Blessed by the Potato

I’ve talked about fee-for-service planners before, and how I think it’s how the financial advice industry should evolve — it’s a model that removes many conflicts of interest from the relationship, and maximizes transparency. I’ve even said that as a heuristic for finding an advisor it’s not a bad one, especially as at this point only a few have opted to go down that road.

So it was great when MoneySense created a directory of fee-only planners. ‎I linked to it a lot, it’s included in the book as a valuable resource, and lots of other people liked having it available, too.

They’ve now scrapped the list and are starting something new where they will not just provide a list of planners and what some might see as implicit approval, but also give them ‎an explicit seal of approval. The new process involves a hefty application fee, which will help pay for the magazine to do a survey of past clients, but will mean many fee-only planners will not choose to pay for inclusion so the list will be less inclusive. $2500 is a big fee for a directory listing, so the MS version of the directory is likely to become substantially smaller, and likely skewed towards the most expensive advisors.

I think there’s a lot of value in a free and open directory of fee-only planners.

So I’m going to create my own directory of fee-for-service planners. This will be a more buyer-beware type of directory. It will have no seal of approval, and use free tools and a minimum of volunteer effort (so forgive the barebones look). The only requirement for an advisor to get listed is to fill in the intake survey and have the appropriate business model (i.e. primarily fee-for-service). Those caveats out of the way, I think it will also be hugely useful to the community and capture a lot more planners and coaches than a closed directory with a high entry fee.

The directory is a simple Google Docs spreadsheet and there is also a sidebar link for the directory that more plainly introduces it than this post — please link to that version of the post and directory.

The intake form for advisors/planners/coaches to use is here.

Caveats: the important caveat is that this is meant to be an open listing and these are not recommendations. I don’t have the resources to vet any of these listings. I’ve mentioned a few more on the permalink.

Through the rest of this week I will start contacting the advisors that I know of to start filling out the form and adding themselves, so expect the directory to be a bit barren for the first little bit.

Thanks, and I hope you all find it helpful!

You may have noticed that the blog is even quieter than normal the past few weeks. To start with there’s the subject of the last two posts: my cat dying didn’t put me in much of a mood to write. Then last week my desktop computer died (hard disk failure), so I’ve been spending the past few days trying to rebuild it and recover some data.

First of course the public service message: back your stuff up. I’ve been very lax about backing up the last little while, and it’s biting me now. My last full system image is from December 2014 — eight months ago!! I have a partial backup of some important folders from June. Thankfully that means I won’t have to repeat all my year-end bookkeeping and taxes, but it still sucks that I’ve lost two months’ worth of work (plus eight months of whatever files weren’t important enough to include in the partial backup — things like media and saved games). I’ve been trying to think of what’s been lost and thankfully can’t come up with much. I know I totally reorganized my book business accounting excel file just last week to make it easier to track unit sales (before I was only tracking revenue and expenses), but given how much time I’ve spent on recovery at this point it’s just easier to re-do the work (and that was open at the time my drive blew up so I guess it’s gone for good).

I was greatly let down by the windows restore tools — my backup boot CD wasn’t able to restore windows, refresh windows, or reinstall windows. The drive had somehow become locked and many of the files were supposedly corrupt in the recovery command prompt environment, but I could still see the directory listings which gave me hope for recovery. So I popped in another hard drive and restored my December backup image (the one I thought I made in April — not much better — was unreadable) so I could boot to windows and see what was going on. I hooked up the original system drive as a secondary drive and fired up the computer. Before I knew what was happening, Windows was running chkdsk on the damaged drive, which wiped out most of the directory structure that I was able to see before. Ugh. Then I wasn’t able to access any of the contents because I wasn’t the “owner” of the folders. When I tried to take ownership the system bluescreened and I was back to the command prompt from the recovery CD. There was a very brief “if you don’t want chkdsk to run, press any key in 1 second” message, which is not enough time to actually hit the key. Given that I’m pretty sure chkdsk made my life more difficult here, I have to recommend that if you’re trying to repair a drive that you find a way to disable auto-chkdsk on startup.

So, days later now, I have a system that thinks it’s December 2014, with some of my files from the June backup. I still wanted to see if a more advanced recovery tool could pull anything from the borked drive, so I googled around and tried a few.

Pandora Recovery was able to scan the drive for document files (.doc, .xls, etc.), and found a lot of files and fragments of files. However, it was a lot of work to sort through the results — the original filenames and creation dates were gone, so Pandora created names based on header information (e.g. file creator). That let me cut out a few to search through, but I was still left with hundreds of documents to open and see what they were. I ended up finding a few invoices that I would need to rebuild my accounting spreadsheet, but no accounting spreadsheet. Most of the documents appeared multiple times, likely an artifact of how Windows saves a new version behind-the-scenes (or in some cases, an artifact of how I’ll go back to a website and re-download a document rather than try to find it in my recent downloads folder).

So I moved on to Recuva. This tool didn’t turn up as many potentially recoverable documents, but what it did pull out of the damaged drive had original filenames and dates modified, which greatly helped me exclude the ones I didn’t need to check in detail (for instance, anything before 2014 would already be on my xmas backup image — I was mostly hunting for recently completed documents). This helped turn up one other document file missed by Pandora (though I can’t say whether Pandora missed it, or if I missed it because the meta information wasn’t helpful), as well as some email files (eml) that Pandora doesn’t seem to check for.

It’s a few days later now and I still am not yet up and running on my desktop. I figured I would take advantage of this “opportunity” to upgrade to a solid-state drive as my boot drive, so I’ve got some more work to do on that (which I was hoping to finish tonight but looks like I will likely be offline until Wednesday).

To get the blog back on track, I have an exciting post coming up for tomorrow.

My cat died today, 18 and a half years old — almost 18 years to the day since we got her. I moved out at 23, when my kid sister was 12, so in many senses I was closer to that cat than my own sister (certainly in terms of time spent within a few feet of each other). Forgive me if I’m a bit of a mess for the next few days.

I’ve often said she’s the best, most amazing cat in the world — you all think that of your cats but you’re wrong because it was my cat (well, now one of you might be right). However, it’s always been hard to explain why she was the best cat, so I suppose I will just throw pictures and mini-stories at you (keep scrolling), and otherwise just remind myself that I don’t need to convince anyone else that she was not just awesome and sweet and loving but the best cat ever.

What’s really amazed me the past few years is how good she is with Blueberry (and vice-versa).

The Origin Story

We got her years ago, on PEI. At the time I didn’t want to get a cat because I had had dogs until shortly before my sister was born, and my dad promised I could get a dog as soon as he stopped smoking (aside: he would not quit for ~7 more years, when he went cold turkey after a cancer diagnosis). I never saw her at the combination vet clinic/pet store where they got her, but supposedly she was super-friendly with all the people coming in to the store, and was nearly 5 months old (she roamed the store, she wasn’t in a cage). There wasn’t much of a market for pure-bred Himalayan cats on the Island, so the store owner said she was going to adopt her herself if no one got her by 6 mo. My mom and sister fell in love and raced back to the cottage to try to convince the rest of us that we needed a cat. My dad had a conference call, and my sister kept trying to ask him to get the cat. He kicked my mom and sister out of the cottage for making too much noise while he was on the call. My sister made pleading faces and hands at him through the window. Still on the conference call, he scrawled across a piece of paper “FUCK OFF, get the cat.” And so they hopped in the van and went right back to adopt her.

Taking her from the pet shop to our place seemed to break her brain: she couldn’t handle more than two people in a room and was constantly under a bed or the couch. I liked to stay up late into the night reading (some things never change), so I was often the only person up when the nocturnal cat came out to explore. We became best buddies. She immediately started sleeping under my bed, hiding from the others during the day, then snuggling with me in the recliner at night while I read. It took a few weeks, but soon enough she was sleeping on top of the bed with me.

Back in Toronto she started sleeping not just on my bed, but up on my pillow. She used to lick and groom the top of my head before we’d go to sleep. As my hair started falling out she seemed to have a realization that it was not a thing to do any more (I like to humanize it by thinking she mistakenly blamed herself for the hair loss), and instead slept beside me for bit, until a few bad nights of getting nearly rolled on and twitched out of place drove her to the foot of the bed. She also loved the basement. It was full of boxes and dust and places to hide, and being a teenager and the oldest child, I had claimed the basement as my own lair, so once again we became the two souls out on our own, and I started to think of her not as the cat that my mom and sister brought home on an impulse, but as my cat.

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Driving

She hated driving. Supposedly she yowled the whole way back from the pet store in the first place. When our month-long vacation on PEI was over, we had to get back to Toronto in the van, and she yowled until about Moncton before settling back with me on the very back row of seats in the van.

When I moved to London, which was about a 2-hour drive away, she would cry for about the first hour and a half of the trip. Every time. The first time I took her out with me it was a terrible snowstorm, and I think it took nearly four hours to do the drive. On that one I swear she figured out how to modify her meows to call to me (and later Wayfare) by name. “Meeep, meeep, meeeowww, jeeeeow, jeeooon, jeeeooon, jeeeooon… [Way-fr; way-fr]…” After I stopped taking her back and forth every weekend she seemed to settle down about driving (a bit).

Even after she stopped crying the entire trip, we’d still get subjected to the protest pee when we tried to drive with her, where she’d pee in her travel crate as soon as it was placed in the car. We got that treatment on her very last long-distance trip, our return drive from the cottage two weeks ago.

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Kitty and Blueberry

One thing that never ceased to amaze me is how this shy, skittish cat became fast friends with a toddler. I know Blueberry is awesome and very good and gentle with the cat, but she’s still a toddler and kind of unpredictable. Blueberry would “read” bedtime stories to the kitty while she napped on the couch, and was constantly bringing her toys and interesting things to sniff. Kitty would follow Blueberry around for a surprisingly large part of the day (given how much elderly cats sleep), and often came in to sit and listen to me read bedtime stories to Blueberry. They’d “ooga-mooga” (rub noses) together, and roll on the floor in the sunbeams together. Blueberry was excellent at giving kitty just one or two treats, and kitty was always super-excited to hear her politely ask “Daddy, can I give the kitty a treat please?” and start crinkling the bag.

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Fluffball

She was super, super fluffy (Himalayan). But underneath all that fur she was always a small, dainty cat. She was a grazer who always left lots behind in her food bowl, just naturally skinny. All that fur was constantly flying off, and for a long time my wardrobe tended towards grey to hide the omnipresent cat hair.

Wayfare is incredibly allergic to cats, but had almost no problems with my kitty as long as she didn’t take a nap on Wayfare’s face. Many other people I’ve known with allergies didn’t even know I had a cat until they saw her, because their allergies weren’t triggered. I never thought I had cat allergies, but now I wonder if that’s just because of how awesome she was, as I find I get itchy eyes every now and then when I go visit my sister’s cat. It’s too soon to seriously consider whether we will get another cat, but I wonder if Wayfare’s allergies (and possibly Blueberry’s allergies, who also reacts to my sister’s cat but never to my kitty, even when smooshing her face into her side) will preclude us from getting another in the future.

Fur like that needs brushing, and for many years she would willingly come up on my lap and let me brush her. Normally she wasn’t allowed on my desk, but I’d let her up if she let me brush her for a bit. Starting a year or two before Blueberry was born, we were having more and more trouble getting her to accept regular brushing — she’d bite at the brush, or stop coming up on my lap entirely. So we got into a regular habit of cutting out big knots of hair as it bunched up instead. As she got older and less flexible, we had to really thin out the hair on her back near her tail because she couldn’t keep up with her grooming, and wouldn’t let us brush her. The past few months she wasn’t brushed at all: with the weight loss and dehydration we were just too afraid of hurting her or stressing her out, so she was just a big ball of mats across her sides and tummy — though miraculously the fur on top was still pristine and gorgeous (even the vet commented on it).

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Goodbye My Dear Friend

I stayed home from work and spent the day with her today, doing a bit of work on the laptop in the living room while she snoozed in a sunbeam from the front window. I’d pet her, and cry, and she’d purr for a few seconds and go back to sleep. At lunch I had mac ‘n cheese, and she woke up to lick some cheese sauce off my noodles, just like old times. I tried offering her food and treats, and while she took 3 treats she only touched food twice, and even then only got a few teaspoons in.

A half hour before it was time to go to the vet she woke up, had a bowel movement, and visited her food bowl. Just like a cat to make the decision hard on you at the last minute. I figured if she was indeed doing a bit better with a few more good days in her, the vet visit could just be a chance for some more subcutaneous fluids and a checkup. We started the vet visit with a health check to kind of assess where we were at in terms of quality of life remaining and make sure that this was a helpful move. She was down to 3.5 lbs, her kidneys had atrophied, she was anemic, and above all, she just lay down on the examination table and didn’t try to get away. I offered her more treats and she wouldn’t lift her head up to take them. Those last two were the deciding factors for me. She died peacefully while I pet her.

The house feels so empty. Which is weird, because I’m up working on my computer, and for the past few weeks she would have been down on the windowsill at the opposite end of the house, not able to manage the stairs to come up here and visit me. There’s no way I could hear or otherwise sense her from here if she were here, but somehow I can just feel the emptiness (the rest of the family left for the weekend in part so Blueberry wouldn’t have to deal with kitty’s death and daddy being a mess). In some ways I’ve slid into the loss gradually — for instance, she used to always steal the footrest under my desk for a bed, but her limited mobility has meant that she hasn’t been there for weeks, so checking before I put my feet up was already a thing I was getting over. I’m not sure I’ll be eating mac ‘n cheese or laying in the sun in the living room for quite a while though.

She was a loving, gentle cat, and she was loved by all who knew her. I miss her terribly.

Warning: this post is about sad stuff while I’m grieving, and writing it may just be more for me than you. Feel free to skip this one. Comments have been disabled.

My cat is downright ancient by feline standards, pushing eighteen and a half. Like many older cats, she has kidney failure, and we’ve known for a while now that her days are numbered. The past few weeks she’s had a rather poor trajectory, and it’s clear the end is going to come very soon.

So I’m left with a very hard decision on timing. She barely ate anything yesterday, and refused food this morning, along with other troubling signs like urinating on her cat bed and only having two tiny bowel movements this week.

With my dogs, there was absolutely no question about euthanasia — either as the right move or on the timing. They were in distress, and their health declined hour by hour, rather than day by day. Their deaths came quickly and suddenly, rather than at the end of a chronic illness, and euthanasia was an unquestionable mercy.

With my kitty it’s a much harder decision. She is on a path to basically starve to death, and that is not how I want her to go — I’m comfortable with a decision on euthanasia as an endpoint. But the timing is so hard.

She’s not in distress, she’s not yowling in pain… she’s just lying here in the sunshine, snoozing. But she hasn’t eaten more than a few mL of food in the past few days, and her energy is so low her awake time is measured in minutes, and if she does try to get up and walk she stumbles and falls. Her tummy groans, and she looks nauseous when she does eat, or falls asleep mid-chew. However, she could go on like that for another few days.

It’s hard to say for sure that an injection today is a more compassionate thing to do than one tomorrow, or waiting for some other end at home over the next few days.

I think it’s time. I’ve made our final appointment with the vet. But it’s hard to say goodbye to a dear friend and companion, and I wish I was more sure about this than “I think it’s the right move and the right time.” But waffling on the fine timing is not going to change the fact that I do have to say goodbye to my sweet fluffy baby sometime very soon.

Goodbye, old friend.

As much as I love blogs, if you’re coming to a topic for the first time and need a orientation and structure it’s hard to beat a good book. However, there are so many out there covering so many aspects of personal finance that it’s hard to know where to begin — especially as a Canadian, where suggestions from across the border can be hard to translate into practice here.

I’ve put together a reading guide to help people decide what Canadian personal finance books to read, which is a question I find myself answering a lot. I think something general and easy to read is a good place to start for nearly anyone. In fact, I recommend a few books designed to be general introductions — despite re-treading over some common ground, each brings a bit of a different view and adds information. That helps set the stage for the other books to follow, whether you need more help conquering debt and a budget, want to start investing, or just learning more about how to be a smarter consumer. A reading guide like this can also help put things in context: it’s hard to jump right in to investing and how to manage your retirement nest egg if you haven’t yet given any thought to the notion of saving for the future.

The reading pathway is a PDF infographic type document — click the image above or this link to download it.

I did reach out to a few others for their opinions on what to include for people starting out, but I’ve read a lot on the topic and used my judgement to create the pathway: the final curation, summaries, and opinions are all my own.

Disclaimers: I am the author of The Value of Simple, one of the entries in the pathway. I also embedded links to each book for convenience, and did use my Amazon affiliate code in those links. This did not affect my choice of books for the pathway.

Please feel free to share/mirror the PDF — the attribution is built in.