What I'm Doing Now

Ok, so I've been off grid for a while.

Doing lots of writing and thinking about how I can pay for writing.

I finally decided to turn a sort-of hobby into my career. I've launched a home staging and design business:
Simplified Homes

I have high hopes for this!

Demon coffee

I'm not sure when I got it into my head that I wanted to kick caffeine. But it was at least a month ago. And I thought, "Oh, I'll wait until I move and get settled". So Sunday I thought to myself, this is the time, since I am moved in and more or less settled. I assumed it would not be that bad, since I only have a couple of cups of coffee a day, in the morning.

Day 1 - Monday. Everything seemed fine. 'HA! This will be easy!' I think. Foolish me.
Day 2 - Tuesday. Still Ok, but I feel a bit sleepy in the afternoon. Suddenly at around 10 pm I get a bad headache. Still, I sleep really well, and think 'If this is the worst of it, I'm set'.
Day 3 - Wednesday. I feel like a bucket of crap. I sleepwalk through the day, fighting the headache. I take Ibupofen, which does not work, because the codeine tablets also have caffeine in them. I give up and go to bed at 10 pm.
Day 4 - Thursday. (Today). Dear God, I feel like a truck has hit me. Seriously. I slept for 9 hours straight, have a blinding headache, and could easily go back to bed. But my parents are coming here today, and we have plans! I don't want to be a zombie today!

So.... I gave in. Yes, I am having coffee. I will try to stop again on the weekend.

Sigh.

All moved in

I know I said I'd post regularly, but moving was pretty all-encompasing. Here's what's happened in the last 2 weeks!

I packed up the old house. I purged, and purged and purged. But you know what? I still moved WAY too much stuff. Seriously. How did this happen? I guess 10 years of having more storage space than living space really allowed me to indulge my inner pack rat. The main house was OK, but the basement... Sigh.

I moved in to the new place in Comox Oct. 7. The move went OK. The new house had some issues, like the fact that the lighting is woefully inadequate at best. Also, there were inexplicably no towel bars in the bathrooom. None. What did the previous tenant do? Quite curious. To their credit, my landlords fixed the situation. I have 2 new towel racks in the bathroom, and the husband, who is an electrician, came and installed 3 pot lights in the kitchen. So it's all fine.

Anyway, after one day in Comox, I turned around and headed to Cowichan Bay for Thanksgiving. Saturday we went down to Victoria, to go to the Belfry theater. (I have seasons tickets with my parents.) Then on Monday AM, I packed up the cat, and we went home to Comox.

Then, I turned around and headed to Victoria on Tuesday. I had to meet with the lawyer to finalize the sale, and also to do the final house cleanup. By the time I got home to Comox on Tuesday night I was pretty much a basket case. More than 1000km in a week - too much for me!

My poor cat was pretty stressed by all this. When she was really young we moved 3 times, but now she's lived most of her life on Kings Rd. She's settling in now.

On the money front, I am rich! No, not really. Although the temptation to spend some of this money is pretty strong. I need to invest it as soon as possible! I do have to put some money into my truck though. I need new tires pretty badly.

Exciting stuff, I know.

Another reason to leave Victoria - the City government

I live (for now) in the City of Victoria proper, not Saanich or Oak Bay. When I bought this house in 2001, my property taxes that year were $1100. (I looked it up in Quicken.) This year? $2500. So in nine years, my taxes have considerably more than doubled. Using 3% inflation as a guide, you would expect them to be around $1440. So where does all the increase go? Frankly I have no idea. Let's look at what they are not doing:

• increasing police presence to deal with the homelessness and blatant drug abuse on downtown city streets
• providing extra funding for schools (SD61 is shutting schools down. Mind you the population of school-age children has dropped, but still.)
• developing comprehensive emergency plans
• channeling money into parks
• increasing social housing funding

So, where does the money go? Well, city staff for one. Sam Williams from Focus Online has the rage-inducing details:

The City’s 2009 report showed the number of City Hall staffers making more than $100,000 a year jumped from 15 in 2008 to 50 in 2009. According to Statistics Canada (2006) only 4 percent of Canadians have annual income greater than $100,000.

City Manager Gail Stephens topped the list with remuneration of $186,418.09 and expenses of $168,443.94. The City’s Director of Communications, Katie Josephson ($115,369.52) said Stephen’s high expenses “included transition costs for moving to Victoria [from Calgary] that included losses on [her] house sale” as well as “moving expenses, travel and professional dues.”

Second-highest paid City staffer is Director of Parks, Recreation and Culture Kate Friars, whose remuneration of $166,503.58 was an athletic jump of 25 percent from her remuneration in 2008. Other notable leapers were Peter Sparanese ($161,051.27), who spent 2009 as Director of Engineering, and Mike Lai ($128,347.14), who spent 2009 as the Johnson Street Bridge project manager and Assistant Director of Transportation and Parking Services. Both Lai’s and Sparanese’s remuneration increased by roughly 20 percent in 2009.

The report also shows that remuneration to the mayor and councillors rose dramatically after councillors (excepting Geoff Young and Chris Coleman) voted soon after the November 2008 civic election to hike their pay. In 2008, then-Mayor Lowe’s remuneration and expenses totalled $63,139.04. The Public Bodies Report shows Mayor Fortin received $106,305.60 in remuneration and expenses in 2009. Councillor’s remuneration jumped from approximately $19,000 in 2008 to $40,000 in 2009.

Let's leave aside the question of why in hell I should have for someone's house losing value. No, the best part?  Most of these people live in Saanich.

But really what bugs me is how the Johnson St. Bridge is being dealt with. Sam Williams has been all over this since earlier this year. There are a bunch of truly excellent articles on that site that are in the PDF editions of the magazine. For September though, he goes all the way back to the beginning. According to documents Williams acquired through FOI requests, the estimate for bridge rehabilitation was originally $8.6 million, way back in 2008. Yeah, you read that right. So how is it now $80 million?

Different engineer? No actually, the same person (Dr Joost Meyboom) was at Delcan, who did the original report, and is now with MMM, who the City has chosen to do the work. 


Read the whole thing, as they say. 


The upside is that I won't have to pay for it. Except they are getting federal money. Sigh. 

Relief

Some of you wondered why I decided to sell and move so abruptly. Well, the truth is the idea had been percolating for a long while. And then in August, I woke up to the economic situation. I believe house prices in Victoria (not to mention Canada), are heading south sharply, and will likely stay there a long while. Part of it has been looking at the indicators - eerily similar to those in the US before the housing crash. Levels of indebtedness, artificially low interest rates, changing demographics. All these feed into the bigger picture.

So I figured that if I was going to sell, and seriously extract money from the house, it had to be pretty much now. I worked like MAD PERSON for 3 weeks in August and September to get everything ready so I could be on the market by September 10. (And my Mom worked pretty hard too!) I worked with the Realtor to set a fairly aggressive price, one that would generate significant interest. And boy, did it pay off. Within hours of being on the market on the Friday there were viewings booked. By end of day Saturday, there were 3 offers on the table. I accepted one of them with the shortest condition completion date. A few short days later, the inspection was done, and all the subjects were removed. SOLD

And just in time too - according to House Hunt Victoria (which I have been following for a while), September is shaping up to be brutal for real estate in this city.

I know several people think I should have priced it higher. But what if it didn't sell? I needed someone to fall in love with it hard, and get carried away. Which is exactly what happened. Now, I didn't sell a lemon. This is a fantastic house. I just suspect that in 2 years they will regret paying $469,000 for a 2-bedroom home. Possibly sooner...

Hmm, I hope they don't stumble across this post, or House Hunt Victoria in the next 2 weeks! The sale is unconditional, but anything is possible.

Wait Times. Or, BC Hydro, you suck

One of the irritating things about moving is that you actually have to talk to your service providers. I thought I could avoid this, using online services as much as possible.

FAIL.

Starting with BC Hydro. I get my bills electronically, so I logged into my account to have a look. From the FAQ, it seemed very clear that there was no such thing as "moving". The account is tied to the house. You have to open one account, and close another. Given the service overlap that will be required, that seemed pretty reasonable, so I clicked the link for opening a new account. There was an option for existing/previous customers to use information already on hand for credit-worthyiness etc. I finished the application, and was returned to a (different) 'main' page. Where there was a link for moving your service to a new address, as distinct from opening a completely separate account. Sigh. So I filled that out, knowing that there was another request already open.

Then, I decided I should probably give them a call, not trusting that they would call me if there was any confusion.

First thing, I got all the way through the menu structure, and the system hung up on me. Rinse and repeat, 3 more times. Awesome. I finally got to a point where it put me on hold. Progress! Then I waited for 25 minutes. Finally a CS rep got on the line, and basically told me I was an idiot. Granted, I said, but can we put a note on file that I didn't actually mean to open the new account twice? No, they have no such capability. It would take 'days' apparently for the requests (submitted online) to even show up in the system.

Will they call me when they notice there are two requests? Of course. (HA)

Total time invested? Over an hour. We'll see if this works...

Lord of the Rings rer-ead

I've been plugging my way through Tor.com's Lord of the Rings re-read over the last few weeks. (Warning! Time suck! Seriously!)

Since I finished school, I haven't really read in a scholarly way at all. Not that I don't think about the themes or topics of what I'm reading, but I hardly ever think of the mechanics. Now that I'm trying to write, I'm thinking about that a lot more. Or trying to anyway. How is this passage structured? What language choices is the author making? etc.

The Lord of the Rings re-read is talking a lot about structure, pacing, character motivations etc. It's interesting for me, but I think it would be interesting in general. Of course, such a project only works for books that you are completely familiar with. I'm not sure how many times I've read the LOTR, but clearly it's enough for me to follow along completely without re-reading the books myself as I go.

Tiny houses

I've been talking for quite a while about tiny houses. So part of the medium to long-term goal here is to wait for the real estate market to settle a bit, and then buy some land with cash.

I could do that now, but I want to a) make sure the Comox valley is where I really want to be, and b) wait for prices to drop, which I'm pretty sure they will. Also, c) I'm not ready to build, tiny or otherwise.

As some of you know ;), I've been interested for quite a while in the Tumbleweed Tiny House company. I'm not sure I could go as low as 65 sq ft, but it's certainly inspirational! I think more likely I would build something in the neighbourhood of 500 sq ft, like this one. They estimate building costs (in California) to be between $35k and $42k, so that's a good starting point from a planning perspective.

If all goes well this should be possible in 2-3 years.

Money etc.

One of the things I have to do for this move is think hard about where my money is going to be parked. From the house sale, I will have a large-ish wad of cash. I will make a one-time RRSP top up, and then probably open both a non-RRSP brokerage account, and also a TFSA. (Yes, I should have opened one already. Whatever.) This post will capture some of my thinking about where I should put my money, and what to do with it.

Main Banking
I'm also going to have to move my primary chequing account. For 5 years I've had a Manulife One account instead of a traditional mortgage. It's been great, but since the whole point of the account is that its tied to a house, I won't be able to keep it open after October 14 when the house clears.

I also have a "back-up" chequing account at Coast Capital Savings. There are no fees, so I've kept it since I opened the Manulife account. It used to be my primary, and I have no problems with CC's service. They don't have any branches in Comox though, so it would effectively be a virtual account.  Closest actual branch will be Nanaimo, which is around 1.5 hrs away. That isn't a big issue for me, I think, since I will be visiting my parents in Cowichan Bay, and also friends in Victoria on a semi-regular basis. I don't need to go into a branch very often, so I will probably keep this account.

Since I have ING Savings Accounts, I opened a Thrive chequing account as part of their preview. It seems pretty good, and they actually pay interest on balances. But the show stopper for me is that there is no way to get transaction data out of ING and into Quicken, or one of the online services. I've been tracking every cent in Quicken for 17 years now, so that's a big issue for me. I usually enter savings account transactions manually, but that would be a serious pain for a primary chequing account. I looked into PC Financial as well, but I don't see any advantages over Coast Capital.

Verdict - Coast Capital as primary account


Investments
My self-directed RRSP is with Scotia iTrade (formerly E-Trade). I've been with them for quite a while.
5K will go immediately into a TFSA, but where? I have an ING Savings account, but I don't want to open a TFSA account with them, as the interest is too low. I looked at a few other discount brokers, but I'm reasonably happy with iTrade. I would like it if they allowed transaction export to Quicken, but I can't tell other brokerages allow this. iTrade does link with Yodlee, so I can see the transactions that way. (For now, at least.)

Verdict - Open iTrade TFSA
 - Open iTrade Cash Brokerage account

I plan to manage my investments far more actively than I have been over the last few years. I'm not doing too badly in my RRSP, I'm still well up for the year, and about flat over the last 3 years, which seems OK compared to the market.

I will post a portfolio analysis monthly, with percentage (not dollar) amounts. Should be useful as an archive.

Comox bound

Right, so packing is underway for the big move to Comox. My plan is to live a more minimalist life. I think I've been carrying around a lot of stuff.

This week - getting books down by at least half. Eek.