Blessed by the Potato

This is a surprisingly hard post to write (I’m also clearly out of practice on the blogging front), so let’s resort to the Q&A format:

Hey Potato, what’s up?

In The Big C 2: Revenge of the C I let you know that my dad’s cancer is back. Now I’m going to take some time off work (planning for 1 year) to spend time with him while I can, and also to take care of Blueberry and give her other grandparents a bit of a break. Today was my last day at work!

This is mostly a personal finance blog — how did you swing a year off work?

I have money saved, so I’m not worried about feeding myself or paying the rent during the year itself. It will mean pushing off retirement by a few years for one year being out of the workforce (lost compounding, spending more than saving, etc., will mean roughly pushing things back by ~3-4 years for taking a year now) but I actually haven’t done a huge, detailed projection. Indeed, I made the decision without really doing much of anything in the way of formal planning — it just felt right (after several weeks of hemming and hawing and sleeping on it), and I knew I could swing it, which I suppose is the point of all the previous planning and saving and investing. In the end, I wrote up a little one-page summary of the plan and implications, and that was that. My emergency fund will cover a year off, especially if I can pick up a few freelance gigs along the way.

So are you available for projects? Can I hire you?

Possibly! I know it’s not going to take 24-7 to take care of my family, so I will be looking to do some work, but only part-time (not being able to swing full-time with a commute is the reason I had to step back from the day job in the first place). However, I don’t know how cool the ol’ HR department will be cutting a cheque to an independent contractor who’s on leave, which means no grant-writing or other consulting for co-workers. Personal finance projects/writing/doing DIY investment workshops/lunch’n’learns, editing (it’s been a while since I’ve had a novel to edit, NaNoWriMo authors…), or science writing for others should be fine. Hit me up here if you’re interested.

What else will you do with your time?

Some have suggested using that time to learn something new or get a certification — pick up my CFP (which has a practical requirement, so it would require some commitment to switching jobs or picking up a more robust side gig), or get a MD or RN ’cause I spend so much of my time taking care of sick people anyway. I am getting dangerously close to having spent more time in the real world than grad school, so maybe it’s time to go back to learning and test-writing just to make sure I’ll never have a normal work-study balance in my lifetime.

I might also use my non-caregiving time to write another PF book — I’ve had an idea poking around for over a year now, but I’m getting more negative on the idea as I go along, and may have to just let it die. But hey, it is NaNoWriMo, so maybe some fiction…

However, other than a few random thoughts I absolutely have no plan. I figured all that could wait until I was actually off work to figure it out.

Isn’t it scary just leaving the workforce for a while with no plan of what you’ll do and no income stream coming in?

Well it is now. But that’s also why I managed to actually make a decision with no real analysis/spreadsheets/pro-con lists/waffling blog posts — I was just too burned out to go through my usual over-thinking routine. So at the moment I’m too tired to be scared.

Following my dad’s surgery for the big C, the standard of care is to give 12 cycles of chemotherapy to kill any cancerous cells that may be out there and help prevent the cancer from spreading or coming back. He had chemo just over a decade ago, and it is not a fun time, so he was a bit apprehensive at the notion before meeting the medical oncologist. But the oncologist laid out the plan and the stats and he said that it made sense and agreed to do it.

About a week after his first cycle the worst of the effects were hitting him hard, and he was done. No more chemo, no thank you. Making life miserable now for a chance at some extra years when you’re like, 80, is a bad deal and why would he have ever agreed to do it?

I went over the next day, made some soup, he started to feel better, and we went through some literature together. He agreed that a declaration that chemo was over may have been hasty, and went back for his second cycle yesterday.

That chemo causes nausea surprises no one. This was a known trade-off going in, but once he was actually experiencing these highly unpleasant side effects he was ready to quit.

You don’t want to be rewriting your plan while your head is in the toilet. On top of just feeling awful, there may be some chemo brain that makes it extra hard to make a good long-term decision.

But even beyond chemo, that’s a generalizable lesson. We’ve seen it often enough in investing: the midst of a market crash is not the time to re-evaluate your risk tolerance — you were aware that there were risks to investing and accepted those risks when deciding on your asset allocation in the first place.

The story also underscores the need to write things down. And not just the result of the plan: we didn’t need to write down that he’d be going to chemo every other week for 12 weeks, we needed to write down how he came to that decision. That there would be nausea, and that it would be temporary, and it would be worth it because the survival stats said so. Because it’s while he’s feeling that moment of doubt and urge to quit that he needs to be reminded of why he’s putting himself through this.

In case you’re not familiar with the commencement speech/excerpt from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman describes South Sea Cargo Cults following WWII: “During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.” So it has the superficial form, but of course the form is not what’s important, and without the core functions, it doesn’t work.

A recent post on doing laundry got me thinking about cargo cult adulting.

After I graduated and got a real job, my dad bought me a bunch of nice grown-up work shirts. They’re the kind of thing you have to take to the dry cleaners, or be very fiddly with about washing at home. And of course, they had to be ironed.

So, there I am*, sleep-deprived and busy as hell, watching my baby girl play in the playpen while I futz about with this scorching-hot hunk of metal. And she starts to fuss and wants out to crawl around on the floor and play with her daddy and eat all the dirt, but it’s not safe. This unstable burn hazard and relic of Victorian values is not even really safe for me to be handling in my current state. And even then, I ended up missing part of my shirt, going into work with a wrinkly arm the next day**.

I did not enjoy ironing. I had better things to do with my time, but what could I do, it was part of being grown-up and having stable employment. Then the epiphany: screw that noise. Ironing shirts didn’t make me an adult, being a good dad to my kid was my biggest ticket to adulthood, and she didn’t want me to be ironing my shirts. Wearing shirts that needed ironing (and actually ironing them) was just a symptom of someone else’s adulthood. Besides, it was 2012 (or 2013) and wrinkle-free fabrics existed in the world. Once Wayfare bought me a few wrinkle-free shirts, that was it for ironing.

Now I have a very simple laundry procedure: everything goes in together in one bunch.

If it can’t handle cold/normal followed by tumble dry low, I don’t want it. There’s no room for primadonna fabrics in my world, so if someone gives me a gift of clothes and it can’t deal with how I manage laundry, it just goes in the donate pile. I’ve ruined a few pairs of really superficially nice wool pants, and I have zero regrets. It wasn’t meant to be, anyway***. For the ones with sufficient warning labels (or only slightly scarred by my treatment), maybe Diabetes Canada can find someone who has that kind of time.

Of course there’s an even bigger source of cargo-cult adulting: buying real estate. Just today Rob Carrick has an anecdote in the Globe of one young adult living at home, hoping to save enough to buy a house at the expense of renting, being independent, and “[getting] on with the next phase of [her] life.”

And this isn’t some article assignment he had to go terribly far to find: it’s a story I’ve heard dozens of times in recent years. Real estate’s too expensive and out of reach, but people can’t [won’t] move out/have kids/really become adults without a house they can mortgage.

Now there’s a bit of a political brou-ha-ha in Ontario over the sex ed curriculum. Apparently we’re still using the 1998 one. Well, I graduated in 1998, so I don’t know what exactly is in that iteration — I was subjected to the one even older than that — but from listening to some millennials whine about how they have to buy before they can have kids, but the market’s too expensive to buy, so therefore they can’t have kids… well, I can only conclude that there’s something deeply misleading about how you use property deeds in there. As someone who has taken a university-level biology class and is a father, let me reassure you that there’s eggs and sperm and sleep deprivation and inordinate amounts of patience, but at no point does the legal ownership of land or structures factor into reproduction.

Anyway, there will be lots of adjustments from previous generations. Maybe you won’t have a single job that you use interchangeably with the word career — the gig economy is a monster and it’s coming for us all. Maybe you won’t own the roof over you head, or a car. Maybe you will have more monthly bills as Netflix and cell phones weren’t a thing for your parents. Maybe you won’t spend half your weekend on lawncare (or maybe you’ll spend more as you turn your little patch of dirt into an apocalypse-ready source of calories and essential fatty acids).

You are**** an adult and you get to decide what that means. You don’t necessarily need the same trappings and signifiers of adulthood that your parents had. And they won’t make you an adult any more than coconut headphones could call down a C-47. Don’t make yourself feel like you’ve put your life on hold for something that doesn’t even matter in the end.

In conclusion, screw ironing. Long live the wrinkle-free workshirt!

* – This is like 6 years ago, so it is safe to assume that this anecdote has been heavily embellished by time if not my story-telling.

**** – Unless you’re not. It’s the internet, after all.

There are a lot of things in the world to potentially research. Even just restricting the conversation to investing, there are a lot of potential avenues to put your money to work. However, you don’t have to have an opinion on everything.

I was on Tom’s podcast recently, and he threw me some questions on bitcoin and peer-to-peer lending. Things like this pop up from time to time, and I usually do have something to say. But just because I have an opinion and want to talk about it doesn’t mean it’s a strong opinion, or that you should go off and waste some time doing a bunch of research.

There’s a difference between having an opinion for the purposes of a discussion or entertainment, and an opinion for guiding your investment decisions. I’m not trying to talk you out of ranting about bitcoin or whatever individual stock is in the news or whatever you like to talk about at parties. But just because some new option is there doesn’t mean you have to give it full due diligence and a careful pro/con decision process to determine if it belongs in your portfolio.

Sure, bitcoin went up however many gagillion percent through to the end of 2017, but it just as easily could have gone another way — that doesn’t mean you have to start researching bitcoin or every potential growth story in the future now. If you missed out on the crypto craze, you’re probably still doing just fine on your trajectory to retirement (and if you jumped in late last year you probably regret it at this point).

And almost all the stuff on TV and in the paper on investing, all the different styles and strategies and specific companies — most of that is just discussion and entertainment. It’s very hard not to talk about something when someone else wants to talk about it. That goes double when there’s a camera on you. Engaging in a discussion on some potential investment is not a pointer that you should be researching this stuff or taking the opinion seriously. Often guests on BNN have opinions on stocks they do not own, to reinforce that point.

Buffett had this concept of the “too hard pile” — he didn’t have to come to a buy or sell decision on every stock, if it turned out it was too complex or outside his circle of competence he could just shelve it and move on to the next opportunity. Sometimes in a conversation someone may give you a forced choice “which one would you pick? OK, but if you could only take one with you when you’re stranded on a desert island…” but real life rarely does in the same way. And it’s ok to say that you don’t know and don’t care to waste the time trying to decide.

Focusing on the essential building blocks — your savings rate, fees, risk tolerance — is what will help you meet your goals. Debating the blockchain flowchart can make for good conversation, learning about new things can be fun, but that doesn’t mean you have to seriously consider how much of your portfolio to put in whatever the obsession of the week is.

The flu swept through town here (word from the school is that Toronto Public Health confirmed it was a flu outbreak that hit Blueberry’s class) and I had a rough week there — high fever, chills, aches, as well as a bit of a cough. Though it wasn’t a bad cough in the sense of coughing non-stop, I did get hit hard by the coughs when they came, and now a week and a half later I still can’t talk right and can barely move, because I seem to have thrown my back out and damaged my vocal cords coughing. My back was just starting to seem a bit better today (I could bend over and reach all the way to my knees! I could sit in a chair and type!) when I did something that seemed totally innocuous but put it out again today.

So that sucks. Also makes me feel really old to be shuffling around the house, doing awkward things with my knees and hips to try to reach things without actually flexing my back.

Yesterday was my first day back at work, and it was hard, especially the part where I couldn’t take a nap partway through the day. The flu’s a hell of a virus.

Behind the scenes, the blog is still very quiet. I do have thoughts on the new Vanguard all-in-one funds, and they are positive ones. I’ve also been trying to do a little video to accompany the guide to Canadian taxes for freelancers, but can’t really record anything other than a throat cancer awareness ad at the moment. I figure it could wait until April, however, I’ve seen a fair number of people inpatient for various tax slips so they could go ahead and file, and I’m like man, it’s still early March. I know as someone with a non-registered account I can’t file until April because of T3’s, but even then, don’t most people wait until close to the deadline anyway? Isn’t that what deadlines are for?

One good thing about getting really sick is just shedding the pounds — though I suspect I’ll gain much of that back before the next official weigh-in (and by definition, that’s not healthy weight loss).

Since I’ve got nothing else for you to read, why not check out Sandi’s reads, or Dan’s take on the new one-fund solution. I noticed a lot of people talking about burnout — here’s one from Des at Half-Banked as an example — around the turn of the new year. Definitely been feeling a touch crispy round the edges here, but don’t have articulate thoughts yet on the topic — though many of you have likely noticed the lack of posting frequency, or the number of emails and side projects that get a “that’s nifty, but let’s just park that for a few months until I can properly think about it or really anything.”

I had a few people ask me about dollar-cost averaging late last year, and was going to bring the threads together into a post, but then Dan hit all the points in this post and podcast.

Speaking of podcasts, there are just a whole bunch of episodes of Because Money out now in case you somehow feel the need to make up for the lack of activity on the blog.