Not To Be Trusted With Knives

I think I’m in love with hot yoga. I mean, it’s only been four days since I started, so we are still in that “honeymoon phase” and maybe I’m willing to overlook hot yoga’s short comings, like how I have to get up at 5 a.m. to be there for the 6 a.m. practice, which is the most convenient one because I can do it before wrok. But seriously, four days in and I feel like I can already feel a difference in my muscle tone¹. It’s also helped me to see which of my muscles are tightest and need the most stretchy goodness and I seriously need the work on balance!  Plus, I absolutely love the heat – you are just dripping with sweat throughout and by the end of the practice, your clothes are soaked right through, just as much as if you’d jumped into a pool! Also, there’s the mental benefits of yoga, like just taking the time to still the mind.  Oh yes, hot yoga has everything!

Except, of course, that while my 30 days for $30 Groupon was a good deal, the cost of hot yoga is rather unaffordable. The usual price for 30 days of hot yoga at the place I’m going to (Westcoast Hot Yoga in Surrey) is $150. If you sign up for a whole year, you can get it for $980. That’s not chump change. I already spend about that much on hockey in a year and it’s hard to justify doubling my exercise budget!  Especially knowing that I wouldn’t be able to keep up a yoga-every-single-day habit, as I’ll want to get back to running after this little 30 days of yoga reprieve and I do play hockey one or two times per week. This got me thinking about Darren’s recent post on Groupon – and I quote:

“Buying Groupon deals provides a way for middle-class people to scratch an upper-class itch.”

Since I’ve been going to the before work practice, I’ve been bringing my clothes and makeup to the yoga studio so that I can shower and get ready for work there², and in doing so I’ve been chatting with the others who stick around to get ready for work³. So far I’ve chatted with – and I’m not making this up – a doctor, a lawyer, and a wealth manager. Seriously.

So, while I love my hot yoga so far, I think I’m in it for a good time, not a long time. After my 30 days are up, I’ll probably switch to just doing yoga at home, where it is a nice and free⁴, and maybe just pop into a hot yoga session once in a while as a treat. You know, to scratch that upper class itch.

1. of course, I may just be delirious from all the dehydration and exhaustion [↩]
2. side benefit to early morning yoga: it’s made me become way more organized – ensuring I have my lunch and other necessities for the day packed and ready to head out the door. I even planned out my outfits for every day this week on the weekend so I wouldn’t have to think about it when I’m packing my yoga bag [↩]
3. a lot people just head home to shower, but for me it’s more convenient to do it at the studio and head right in to work [↩]
4. and my living room is big enough to be a yoga studio anyway! [↩]

Tags: exercise, Groupon, health, hot yoga, physical activity, rampant consumerism, yoga

Beth can’t come to the blog right now because she’s in a sugar coma, having discovered a store in Surrey that sells vegetarian marshmallows. Let me repeat that: Beth found a store that sells freaking vegetarian freaking marsh- freaking -mallows!!

For the uninitiated, you may want to read the blog posted entitled “The Tale of the “Vegetarian” Marshmallow” for the 411 on why the finding of vegetarian marshmallows is so important!

Anyway, Beth found said marshmallows at The Organic Grocer, a little store that is located about 30 seconds from her office. To which she has been many times and never ever ever ever noticed that they sold pure heaven in vegetarian marshmallow form. She was actually there on a hunt for vanilla beans, since Surrey, in addition to hating peanuts, hates bulk food stores. Seriously, a city of nearly half a million people, and no bulk food stores? What gives, Surrey? Anyway, she went to the Organic Grocer to find her some vanilla beans and much to her delight, she found the vanilla beans AND the veggie marshmallows!

And to add the cherry on top, Beth also got an email notifying her that she could have an ING Thrive chequing account! Which made it funny when her landlord dropped off her mail and the PC Financial cheques she’d ordered in August finally arrived – just in time for her to not want them anymore, because she’s going to go with the ING Chequing account instead!

Also, she started the first day of her 30 days of hot yoga from her Groupon. All in all, it was double rainbows all the way today. All the way.

Tags: chequing accounts, finances, food, geek, Geekery, hot yoga, Organic Grocer, rampant consumerism, vegetarian marshmallows, vegetarianism

So lately I’ve been reading a fair bit about the real estate market. As a kid, I was brought up to believe that when you grow up, you buy a house – after all, it makes more sense for the money you spend on housing to go into an asset you will own, as opposed to going into someone else’s pocket, right? I was also brought up to believe that education was very important and so I spent the first eleven years of my adult life pursuing that¹. And the idea of buying real estate never even entered into the realm of possibility in those years, as I barely had enough combining jobs, scholarships, bursaries, and student loans to get by, let alone even think about investing in anything. And since I graduated, my financial focus has mainly been on repaying my crushing student loan debt and trying to build some semblance of an RRSP/pension – and, in the last two years, putting money into my Tax-Free Savings Account.  And though I’ve been pretty good at finding cheap rent, it’s always in the back of my mind that “you are putting money in someone else’s pocket!”  Hence, the thinking about, and reading about, the real estate market.

I mean, I knew that the prices of homes in Vancouver are absolutely nuts, but when I started to read more about it, I was surprised to learn how truly, ridiculously, extremely nuts they are.  A general rule for “affordable housing” is that your housing costs (including taxes and insurance) shouldn’t be more than 30% of your gross income. For example, if you make $50,000 per year, you shouldn’t spent more than $15,000 on your mortgage, property taxes, and insurance. Another way of looking at it is that, to be affordable, houses shouldn’t cost more than three times your annual salary². Again, if you made $50K per year, your house shouldn’t cost more than $150K. And the thought of a $150K home anywhere near the Vancouver Lower Mainland is laughable. Even our shoebox-sized condos cost double that! Personally, I make more than $50K, especially when I have teaching gigs and contract work on top of my annual salary, and there’s no way I could find a home in this area that costs less than three times my annual income (and that’s not even counting my $1000/month student loans payments thrown into the mix).

And it’s not just me. Over on the Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive blog (which I’ve been following for a little while), they posted a couple of graphs that illustrate the insanity of the market. This one illustrates exactly what I’m talking about:

Dashed lines = salaries (in % increase) and solid lines = home prices (also in % increase).  It doesn’t take a statistician to see that home prices have shot up dramatically compared to income. According to Stats Canada, the median family income in Vancouver in 2007³ was $66,330.  That’s *family* income, not individual salaries.  And according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, the “benchmark” price for a property⁴ in Greater Vancouver is ~$577,000. The benchmark price for a detached home is just less than $800,000, and the benchmark price for an apartment is ~$386,000.  So we are talking about nearly 9 times the median annual salary to buy a “typical” home, and 12 times to buy a typical detached house. Even to buy just an apartment, it’s almost 6 times the annual median salary – twice as much as an “affordable” home should cost.  Ouch.

And it’s this crazy house price-to-salary ratio that have people talking about a housing bubble, poised to burst. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives recently issued a report that Canada is in the middle of a housing bubble. Then the C.D. Howe Institute issued a report that says the opposite⁵.  Though I’m not an economist by any stretch, I just look at these numbers and wonder how on earth people are buying houses?  Of course, low interest rates on mortgages (using very low down payments) have allowed people to do it, and lots of people are saying that it is rich foreign investors and/or drug dealers⁶ who are buying up the over-priced real estate.  But seriously, why would rich foreign investors continue to buy – and drive up the price of – Vancouver real estate when real estate in the US is so cheap?  And once mortgage rates go up, won’t those people who could only afford their mortgages because the interest rates were rock bottom be in trouble?  And if those same people put down only 5-10% as a down payment, and then prices drop by more than that (as is being predicted by some), won’t they owe more on the house than they could get even if they sold it?

As I have no interest in buying something that I can’t afford, especially given that the value of the “asset” in question could drop considerably (after all, it’s not putting money in your own pocket if the price of your house drops well below how much you owe on the mortgage), my plan is to continue to wait this thing out. I still have a fair way to go until my stupid student loans are paid off anyway, so I’ll just continue on my path of paying those down, balanced with putting some money aside in savings⁷ and emergency savings⁸.  Of course, if my dad would just win the lottery like he keeps telling me he is going to, all of this wouldn’t matter!

Image Credits:

• First image: stock.xchng.
• Graph: VREAA

Footnotes:

1. perhaps I took my mom’s saying of “more education is never a bad thing” a little too literally? [↩]
2. I know I’ve heard this somewhere, but can’t seem to find a reliable source to link to on it. If someone out there has a good link – or if you think I’m totally mis-remembering it, hit me in the comments section! [↩]
3. the most recent number I came across [↩]
4. where “benchmark” = a typical property in the region [↩]
5. I would have linked to the C.D. Howe report directly, but their website is down right now, so I’ve not been able to read the report myself, only the news reports about the report [↩]
6. the latter who, presumably, aren’t reporting their actual incomes, thus making the estimates of income lower than they should be [↩]
7. granted, it’s not like I’m making scads of money in my RRSPs and TFSAs, given how much the market sucks, but I’m doing OK, considering [↩]
8. ‘cuz you never know when you might need it! [↩]

Tags: Canada, finances, money, real estate, real estate bubble, student loans, Vancouver

So, remember how I was looking for a no fee chequing account for paying off my students loans and it was a great big pain in the butt to find and eventually I decided to open up a President’s Choice Financial chequing account? Well, would you believe that ING Direct, with whom I already have accounts, *just* announced they are launching a freaking no fee chequing account? No fees, no minimum balance, and they even pay you interest!¹. In order to get one of these new “Thrive Chequing” accounts, you have to register your interest and then hope to be picked as one of the 10,000 people who get to pilot the program.

Cleverly, on the registration form, they ask you how you are going to help them out with the piloting of this program:

If you really want to be an early adopter of this account, it looks like you better be willing to share information on how it works!

Seeing as President’s Choice Financial *still* hasn’t sent me the cheques² for my new account (and it’s been more than a month since I opened it!), I’ve registered for an ING Thrive Chequing account.  Truth be told, I’d rather go with ING since I already have accounts there *and* they give you interest on your chequing account.  A penny is saved is a penny earned, right?

Related articles:

• ING rolls out online no-fee chequing accounts (theglobeandmail.com)

1. Granted, it’s only 0.25%, but still. 0.25% > 0% [↩]
2. which I need in order to be able to set up my auto-payments for my student loans [↩]

So, yeah, I’m still paying off those damn student loans.  But student loans aren’t what I’m bitching about today.  Today I’m bitching about the Royal Bank.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I keep a separate bank account where a portion of my paycheque goes every month, which is used to make my student loan payments.  I have it separate from my main account, which I have at Vancity Credit Union, because I just can’t bear to see $1,000 disappear each and every month – keeping it separate allows me to pretend that I never made that money in the first place!  Anyway, since I started paying off my student loans three years ago, I’ve had this account at the Royal Bank (which holds two of my three student loans – the third is held by the government).  And every month for the past three years I’ve had the same three debits come out of my account with no fees.  But on my last bank statement, I saw there was a $1.50 charge for an “extra” debit, though I didn’t make any more debits than usual. After a bit of back and forth via email with the Royal Bank peeps, I found out that they had changed the rules on the account type I had.  Up until now, my account had no monthly fee and I was entitled to one free debit per month, plus one free debit for every payroll deposit.  I get paid every two weeks, so that gives me two extra free debits – so a total of the three debits I need per month (one for each student loan payment).  Apparently, though their website didn’t say this when I looked at it when the $1.50 charge went through, they’ve removed the free debits for payroll credits, meaning I’m only entitled to one free debit per month, period.  Which, of course, isn’t sufficient.  “But you can get an account that will give you 15 free debits for only $4 per month,” they told me, after I told them I only ever do 3 debits per month.  Since the account I have gives me one free debit and the extra debits cost $1.50, that would only be $3.  And the last time I checked, $4 is more than $3, so, thanks for offering me a worse deal, asshats! Regardless, I’m not willing to pay $3 per month for the “privilege” of paying off my student loans – I still have about five years left to go, so that would be almost $200 in the end. For nothing.  No thanks!  Anyway, I wrote back and restated my needs for this account, asking, “Do you have any accounts that will meet these requirements that won’t have any fees?” (which, of course, is what I have had up until now).  They replied with a form letter that basically told me to look at their website to see what accounts they have.  You know it’s bad when you find yourself replying:

“Hi Sandra,

Thanks for sending me a generic form letter in reply to my question. I’ve already looked at your website and don’t see any options that meet my needs. I’ll just close my account and take my business elsewhere.

Beth”

Did I mention they were asshats?

My next stop was to visit Vancity and see if they had any accounts that would work for me. The person I spoke to there was new and tried really hard to figure out what I was wanting, but she ended up giving me a savings account from which you can’t write cheques or set up preauthorized payments, so that didn’t really work.  A follow up phone call to Vancity (once I discovered that I couldn’t do preauthorized payments) revealed that my only option there that would allow me not to have to pay fees would be  to open a second chequing account and keep a minimum balance of $1,000 in it, in addition to  my main chequing account where I already keep a minimum balance of $1,000.  Not keen to have $2,000 tied up doing nothing, I decided to look elsewhere.  And it seems that my best option is to open a President’s Choice Financial account – they have chequing accounts that will allow me to set up preauthorized payments with no fees and no minimum balance needed.  So that’s my plan.

But it will take a little while, apparently, to get my PC account set up, so in the meantime I faxed the National Student Loans Services Centre and the Royal Bank Student Loans Centre (which, by the way, appears to have nothing to do whatsoever with the Royal Bank… don’t even get me started on THAT rant!) to set up preauthorized payments from my current Vancity chequing account. I figure I can handle one month of my student loan payments coming out of my main account without being too emotionally scarred. I want to make sure I can pay my July 31/Aug 1 student loan payments without using the Royal Bank account – because they don’t deserve even $3 of my money!  And then I’ll use my *one* free debit – to withdraw ALL of my money from that account and close it down!

Tags: finances, poor, President's Choice Financial, rants, Royal Bank, student loan payments, student loans, Vancity

So, we’ve all heard that buying coffee is one of the big ways that a lot of people blow huge amounts of money without even realizing it.  Drink a coffee a day? If it’s simple $2 coffee, that’s $730 a year… and if it’s a $5 fru fru Starbucks drink, you’re talking $1,825 a year! That’s enough to cover my car insurance for the year… or almost three months rent¹!!

So, how much cheaper is it to make coffee at home?  Well, being the scientist that I am, I decided to do some fancy pants maths to figure that out.  Where by “fancy pants maths” I mean counting how many pots of coffee I can make from a bag of beans.  Now, I’m a bit of a coffee snob, so I won’t drink cheap, crappy coffee.  My coffee of choice is Fair Trade Organic Bolivian from Level Ground Trading²  A 300 g bag of this deliciousness makes ~500 fluid oz of coffee.  If you divide that up into 12 oz³ cups, that’s 42 coffees.  And though a 300 g bag of beans officially costs $15, I always stock up on it when it’s on sale for $11⁴.  That works out to 26 cents per 12 oz cup.

Let me me say that again:

• 12 oz cup of coffee at a coffee shop = ~$2.00
• 12 oz cup of coffee at home = $0.26!

That’s EIGHT TIMES cheaper!  Even if I paid full price for the beans, it would still only be $0.36 per 12 oz cup!  And remember, I’m not talking about some crappy tasting coffee – this is fair trade, organic and absolutely delicious!  In fact, I actually like my homemade coffee more than stuff from a coffee shop!

Given my cheapness, I’ve been pretty good about not buying coffees out since I’ve been on my budget, but even *I* didn’t realize that that making it at home was so much cheaper! Now that I’ve done the math, I have a really, really hard time buying coffees!

Image Credit: Posted by Refracted Moments on Flickr using a Creative Commons license.

1. granted, I do have pretty cheap rent [↩]
2. as usual, I have no financial interest in this company.  I know it’s surprising, but they haven’t paid me off for this endorsement.  Though, for the record, I’d *totally* take a bribe in the form of free samples.  I’m just sayin’. [↩]
3. or a Starbucks tall [↩]
4. and on very special days, it’ll be on sale for $9, and then I *really* stock up! [↩]

Tags: cheapness, coffee, finances

I just read on the blog of Wesabe, the free online financial management software I use, that they are closing down at the end of the month.

Boo-urns!  I’ve really liked using wesabe!  It’s helped me create a budget and to keep track of my spending and saving.

And now I’ve only got a month to figure out how I’m going to track my finances.  I checked out wesabe’s competitor, Mint.com, but their system doesn’t work with Canadian accounts¹, and from reading the forums there, there isn’t currently any online system that works with non-US accounts.  Apparently wesabe is going to release their website & infrastructure as open source so you can run it on your own computer, but it sounds like you have to know quite a bit more about computers than I do to get it set up.  So, I may be harassing one of my more tech-savvy friends to set it up for me, but I figure I should have a back up plan in case it doesn’t work or in case they don’t get it released by the end of July.

Possibilities I can think of at the moment:

• buy MS Money or Quicken
• use Excel (though that seems like a lot of extra work)
• give up and go on a crazy spending spree, wasting all my money on candy and shoes!

Anyone have any other suggestions?

1. they claim they are working on getting it set up for Canada, but I’m not going to hold my breath [↩]

Tags: finances, stuff on the internets, wesabe

Because I am a glutton for punishment, I filled out the “how much of a mortgage can you afford?” calculator on the Royal Bank’s website.  This is what I got:

So, the bank is willing to lend me somewhere between $68 and $71 to buy a home. I feel so honoured that they feel I could pay this vast sum back within the 35 YEAR amortization that I had to choose in the calculator in order not to receive a “we cannot calculate anything at all for you, you poverty-stricken loser” error message.  I especially love that they figure I can afford $71 paid back over 35 years if I have a downpayment of $30,000.  I mean, if I’m so poor that I can only afford about a one cent per month mortgage payment¹, where do they think I’m getting a $30,000 down payment from?

And huzzah!:

I could save 12 whole dollars if I make accelerated bi-monthly payments.  I mean, I can’t afford not to!

I guess I’ll check again in about 5 years when my student loans are paid off. Maybe then they’ll let me get a mortgage and I’ll only be slightly into my retirement by the time my mortgage is paid off. Sigh.

I guess I should have taken them seriously when I saw this message before I started the calculator:

Surprised indeed.  Or, you know, depressed.  Whatevs.

1. I don’t know what they actually think the monthly payment would be, because it’s been rounded off to $0 [↩]

Tags: depressing, mortgage

So, I’ve found a new place to live.  I have to tell you I was ridiculously stressed out when I got the news that I had to move.  Like stressed out enough that I couldn’t eat for two days¹. There were a variety of reasons for this extreme stress reaction², including the fact that I *hate* apartment hunting, I hate packing, I hate moving and that this forced me to face a decision that I knew I should be facing.  That decision: Do I move to the ‘burbs?

I am not a suburbs kind of girl.  I grew up in the suburbs and I hated it.  I hated that everything is so sprawling you have to drive places instead of walking.  I hated that you can’t get everywhere you need to go by using public transit³.  I hated all the chain restaurants and big box stores.  I hated that there was nothing to do (though this isn’t quite the same in the suburbs around here as it was in my teeny tiny hometown).  But the fact remains that I work in the suburbs now and I currently spend 7.5 hours per week commuting from Vancouver.  And that’s 7.5 hrs that I can’t use for running or other forms of exercise, sleeping, blogging, or doing freelance work⁴.  It’s a full workday every week that’s wasted⁵.  In addition, I spend my weekends primarily at Tod’s, so my place really is more of a weekday home base.  I have to admit that it doesn’t really make sense to pay the higher rent of living in Vancouver and commit all that commuting time when I’m only in my place weekdays anyway. I still will spend my weekends in Vancouver and any weeknights I want to hang out with friends, it’s no big deal to drive to Vancouver, seeing as I’m used to driving from Vancouver to Surrey and back every weekday anyway!  (If it sounds like I’m trying to justify this choice to move to the ‘burbs, it’s only because I am.)

And so I have decided to take a place in Surrey.  A place that is five minutes from my work, in fact.  It’s bigger than anything I could reasonably afford in Vancouver, as well as nicer than the places I looked at in the city⁶.

Here are the deets:

• 850 sq ft
• all new appliances include a freaking DISHWASHER!!⁷
• lots of counter space (and very pretty countertops!) in the kitchen
• a bathtub (my current place only has a shower) with pretty sliding glass doors
• good sized closets for storage
• alarm system⁸
• rent includes heat, hydro, water, cable⁹, but not Internet

The major drawback of this place is that there’s no laundry.  It’s actually a pattern I noticed – any basement suites I looked at in Vancouver had laundry included (you just share it with the people who live upstairs), but all the ads for places in the suburbs say “no laundry, sorry.”  I’m not sure what it is about driving over the Oak and Knight Street bridges that makes above-ground dwellers unwilling to share their washer and dryer, but that just seems to be the way it is.  And for me, the inconvenience of going to a laundry mat once every week¹⁰ is outweighed by the glory of not having to wash my own dishes EVER AGAIN.

I signed the lease on my new place yesterday and take possession today!  The plan is to move in over February (i.e., moving in a few things here and there and then book movers to move the furniture and heavy boxes on one day).  It means I’ve had to scuttle my plan to do the 30-day yoga challenge, as I just won’t have time for it while packing and moving¹¹.  On the plus side, I’d kept most of my weeknights free with the intent of doing yoga, so I don’t have to cancel a bunch of dinners/coffees/other social occasions (as I would on a normal month).

So – anyone know of any good moving companies?

Also, consider this your forewarning: many of my blog postings this month will likely be about moving!

1. well, I did have about three things to eat in those two days, but I had to force myself to eat them [↩]
2. some of which I’m not going to talk about in a public forum [↩]
3. at least not in a reasonable time frame [↩]
4. not necessarily in that order! [↩]
5. I do listen to audiobooks to make it not entirely wasted, but I could listen to audiobooks in the comfort of my own home when I feel like it rather than basing my listening on my commuting schedule [↩]
6. except for one that was equally nice, but way, way smaller and dishwasher-less, and most costly [↩]
7. I’ve never in my life had a dishwasher.  And I LOATHE doing dishes. LOATHE! [↩]
8. though anytime a place has an alarm system, my first thought is “oh gawd, why do I need an alarm??” [↩]
9. of course, I don’t have a TV currently, but my friend Kim has an extra one! [↩]
10. or two – I have a lot of clothes [↩]
11. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for the next 30 day yoga challenge though, you can be sure! [↩]

Tags: apartment, basement dwelling, housing, moving, rampant narcissism, renting, Surrey, Surrey girl, Vancouver

So remember how I blogged about the house I live in getting sold and the new landlord said I could stay? Yeah, apparently not so much. The new landlord called tonight and said I have to get out. Sigh.

Anyone know of any cheap places for rent in Vancouver?

Oh yeah, and to add insult to injury, this news story came out today. Double sigh.

Tags: I hate moving