was give them my time to be used however they saw fit. That’s exactly what the Double Dippers show was: BNL simply gave us their time and allowed us to control the puppet strings for a few hours.

One could argue, “They didn’t even put the time or effort into planning something for you. They just showed up and thought that would be enough.” But, isn’t that what all of us really want: for people we respect and admire to simply make time for us?

We didn’t get a canned performance, I like to think, because they respected us more than that. They had confidence in their ability to provide something of quality just by being there because they’re just that good. They also had confidence in the fans to direct the course of the evening, and the result was a set list from heaven.

This is what happens when mutual respect is assumed and assured. I don’t think all my students were “adoring fans,” though very many of them were, I have to say. But, they all knew that I was passionate about creating time personalized exclusively for them, that they called the shots and that no matter what might happen, at least I was “serving up quality.”

I couldn’t think of any better way to treat my students, and it was such an overwhelmingly emotional experience to be on the receiving end for once, and treated like that by BNL. I think now I have a better idea of why the kids kept coming back, and I can’t wait for Ships and Dip V, the re-dippening!

(It’s not too late to join us, either! Hint, hint!)

Consider an ordinary-looking receipt. I have to process this for my corporate income taxes. I use QuickBooks Pro to do my books, although I imagine this problem exists in all major book-keeping software. I have to enter a tax code for this transaction in order to get the input tax credit (ITC) related to the GST I paid which, I should mention, comes to $2.49. Look at how hard I have to work for my $2.49.

First, I happily choose tax code “S” for standard tax rate (6% GST at the time, 8% GST in Ontario, where this meal was purchased), then happily enter the net amount of $46.30 into QuickBooks. I see that the total is not the $52.10 I expect, but rather $52.78. Whence the extra 68 cents? Not too bad yet, since this pretty common: some items are only taxed at GST, others not at all, and usually it’s clear what’s what. I fiddle for 10 minutes or so before recalling algebra and solving the following system of equations. (Yep!)

Let x be the amount of the bill attracting only GST, and let y be the amount attracting GST and PST.

x + y = 46.30; 0.06x + 0.14y = 5.80

I solve this, but get the ugly y = $37.775, and that can’t be. Perhaps part of the bill attracts no tax at all. Well, 5.80 / 0.14 = $41.43, roughly speaking. That means $4.87 is not subject to tax at all. But what the hell comes to $4.87 on the cheque?!

Oh wait, there’s a .29, another .29 and a third .29, which I know add to .87. Aha! I can’t believe it: the tomato, jalapeño and asparagus do not attract tax because they are fresh produce!

I’m sorry folks, but this is insane. There is no way Eggspectation is doing this correctly. If that were the case, Pizza receipts would require a mathematics degree to figure out, since they use fresh produce (one hopes) in their food, too. Could you imagine if a restaurant itemized your salad and charged you taxes only on the (processed) dressing?!

Whether Eggspectation is computing their taxes correctly or not, shame on Canada for having sales tax rules with the potential to create this situation at all. It’s ridiculous. It wastes time for vendors, book-keepers, tax collectors… sure, it fuels the bureaucracy and gives civil servants jobs, but that’s not why I pay taxes, and I certainly didn’t want to pay for an absurd system like this!

So that’s why I long to live in Andorra, where at least there is almost no income tax. I don’t know about their sales taxes, though… that bears another look. To the point, though, it’s the complexity of the tax system I want to avoid. If we paid a flat sales tax on everything and a flat income tax, then I would be much happier. Happy enough perhaps not to need to leave Canada.

Our last dwelling in Toronto was, we believe, the last house in Toronto proper to have a septic tank. Being a nearly 100-year-old farmhouse, that might not come as a surprise, but being in Toronto, it shocked us. Sadly, we discovered a, let’s say, flow problem with the tank the hard way. It took too much time and too many of someone else’s dollars (another reason to rent in an expensive city) to fix that problem, but it was fixed long enough for us to push the image out of our minds of a sewage marsh at our front door. Of course, the septic tank connection was replaced with what we understand is an entirely illegal hookup to the city’s storm drain, but frankly, that was never our problem.

Backing up computer systems, though, is a pleasure. It is the primary reason I recommend Mac computers to my friends and family. (Really!) Mac OS X makes disaster recovery routine by minimizing down time when disaster strikes. I have yet to see a backup/restore utility on the Windows platform that allows me to resume working within 5 minutes after a serious hard disk failure. Yes: 5 minutes. At the risk of boring you with geeky details, the key point is that when I back up my computer to an external hard disk (USB or Firewire, it works the same), I make the backup “bootable”. This means that my computer can’t tell the difference between booting from its internal hard disk and an external one. What this really means is that since I have nightly backups, when my internal hard disk fails, I simply boot to the external disk, losing on average half a day’s work, then continue what I was doing. When I can take a suitable break, I survey the damage, either reformat or replace my internal hard disk, then (and this is my favourite part) back up the external hard disk to my shiny new internal hard disk. There is no “restore” in this scenario, only backup, and it’s just a question of which direction. I can even add a second external hard disk while my internal one is out of service and backup external disk 1 to external disk 2 so that I always have a backup to work from. It works beautifully for a few reasons: even a disaster means I can resume working in 5 minutes, I can keep working while I’m waiting to replace my failed disk, and it’s easy to move data onto the new disk when it’s ready. I can even just wait until the next nightly backup at around 1.00 AM. Let me emphasize that I have never seen a Windows backup/restore platform allow me such peace of mind. I used to lose on average two full days restoring from a backup on Windows, including buying the replacement hard disk, reinstalling the operating system and figuring out which files to restore and not to restore. Disaster recovery is routine with a Mac as long as you’re willing to pay about $250+ extra for an external hard disk and a copy of SuperDuper!

That post was prompted by the attempted railroading of our beloved Zenn car by various levels of government.

Unlike the contradiction in my volunteer work for the “Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents” (being neither a parent nor currently residing in Ontario), the contradiction in our support for ZennMotors (as a car-less and license-less couple) is a little more complicated.

I’ve always, ultimately, enjoyed the fact that we couldn’t own a car even if we wanted to. (You know, the whole pesky not being legally allowed to drive, and all.) I do think that some of the hype around alternative fuels, alternative transportation and alternative energy hides the root problem that too many of us just plain use too much.

Being car-free is a statement in and of itself. So, how do I reconcile that with the fact that it looks like we’re finally going to buy a car?

On an individual level, there’s little doubt that NOT owning a car is better for the environment than owning a car — any car, even the kick ass cityZENN that we’ll buy in Fall 2009 (or whenever it finally does roll off the line).

Looking at the bigger picture, though, I can’t help but think that owning this car might be the best thing to do.

It would be unrealistic of me to think that large sections of the population are going to go completely car-less, as we have always been. Our car-less lifestyle in which we

• (a) use fewer resources
• (b) plan every shopping trip very carefully and never just “run out for one thing” and come home with a dozen things we didn’t really need
• (c) generally never buy more than we can carry
• (d) use public transportation guilt-free knowing that we can BOTH sleep, read or just generally tune out
• (e) never worry about insurance or the rising costs of gas
• etc. etc. etc.

. . . is almost always met with a cute “oh that’s quaint” pat on the head. “But we could never do that.”
But, when we tell people about the cityZENN, everyone’s excited! (Yes, we’ve discovered that the company is not (yet) publicly traded because several people have even wondered about buying up stock in the car, in addition to the car itself.)

And, although we live a car-less lifestyle (in that we deprive ourselves of ownership) it’s not entirely accurate to say we live a car-free lifestyle. We do use cabs and take rides from others when the situation arises.

While we have long since determined that a taxi lifestyle beats car ownership in the personal finance arena, the truth is that most of the taxis we take are gas guzzlers. (Props to the ‘peg for having hybrid taxi fleets — more often than not our Winnipeg taxis are hybrids, but we’ve yet to take one anywhere else.)

Our friends and family haven’t crossed the chasm into hybrid ownership. (Unless they’re just saving the “good” car for special occasions!) So, our car experiences aren’t particularly environmentally-friendly; they’re just minimized in frequency.

I have to think that owning a cityZENN for those situations might just tip the scales environmentally. I think, come 2010, our goal should no longer be, “I never want to pay for gas,” but instead, “I never want to ride in a car that uses gas.”

We’re past the stage where we finances have to be the primary concern. Although, we can never forget that it was a lack of car ownership (and similar financial thinking) that helped us achieve our current financial position.

I think it’s our responsibility to support this revolutionary product, this Canadian company and champion the cityZENN. Although it might seem like a step backwards for us personally, I think the effect is negated by the huge step forward this car would be for others.

So, tax-time permitting, next week we write the Manitoba equivalent of the G1 driver’s license!

And Dad can take Joe on driving lessons in Oshawa at the end of the month.

Fasten your seatbelts . . .

I’ve gotta say, this does hit very close to home (emphasis mine):

“. . . conservatives are likely to support a ban on same-sex marriage in the interests of preserving traditional order, while liberals are likely to favor allowing same-sex marriage in the interest of guaranteeing equality under the law. Libertarians are likely to disagree with the notion of government-sanctioned marriage itself. Specifically, they would deny that the government deserves any role in marriage other than enforcing whatever legal contract people choose to enter, and to oppose the various additional rights currently granted to married people (married couples could make the property pool in their own contract).”

And they say romance is dead!