Blessed by the Potato

I know, it’s a bad sign when half of a blog’s recent posts page consists of “not-dead” posts, but it’s been a hell of a year. Here’s a quick recap of the woes, which I will promptly bury with something completely different.

So first off, we got kicked out of our house. It’s explicitly a risk that renters have to accept in the rent-vs-buy debate, but it still sucks when a risk is realized and slapping you in the face. It was extra sucky because our landlords decided to tell us that they were moving in in mid-August. They gave us much more than the minimum notice, saying we could stay until the new year… but that would mean Blueberry would have had to switch schools mid-year. We were under some pressure to not only move against our will, but to do so on an extremely tight timeline.

It was extra super-duper sucky timing because we had looked at a place in the maternal grandparents’ neighbourhood just a week or so before and passed on it, largely because we didn’t want to have an unnecessary move. If we had known a week early we would have jumped all over that place. Grr.

So we hustled and bustled to find a new place in a matter of weeks. Holy crap were some of the houses in complete shambles. One we were sure was possessed it was so grungy and grimy and gross feeling that it had to be the work of the supernatural. We did manage to get a lease on the last possible day to register for a new school year, and even that was crazy. I don’t know how realtors managed to sneak their greasy incompetent mittens into the leasing world, but they did, and we had to go through this realtor who knew nothing rather than being able to talk to the landlord directly until after we had been approved to sign a lease. Then the lease was some legal shambles spewed out by someone who clearly had no idea how leases work, with weird illegal, illogical clauses inserted. The biggest one being a clause that gave the landlord a rescission right for a number of days to check our credit. The landlord can absolutely check our credit, and we provided an invasive amount of information to let him do that… but that happens before signing the lease. Even if you allow for the idea of a conditional period to check in on credit, the clause was written so that the lease would be self-cancelling if he didn’t proactively provide a written notice of his approval, with the rescission period extending well into the period where we would have moved in. Let alone legality, it makes no common sense to have a lease self-immolate because a landlord forgot to send an email long after a tenant had already moved in. And then going through what felt like 10 different people to get that fixed (when Ontario has a standard lease template anyway!).

Whatever, it all sucked tremendously. Then the actual effort of packing and moving, which also sucked. But we’re here now.

And I skipped a step, this was preceded by moving my mom into a facility that was better able to care for her, so lots of work and effort there (and lots of thoughts to come on that). Then after packing up and moving our place, it was time to pack up and clear out mom’s place, and list it for sale in one of the slowest markets the GTA has seen this millennium.

So that was a big part of the fall/winter/spring I was away from the blog. Then comes this summer. I had called 2022 “the summer of suck” and 2024 was another contender for the title. To just rapid-fire out the news in one long paragraph, we went on a family road trip out East (so far so good), to the Potato holy land. The first day we arrived, it was unseasonably cold and the heat and hot water weren’t working. It was a dumb, simple to fix thing in the end (there are like 4 different emergency shut-offs for the power, gas, and water feeding the furnace and hot water heater, included one outside, and whoever had winterized my parents’ place had redundancy/paranoia in mind and had flipped them all) but took all of the first night and then all of the second day to go through all the troubleshooting steps to figure it out and get it working again. I thought that was going to be my big “ha-ha bad luck vacation story” but then the next day one of my aunts on my dad’s side got a sudden and severe case of pneumonia and had to go to the hospital, and died a few days later. On my mom’s side of the family, one of my uncles was struggling with some weird symptoms for a little while, and found out it was a super-aggressive brain cancer. He died barely a month after finally getting a diagnosis. And my mom had a bad, bad accident, rolling her wheelchair down a flight of stairs, ending up in a coma for a week and has been in the hospital for almost two months now (though is now in stable condition).

Anyway, I will bury this bad news post with another post right away, but some other rapid-fire updates:

• I hate hate hate the new WordPress. I haven’t figured out how to make some equivalent of a classic editor plug-in work, but having to add a “new block” for every paragraph disrupts writing so much, and it creates so many ways for me to screw up the layout. I had to set up a new site from scratch and even though I’ve built like 6 or so sites on my own and worked on quite a number of other ones, I just kept getting stymied by this new approach to writing and design that they’ve taken on. The new site is live now (see next post!) and is reasonably ok-ish but I just can’t figure out how to tighten up the layout any more or add the elements I want to and I give up at this point, it’s good enough for people to get what they need out of it. But way harder than previous versions of WordPress, and seems to be actively hostile to users doing anything (even changing the stock photos in a pre-designed theme seemed to break things!). Zero stars.
• I also haven’t posted on The Bird Site since the take-over, though I’ll probably go on it to promote the next post. I tried setting up an account on Threads with my usual username, and was instantly banned before I even posted anything — apparently holypotato is hate speech in Meta’s eyes? Anyway, the community on Threads appears to be more vibrant than Mastodon, but I’m still trying to figure out how to use it (esp. as it seems more mobile-oriented, so my ancient desktop-based brain can’t even figure out how to link you to my profile [oh there it goes]). Anyway, after my first round of being insta-banned I now have the oh-so-catchy handle of valueofsimpleca.
• In the various house moves, I inherited my sister’s Peloton. Though the membership isn’t cheap, it is actually motivating me to “sweat every day” so yay for small health wins? There is some kind of social aspect to Peloton that, to echo a point from above, my ancient desktop-based brain has not figured out yet. I have #curling on my profile if that helps make friends?
• I’ve made very little progress on the third edition of the Value of Simple. Instead, I wrote an entirely different book (see next post!). But the third edition is still on my (very long, very slow to clear) to-do list!

I left off with a post about sustaining a head injury, then haven’t posted in over 4 months so some people are — perhaps rightly — worried about what’s going on here and whether my stuff is up for grabs.

I’m merely mostly dead.

Since that post in the summer, CIHR once again went on a denial-of-service attack against researchers, launching a major national competition with a deadline just over 4 weeks after the initial announcement. I picked up another tendon injury, managing to somehow injure the tendon in my elbow sweeping in my first curling event of the year. It’s fine with a tennis elbow brace, and a little over 6 weeks after hurting it I figured it was feeling ok, so I played a game without the brace, and immediately re-injured it. So I’m playing with the brace anytime I’m not skipping now, and will wait until next season to test how well it does on its own, but fortunately it’s not hurting in regular activities any more and I can turn doorknobs again. My ankle has healed enough that I don’t feel any weakness, but I still have a palpable bump in my Achilles tendon.

And after nearly 3 years of managing to avoid it, I finally caught Covid this year and was sick for nearly 3 weeks over the holidays (and still haven’t fully recovered my energy level or brain fog). It hit me somewhat hard — on day 2 I had a decent fever that tylenol & advil combined could not get rid of, and I was uncontrollably shivering to the point I was afraid I was going to break a tooth. So I got paxlovid, which got rid of most symptoms (just tired and then paxlovid mouth), but I got rebound covid just a day or two after my prescription ran out, and had another two weeks of testing positive and having just generic cold symptoms and some brain fog. And even though I’m “better” now, my energy level and focus is still noticeably under 100%. Perhaps not so bad to say that I have long covid/PCC, but it is not all the way back yet.

I got almost nothing from my big 2022 to-do list done, and some of them are getting rather ripe. I had wanted to set up a new dedicated site for the directory of fee-for-service planners, and Google is making that more urgent as someone keeps flagging the spreadsheet as a phishing attempt. But other than a few bullet points in a journal that’s gone nowhere.

I have a bunch of modules for the course to still either add or re-record/update, and I’ve been holding off on promoting it until that’s done. Those are all sitting around 3/4 done and I just haven’t quite been able to polish them enough to upload.

But a webinar I recorded with TD is going live this week — a promotional opportunity that I won’t have the promotion ready for yet! (Feel free to sign up and attend — the interview is on sticking to a simple index investing plan and what can get in our way to obstruct that).

I also wanted to update the rent-vs-buy spreadsheet’s default values. Way, way back in 2011 I had thought that it was important to make a rent-vs-buy calculator that could include the effects of interest rates going up in the future. It’s a risk factor I’ve repeated in many lectures, and while I was disappointed at how long the BoC was able to drag their feet and put off raising rates, even I was surprised at how fast they raised rates when they finally did start moving — the current default scenario assumed 10 years to get back to mortgage rates over 5%, and we did it in 1. So now the starting rates are too low (and the starting prices and rents could likely use some fresh listings searches for updated prices, not much left at the $500k price point these days). I may also need to make the instructions for editing it larger as I still get several requests per week to edit the template.

I had intended to release a 3rd edition of The Value of Simple in 2022, mainly to re-jig things for the all-in-one funds that came out right as the 2nd edition was published. All the material is there in the course already so it wouldn’t be too hard, but I was also debating whether I needed a chapter to go all super-skeptic on crypto since it’s such a common question. Fortunately interest seems to be waning lately so I may just skip it… but there’s still a lot of work to do to spin up another edition and I don’t know when I’ll have the time and mental sharpness coinciding to do it. In the meantime, don’t forget that the errata exists for a reason.

Anyway, I have a few draft posts I hope to finally push out to resuscitate the blog in the next few months, but for now, just know that I’m merely mostly dead but still hanging on.

Oh, and The Bird Site and The Space Toddler — I’ve opened a Mastodon account, but haven’t started using it yet. Hopefully I’ll figure it out before The Bird Site goes down.

As we approach another Potatomas [or just pass, if it takes me two weeks to post this], Blessed by the Potato has another anniversary, turning 22 this time.

Perhaps it’s time for a little refresh. Perhaps it’s long past time for a major refresh — sidebars and fixed-width columns are so 2006. And have you heard about SSL certificates? But we can’t just grab a new WordPress template, upload it, and hope it works.

No, we must start with some existential questions to better understand the purpose of the blog and why I do what I do so that we can better decide how to move forward together.

Why does BbtP exist? Why do I still blog after 22 years? I don’t really know, I’ve just always kind of done this. Ok those are too hard, let’s try something else.

Why do I have some ads, but don’t accept paid posts/native advertising? Do I even want to make money?

So hosting a blog costs money, usually (I suppose there are platforms that let you do it for free). But I do it with WordPress and an account at a web server company and a domain name and all that, and it costs money. I had a grand vision of not having to pay for my hobby of blogging and maybe even making some side income back when I started this. Hosting costs let’s say $150-200 CAD/yr for some round numbers. Google Ads has a $100 minimum threshold to hit before getting paid out, and IIRC it took me over 5 years to hit that the first time. I now make an average of $160/yr in advertising (not including affiliate income). Not a whole lot of side income, and indeed over the whole lifecyle of the blog I’m still in the red.

In addition to display ads, I have those referrals in the sidebar. The thing is, all but one of those don’t just round to zero — they are zero. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a single payment from Passiv or the robo-advisors. Questrade is the most beneficial to users signing up (free money!) and also the only one actually earning its keep — I make roughly $200-250/yr from that program being featured there (though I don’t track the source and its also printed on the bookmarks I give out at talks). Which kind of raises a question: why have them there at all? I am very picky about which referral programs I put up, and think that they do benefit users as well as myself, but still I keep them explicitly over there in the zone where users immediately understand that it is advertising and not content. Even then, people occasionally question whether that affects my impartiality. Is $250/yr worth that? Eh, I’ll leave Questrade and Passiv for now, but now that I’m thinking about it I’ve taken down all the robo-advisor affiliate links.

Clearly, I’m not in this for the money. Should I be? I mean, that was the whole problem with grad school too, right?

If I was, one thing that we have to circle back to is why BbtP exists. More to the point, why that branding exists. It’s from an inside joke from when I was a teenager. I’m sure that the silly name and address (and possibly my silly writing style) is holding me back. That stuff shouldn’t matter — only the content should — but I’m pretty sure that it does anyway.

I really wanted to take some time in 2020 to sit down and re-think the whole site — whether (and how) to rebrand it, whether to split it into a more professional personal finance type site and a separate personal rant/update site. Whether to just mirror the PF content to the VoS site. Whether to delete a bunch of old posts and only keep a few of the tools and explainers. And of course to get a new theme. But the year was a massive dumpster fire. I’ll put up a separate post on that, but despite being locked at home in front of the computer with no day job for much of the year, I accomplished basically nothing.

Anyway, I’ve done nothing to the site (not even getting that SSL certificate going or changing the URL structure to include post titles in the permalinks), and now that I’m back working I may have missed my window to do anything major with it. So for now, it remains trapped in 2006. But the comments are open (even if it takes me two days on average to clear out what the spam filter catches), so by all means tell me how you think it should be revamped/rebranded/abandoned. Should I ditch the ads and get a Patreon pitch? (I am not liking that the previously unobtrusive banner ads have started including pop-ups) Or is that trend passe, and the thing to do now is to turn the site into a subscription newsletter on substack? Or are blogs themselves relics of another age, and I should shut it down entirely and just put 35-part rants on Twitter when I have something to say?

I’m not sure if I have any readers any more, with months elapsing between posts.

So before throwing up a few posts, perhaps a personal catch-up on where I’ve been.

As you may remember, my dad’s cancer came back last summer. He passed away at the end of May, and my siblings and I are the executors of the estate (though I’ve been taking the lead).

So it’s basically just the worst year ever. Estate administration sucks — there’s a fair bit of bureaucracy to wade through, and it’s simultaneously incredibly emotionally draining. There always seem to be new surprising challenges and things to deal with, so I can’t even say how close I am to being done with everything. Oh, and there’s covid, and there’s been no school for Blueberry since March.

There were also a lot of whip-saws this year. Dad’s health was really bad around Christmas, and we started to talk about death and get sad and stuff. But then we found out he had a weird, super-severe magnesium deficiency. Whatever was happening in his gut wouldn’t let him absorb enough to fix it even with max supplementation, but we were able to arrange for in-home IV infusions after the first few visits to the hospitals. Once those Mg levels came back up, he was up and feeling great. He visited the cottage again — all on his own! He was going to give me a new car, and pay for Blueberry and I to take a little Disney vacation, ’cause he didn’t need us to hang around the city and take care of him. Then covid hit and the market crashed and he wasn’t feeling good (and there wasn’t travel any way) and all that is off the table. His health and mood spiraled down again, and it was just generally terrible.

We had a year to prepare and get ready and I saw it somewhere else and it’s stuck with me — you can be prepared, but you can never be ready.

I’ve also had a whip-saw on my own health and diet progress. I was back to my target weight in the winter, and doing great at curling. Our team won our division in the centennial bonspiel! Our Mixed Doubles team made it to the A division, and we technically beat the provincial champions! (and by that deliberate “technically” you know that they defaulted but nonetheless we’re literally in the same league as the provincial champions even if we’re at the bottom of that league) I was making plans to keep up the positive momentum through the summer (“plans” in this case consisting of scrawling “sign up for tennis” on my whiteboard, but that counts!). Then covid hit and everything shut down. Spring was super-delayed, and it wasn’t nice weather to go for a walk (not that I had anywhere to go), and of course dad’s progress and death. So emotional eating was back on the table. And I gained the full “quarantine 15”. I’ve been out every day in August for a walk or bike ride (or done an indoor workout) but I’m still just flattening the curve as I’ve had more trouble getting a handle on the input side of the equation.

I had so many plans for this year. I didn’t think taking care of dad would take every moment of the day — most days I left him in time to pick Blueberry up from school (when there was school), and even on days when I stayed later he was often out of energy and in bed before 7. I thought I’d get so much done while I was off work: I had 3 book ideas kicking around, and all my websites are in need of some facelifts and functionality updates. Instead I’m over here barely coping with daily existence. I couldn’t even get my brain in gear to write a blog post or hell, even play a challenging video game. I’ve had a number of FTL runs and played some MOO2 and StarCraft: Brood War, but nothing new (even though I have some unplayed games in my Steam library just waiting for a quarantine). I have 64 un-answered emails in my inbox (if you’re waiting on a response, it’s probably because I couldn’t get into the head space to write one, and then fell into the guilt spiral of responding to a week/month/3-month-old email).

But now I think I’m doing a bit better, I am getting a post up, and I feel like I’m on the upswing from the depths of grief and depression at least.

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.