Blessed by the Potato

As a gift for defending my thesis, a colleague and friend here got me a pen with my name engraved on it. I, being the pen-losing master, lost it in under 6 months. I was cleaning my desk today and found it again! Over a year later! …goes to show how often I clean my desk, though :(

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I seem to have lost the ability to cook recently. I tried making tomato soup last week. I made it the same way I do every time: can of Campbell’s tomato soup concentrate, a can of milk. Stir, heat, add oregano and basil, enjoy. Except along the way I curdled the milk somehow, turning it into threads of cheese in the soup. Ewww. Then this week, with a new carton of milk, I gave it another go, and did the same thing. I figured it was just tomato soup, so I tried Kraft Dinner: gross. I don’t know what went wrong exactly, but the whole thing just tasted terrible. Maybe the milk’s bad, even in the new carton, I figure, so I make a batch of pasta instead… ok, that was edible, but not really very good.

Then, just after blogging about how I have magical “innate frugal budgeting skills” I pull out the receipts from the last two months and crunch the numbers to see how close we came to being on-budget. For a total household budget of ~$2800/mo* (it’s not that exact; generally we aim for $2500, and don’t panic as long as it’s not over $3000), we managed to come damned close to breaking $4000 in October. There are of course a number of extenuating circumstances: there were a lot of sales on things that we stocked up on (hello, Coke through to next spring; ah, Halloween candy, my old love…), and being Halloween we managed to buy over $100 worth of decorations, spent $200 on our costumes, and something like $50 on food for the party. Plus I got new tires for my car, and we went out for dinner every week through the month (3 separate special occasions fall in October, so that’s only one or two random date night or meet friends eat-outs). While I don’t have the hydro or gas bill for November yet, assuming they’re the same as October then November will come in about $450 under budget (we only ate out once, I was sick, so we only drove to Toronto once, and we had a lot of groceries stocked up after October). Of course, December is going to be rough because of the gift budget… and the summer months were slightly over due to our Ottawa and cottage trips. Maybe I’ll need to get back to budgeting basics for the new year!

So today I’m feeling kind of dumb for losing the ability to do such basic things that came so naturally to me for so long…

* – just for the curious, we don’t actually live on $2800/mo. There are a few things, such as gifts and my curling membership, that through lack of a receipt or just plain forgetfulness never seem to make it into the budget reports. Those probably add $1000 or so for the year. Plus my parents help out a fair bit: we’re on the family’s car insurance, so my dad pays for that (which I’m told is very cheap for a car stationed in London), my dad pays for any dental work not covered by my insurance (and with two crowns this year, that is most welcome!), my dad says “take Wayfare somewhere nice” and will pay for a restaurant meal for us (which I tried to refuse at first, but hey, he’s got the stubbornness gene in full-force, whereas I only got one allele). That’s not even counting all the little things, like “borrowing” vacuum bags or movies from the ‘rents (I haven’t bought a DVD in 16 months). If I had to guess, I’d say our actual monthly budgets would come out closer to $3300 if we were really out on our own.

It’s crazy in Toronto this weekend, and this is also my first chance to test out my Nokian WRs in the nasty stuff (snow, then rain + ice).

I had heard that one downside to the tires was road noise, but even listening for it I could only say that it was noisier when taking turns or braking at slow speeds. Going in a straight line really doesn’t have any noticeable extra noise.

I’ve never had a set of dedicated snow tires before, so I can only compare these to all-seasons (most recently, Michelin RainForce MX’s). There is a quite noticeable improvement in snow and ice traction. On a road and a driveway that had turned to glare ice so slippery I slid down it after getting out of the car, there wasn’t much of a problem with the car stopping on it. The ABS did kick in, and the stopping distance was longer than it would have been on a dry road, but not nearly by the same amount as I would have slid in the all-seasons.

Snow grip seemed good, but one strange thing I noticed was that the car seems to decelerate more strongly in deep snow/slush than I was used to. There was no wheel spin when trying to get up to a start (using of course, gentle acceleration) from within deep snow. The car was pushed around a bit by wheel ruts, and when making a turn through that pile of snow left behind by the plow in an intersection. I was a little surprised at how much the car seemed to be forced into existing wheel ruts, but the snow was particularly deep (about 3″ on the road), very wet, and thus, very heavy.

After experiencing this, I don’t think I could go back to regular all-seasons. I think these tires are an excellent compromise between the grip of a proper set of winter tires, and the convenience of a single set.

Well, it looks like the over a thousand Canadians who took advantage of the strong dollar in the last few months and bought cars in the US, only to be turned away by an overly specific rule on immobilizers will get amnesty and be allowed to register their vehicles. This will hopefully keep pressure on the auto makers to keep lowering their prices in Canada. I doubt we’ll see pricing on par, even if the currencies are, but the prices should drop to within 6-10% so that it’s no longer worth the effort… and if they don’t, then I’ll probably be planning a trip down south when it’s finally time to let my car go…

Out in the blogosphere (blagonet), a bunch of people are describing their financial mistakes and entering a contest by Canadian Capitalist.

I have several mistakes to talk about. Most recently, I was locked in indecision about what to do about a car. Mine had been stolen (twice!), had just had an expensive round of repairs, and was making funny noises. I had a significant amount of “negative affect” every time I drove it: knowing that it had been stolen, cosmetically damaged, and who knows what else was done to it, it just didn’t feel like my car any more. I spent a ton of time researching what to get next (you all know how that ends: Prius). At the same time, some of the income trusts I owned were bought out, and I found myself with some cash instead of stocks. I also got a scholarship, but managed to live as though I didn’t (for at least a few months), and saved up some more money. All of that cash went and sat in a PC Financial high interest savings account so I could get access to it on a moment’s notice in case I needed it for the down payment on a new (or new-to-me) car. To sell my car, I had to detail it, and once I detailed it I reclaimed it to a large extent. It became much easier to forget it had been stolen when there weren’t someone else’s muddy boot prints on the dash, etc. The noises, while worrisome, stopped getting any worse and just kind of plateaued. I came to realize that I didn’t need a new car, and that my old one probably still had a few more years of life in it. While I had sunk in more repairs than it was probably worth, that money was already sunk, and if I could go even a year before the next repair, I’d probably still come out ahead of the cost of buying a new one.

This was a very slow realization, and that whole time — over a year — my down payment sat as cash. That money, which to me is a substantial fraction of my savings, could have been working much harder for me if it was invested a bit better, though I did at least have enough sense to get a 4% return on it over that time. In fact, with the recent market chaos sitting on cash probably worked out to be a good thing. However, that was a serendipitous event. I didn’t even put in a tenth of the effort determining what to do with that money as I did researching which new car to get. Maybe I would have done the research and concluded to keep a cash reserve, or to keep that portion of my savings in a safe, low income place, but I never gave myself the opportunity to make that decision with eyes open. I just let it happen.

Surebeam was another mistake. That one goes a fair bit differently: my dad first came to me with this stock, and he thought the financial side looked good, but wanted my biophysicist opinion on whether their technology would work or not. I thought it would, but might have problems finding a market with so many people afraid of the N and R words (nuclear and radiation). We both invested fairly early on. We set price targets for it, and were on our way. It actually went up for a while. Went up impressively, and hit my sell target within a year or so. Of course, I didn’t bother to check up on my portfolio for a month or so, and then was out of the country and calling home to my dad when I found out. I didn’t trust the public internet computer in the hotel’s lobby, so I waited until I got home to sell. Then I had to unpack and catch up on some work (*cough* and regain my position on the Warcraft III ladder *cough*), and it was about a week or so before I bothered to check back in with Surebeam. It had settled a bit from its peak, and I figured I would wait and surely it would go back up… and the next thing I knew the company was delisted, bankrupt, and my investment was worth nothing. There’s plenty of blame to spread around for that loss, including the management.

The careful reader will also notice that here things could have been saved if I had just put the time and effort into keeping on top of my portfolio. Or if I had taken a chance on a public computer. Or had the good sense to put in a standing sell order for my price target, especially before leaving for vacation.

To say that I’m an amateur investor, or that it’s a hobby of mine is to vastly overstate my case. I invest in the stock market because I was raised to believe that there are much greater returns to be had there than can be found in a savings account, GIC, or government bond. Because money should “work” for me. But I don’t put enough time and effort into staying on top of it, and that has been my financial mistake. There are tools out there to help people like me stay on top of things, and I’m working on checking the status of my portfolio (and any relevant news releases/columnist articles/etc) daily, or at the very least weekly. I’m also starting to look into potentially taking advantage of mutual funds, which can help keep me better diversified and will have managers to stay on top of things. What might be ironic is that I do take the time to set a monthly budget and every month or two I go over all my receipts and bills and make sure I’m staying on budget. Yet I have a pretty good natural instinct for that sort of day-to-day financial stuff and staying out of debt, so I might not even need to (or at least not spend quite so much time at it) — being a frugal university student for nearly a decade might have something to do with that.

So to sum up, take the time to stay on top of your money situation. If you simply can’t, find investments suited to a hands-off style.

Edit: Just to try to clarify, I do think that a mostly hands-off buy and hold, wait and see type strategy is generally good… but hands-off isn’t the same as brains-off :)