Blessed by the Potato

Time to make it official: I will be putting my ebook Potato’s Short Guide to DIY Investing to rest in November.

What does sunsetting mean? It means that the ebook will be going out of “print”, taken down from my website as well as the Amazon and Kobo stores, but not immediately. I plan to pull the plug near the end of November, 2014.

Why are you retiring the book? Though the book is still useful and not wrong, things have changed at TD and in the marketplace, in particular the introduction of commission-free ETF trading at several online brokerages. However, the main reason is that I have a new, more comprehensive book coming out. Unfortunately I can’t share too many details about the new book yet as it is still being reviewed by the potential publisher. By the end of November I should have more details to share on the publishing path and timelines.

What can you say about the new book? It’s longer and more comprehensive — nearly triple the length of the original. I’ve tightened up the writing and added many more helpful figures, and it addressed years of reader feedback and suggestions. It includes detailed how-tos for three investment options that represent ideal trade-offs in terms of cost and complexity: Tangerine’s index funds, TD’s e-series funds, and ETFs (with a worked example using Questrade’s commission-free purchases). It has a much stronger focus on planning and process, to help you set up and stick to an investing plan.

What does this mean for right now? Unfortunately until I hear back from the potential publisher I can’t promise anything in terms of release date or special offers. I want to offer anyone who buys the current ebook now a discount on the upcoming book to make the choice simple, however I can’t promise that as it my not be under my control. It’s up to you whether you want to wait months (or possibly over a year) for a newer, more comprehensive book, or to buy the decent short ebook that you can download right now. I don’t want to prejudice you against Amazon or Kobo, but if I do end up with enough control to offer discounts on the future book, I will only be able to do so for people who buy through my online storefront (ePub/PDF versions — sorry Kindle owners).

Quick question/straw poll for the bloggers and journalists: what format would you like review copies to be in?
1) ARC electronic (placeholder art)
2) Final electronic
3) “Report style” hardcopy ARC (letter paper form factor)
4) Final hardcopy (trade paperback form factor)

I had a meeting with the artist and my new cover art isn’t going to be ready until November, and that’s also when I’ll hear back from the publishers on whether they will take it on or if I’ll be self-publishing. I’d like to give people as much time as possible to read at their leisure (and also to collect blurbs if you like it!), but I know that an ARC with placeholder art can look a little amateurish, and more importantly can’t really be passed along to your own friends and readers through a giveaway (though I can follow with final hardcopies later for that).

I’m interested to hear what the consensus is before I start firing off review requests, and will also note that I can start sending ARCs this weekend for those interested in that format.

It’s been a hell of a run here at the day job with two massive projects back-to-back. I know pagecount is a very rough metric of productivity at best, but within two weeks we had a ~44-page grant and a ~40-page grant to submit, of which ~36 and ~18 pages were for me to write, and all of which were mine to edit. Some writing is more labourous than others — 36 pages of unfocused blog rambling is something I might do in my spare time over two weeks if I was in the right mood, whereas single pages of highly technical material can take days to churn out, much of which may be spent reading research materials to get and reference the data — but however you slice it that was a lot of work. And a lot of overtime to make it happen with the crunch on.

I can hear you asking “but Potato, how could you possibly work so hard and pull so many all-nighters and still be such an awesome daddy to Blueberry, while keeping up your 10-hour-per-week second job inspecting subway cars for the TTC?”*. Of course one part is that I completely neglected the blog over the last month, but that was a pretty minor contribution to the war effort. The answer is the magical combination of salty food, refined sugar, a significant calorie surplus, and caffeine. That’s pretty much the recipe for supercharging your brain to keep you going and focused for such a task, but it comes at a steep cost: between not exercising (Wayfare and Blueberry made it into the car early enough many mornings to give me a ride to the subway so I lost many of my morning walks), the stress, and the lack of sleep, I’ve put on 20 pounds in the last year, all of which came in sudden bursts during two particularly busy periods (this last month and the insanity last fall).

With the book pretty much done and under review at the prospective publisher(s), and my other InDesign project shelved, my side project is now to lose that weight and try to undo some of the damage. That’s a tall order: I’ve had no success at this in the past. Though I managed to make it through my PhD gaining basically no weight, I gained an amount that can only be described in fuck-ton units through my MSc and have never managed to lose any of it. I suspect it is an evil curse from all those Western blots (because if half-assed attempts at dieting and semi-serious exercise regimes didn’t get rid of it then it has to be supernatural, right?).

Anyway, let’s move on to something you might want to read about.

Over on the Reddit, a user asked me to create “the complete rent-vs-buy manifesto” to bring together the salient points when making the comparison and decision. To a large extent that would just mean putting some organization to about a half-dozen posts I’ve already written to form one larger, coherent post. It’s kind of an interesting challenge and I almost reflexively started outlining how I would approach it. However, I’m crazy enough without having a manifesto to my name, and it’s hard enough to get first time buyers to even look at their rental options with a 1000-word post — I don’t think a 5,000 word soup-to-nuts summary is really going to help.

Oh, I see the Ballparkinator fix is still on my to-do list. I’ll get to it real soon.

Have I talked about the book much yet? (Checks back, not really). So it’s done. Not like ready-to-put-on-the-bookstore-shelf done, but done enough that I have sent it (or queries) to publishers to see if they want to publish it instead of publishing it myself. With all the feedback/feature creep from the beta testers it ended up being legitimate personal finance book length — about 42,000 words or about 200 trade paperback pages, with 20 helpful figures (I consider the bunnies helpful). That’s more than triple the length of the first book, so it’s way, way beyond just “PSGtDIYI 2nd ed” and is its own book (with that how-to/implementation stuff as the core of it). I have a new title that I really like (I know a publisher may choose a new title if they take it on but I’ve gone ahead and spent a few bucks to register the associated domain).

To be realistic, the odds are that a publisher will not take it on. I’m hoping they will of course, but my plan is to be ready to launch into self-publishing as soon as the rejections come in. From what I’ve read, they typically take ~6 months to make a decision so I’ve got a few months yet. Still, I’m moving in the background to continue to tighten up the editing, get the formatting ready for the different form factors, and I’ve retained an artist to help me with a new cover design. I’ll definitely go with a hardcopy version this time around.

What I’m struggling with now is whether I should continue to keep things pretty hush-hush or start getting the word out. I don’t want to publicly say what the snazzy new title is yet because that could still yet change (especially if a publisher has a better idea), but I also don’t want to leave it until a day before release. I want to start sending out advanced reading copies, but don’t want to step on the publisher’s expert toes on marketing if I do end up getting a publisher — after all, that’s the primary reason for getting one.

The broad sketch of my plan is basically to wait another month or so before I start doing any of this stuff, and then to start with ARCs for bloggers. I don’t know whether the 6-ish-month clock for hearing back from publishers starts when I sent the first query, or only after the full manuscript arrived. I should hear back by December, so if I don’t hear back by then I’d like to launch the self-published version in time for xmas shopping, new year’s resolutions, and RRSP season. I know some works started as self-published items and transitioned to traditional presses, but aside from those exceptions I don’t really know if initiating a self-publishing push will scuttle a potential publishing deal if I had just waited an extra few months. Though I’m afraid to push too hard too soon on self-publishing, I also don’t want to wait forever (and miss a big part of the yearly cycle) to give extra time to a process that has a ~90% rejection rate.

Anyway, lack of sleep, dilemmas, too much stress weight, manifestos, and soon I’m going to have to start “sunsetting” Potato’s Short Guide to DIY Investing.

* – or alternatively: “what’s with all the whining? 83 hours/week should be your starting point for the work week. That leaves you with 85 hours of non-work every week: put in 18 to watch Blueberry, 1.5 to get groceries, 3 to wash the dishes and clean up, 2 for meals you’re not eating at your desk or during Blueberry time, 2.5 for personal hygiene, and you’ve still got 8.3 hours per day left to do whatever the hell you want. Don’t whine about a lack of sleep just because you chose to spend some of that time with your wife, checking your email, watching TV, telling people on the internet how wrong they are, or massacring video game orcs to de-stress instead.”

I did not have the chance to follow the Ontario election in depth, and haven’t commented at all on it. Now that it’s over, there isn’t much to say.

Except one thing: Hudak’s “million jobs plan” was shown fairly early on to be based on flawed math. This was an excellent opportunity for him to take the race* by changing his platform based on the data and corrected information. Not only could he then have run on a sounder plan (though in the end that plan would likely have looked very much like the other parties’), but he could have distanced the provincial party from the federal cons and their well-known disdain for data.

Instead, the message was “well, in my heart and mind…” [it’s true]. For so long I have had so much trouble relating to conservatives — there is a perfectly valid basis for disagreeing with one another on how we should run the country, what roles the government should play, and whether that should be minimized or optimized based on various value systems and circumstances of the day. But some opinions and plans are so out there that I’m just left shaking my head. And now I know: the disdain for data goes so deep that — Hudak at least — lives in a fantasy world. That or the conspiracy version where he is so interested in appeasing the corporations/lobbyists he truly works for that it doesn’t matter if the thin veneer of reason for playing into their interests comes off, he’s sticking to that flawed plan.

I know the centre and left are far from perfect, and at both the federal and provincial level the Liberals have had their share of scandals and waste, but it’s the lesser evil in my mind. Hopefully Toronto at least has seen enough of reactionary leaps to the right — with Rob Ford, Mike Harris, Harper, and now a glimpse at a near-miss of the Hudak fantasy — to perhaps give us a generation or two of respite from the conservative fantasies.

* – Not that I was rooting for the provincial conservatives — I’m definitely a left-leaning centrist if anything — but as many commenters had said going into the election, with the sentiment against the Liberals and the illogical move by the NDP to trigger the election in the first place over a budget they should have been crowing about, it was his race to lose.

Back when we talked about the gross debt service ratio, we discussed how sometimes a simple rule can scale in surprising ways.

A set percentage of your house’s value is a very common rule-of-thumb for estimating ongoing maintenance costs — 1% is typically seen these days (and what I use), though older articles from before the massive run-up in prices can be double that. It’s a tough thing to estimate accurately because there are so many line items and they’re all irregular; however, maintenance is a pretty big part of the cost of ownership so you can’t ignore it when considering the costs of shelter. A rule-of-thumb at least gets it in people’s minds — people who might otherwise only consider the costs they had to pay in the last few months (indeed, so many bad amateur rent-vs-buy considerations just use the mortgage payment). So if it’s even approximately right to +/- 50% I’m happy to continue to spread the rule-of-thumb.

In a comment this morning, Geoff says:

My issue with such articles about homeownership is that anytime they mention home maintenance, they use a percentage of the house value to estimate costs; this worked maybe when home price reflected the size of the house. But there’s no way that my 1961 built 1200 sq.ft house in toronto (worth I’d say $750,000 easy) costs more to maintain than my in-laws 3500 sq.ft house in Trenton (worth I’d say $150,000).

And that’s totally fair. The rule-of-thumb isn’t perfect, indeed even for Geoff and his immediate neighbours their maintenance costs may not be that close because of luck or the materials and workmanship they choose. To some extent size will matter, but a maintenance rule-of-thumb won’t scale perfectly with size, either: it costs so much to get a new furnace in the first place, and only a bit more for a bigger one; likewise the expensive kitchen/bathroom/etc. stuff only scales up a bit for larger houses, with most of the extra space being bedrooms/offices/living rooms that are basically simple shells. And within a jurisdiction size is usually captured by price increases anyway.

But keep in mind that there are other factors that will make a smaller place in the city more expensive to maintain than a larger one in the country, so there will be some scaling with price (though it’s never going to be a perfect set percentage).

For instance, the potentially higher labour costs in the city is a somewhat obvious one, but a much bigger factor is that the standards will be different. More expensive houses (larger or smaller) will be more expensive to maintain because they are lived in by people with more expensive tastes (or are situated in neighbourhoods with more expensive standards). For example, on PEI my parents’ kitchen is now about 20 years old, and still perfectly fine — heck, it’s probably still one of the more recent ones out there! In Toronto a 20-year-old kitchen would be scandalous and require a reno — a 10-year refresh is de rigueur — though in that case it may not be a cash cost as you can choose to not do it and just suffer relative depreciation (or reduced appreciation) relative to the trendy neighbourhood. Likewise, when a kitchen renovation does come up on PEI a whole new set of appliances would likely come in a fair bit under $5000; in a prestigious Toronto ‘hood each stainless steel, celebrity-chef-approved piece might run that much. Similarly for the rest: the standard for outdoor appearance in a less-expensive area might be a bag of grasseed and patience whereas in a million-dollar neighbourhood landscapers, sod, and shrubbery would be expected. Etc.

Indeed, it’s for this reason that I think the more common rule-of-thumb is value-based rather than size-based. And for cases of extremely expensive small properties or very cheap large ones, well, you’ll hopefully know to nudge your estimates up or down appropriately.

I want to be clear up front: I like Rob Carrick. He talks a lot of sense, and is one of the few voices out there talking about the potential dangers to homeownership-at-any-cost, and breaking the misconceptions about renting. I also think the “rent and invest the difference” message is incredibly important — it was the central idea behind creating the rent-vs-buy calculator.

That said, I had a lot of head-shaking moments at his column this weekend called “the renter’s guide to successful investing.” These are mostly quibbles to be sure, but there are a lot of quibbles for a thousand-word article.

I really get the concept of trying to make advice bite-sized and manageable: something close enough that people actually follow is better than precise advice that people tune out (indeed, I have been guilty of that often enough). However, the maxim is that things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler. I think this is unfortunately a case of over-simplifying. Similarly, I just don’t get his “real life ratio”¹.

First off the message about saving is confusing. At the start he says “Homeowners build wealth by paying their mortgage down and increasing their equity in a house that they will presumably be able to sell for more than they paid. […] A homeowner with a paid off house has the luxury of choosing to: continue living mortgage-free in the home (and rent-free, for that matter);[…]” which leaves off the issue of homeowners also needing to save. He doesn’t actually say “forced savings” at any point, but this statement brings that terrible idea to mind. Homeowners also need to save — indeed, you can’t live “rent-free” in a paid-off house because you have to pay property tax, upkeep, insurance, etc. That notion does come in at the end, off-handedly: “Just as a homeowner needs to have dedicated savings for retirement, so does the renter.” That idea really doesn’t come through in the article, unfortunately, and I’m sure many missed it.

The big issue though is this mysterious 1.5% rule-of-thumb he comes up with. I mean, the logical thing to do would be to take some average figure for the principal paid down with a mortgage payment and use that. Or to go to a rent-vs-buy calculator and find out what the actual cost difference is and invest that. Instead, he takes an estimate based on maintenance + (1/2)*(property tax). What?

This is not remotely accurate for the areas where the rent-vs-buy debate is most important. Check it out for Toronto: the so-called “renter’s dividend” is almost twice what Rob’s rule-of-thumb predicts. I get 2.7% (if you insist on putting it into a percentage of the house price instead of a dollar value for each situation), and that’s for the apples-to-apples case. If you’re a renter saving up for your first place and plan to move up from your rented accommodations (e.g. to move to a house from a small apartment), then you should be saving that difference, which might be 5% of the house’s value.

Secondly, it really irks me that he doesn’t ever suggest that you should calculate it accurately. The rule-of-thumb is all that’s presented, and that is further simplified down to 1.5%.

Now rather than just bitch and not provide a solution, here is a new rule-of-thumb derivation:

Rule-of-Thumb for Amount of “Renter’s Dividend” for Apples-to-Apples Comparisons

How much does it cost to own a house? Roughly speaking property taxes are a hair under 1% in many municipalities, combine that with insurance to make the estimate an even 1%; insurance maintenance rules-of-thumb are about 1% (as Rob has in the article); transaction fees and/or discretionary “while we’re at it…” renovations run about 0.5%/yr amortized out (~10% every 20 years); the last tricky part is figuring out the mortgage payment — remember the renter wants to save the cash flow difference, so this time we do want to include the principal repayment portion. For a 25-year mortgage with 10% down at 3.5%, the mortgage is 5.5% of the property value. The total cash cost of owning is thus 8.0% (which includes principal repayment).

So find what your rent is as a portion of that, subtract, and voila.
Toronto: price-to-rent of 240X translates to rent being 5% of the price of a house; thus save 3%.
Vancouver: price-to-rent of 330X translates to rent being 3.6% of the price of a house; thus save 4.4%
Canada: if the more typical price-to-rent is 180X in other centres in the country, then rent would be 6.7%, so save 1.3% (I guess this is kinda close to what Rob got).

[Note the rule-of-thumb figures are not quite in perfect agreement with the spreadsheet — people should also save what the homeowner would be (e.g., 10% of income for retirement, depending on your guideline of choice]

Rule-of-Thumb for Amount of “Renter’s Dividend” for Moving-Up Comparisons

Now if you’re in a small apartment but planning to move up to a house it gets a bit more complicated. If you want to budget as though you were already in that house and saving the difference, then you would be saving much more. To make the rule-of-thumb simple, assume that the move up is for double the cost of your current place. That is, if you’re in a 2-bedroom apartment and want to move up to a 3-bedroom detached house, assume that if the house is $500,000, your apartment is $250,000.

So if you’re in a Toronto apartment, saving up for your first house (and planning on living to that budget — i.e., it’s not so far in the future that you’re counting on significant wage increases to make it work), then you’d want to save the “renter’s dividend” from your rental versus a comparable condo (half the house) plus all of the cost of owning on the difference between that condo and the house (approximated as half the house). So that first half would depend on the price-to-rent in your city, say 3% in Toronto, plus 8% of the difference, for a total of 11% on the half the value of the house, or 5.5% on the full value of the house.

Now maybe Rob went through a similar rule-of-thumb derivation, and was simply afraid that the numbers were too large — either that no one would believe the so-called “renter’s dividend” would be so enormous in this environment, or that the suggested amount to save would shock people. Moving on.

“Whether you’re a renter or an everyday investor, there’s only one way to set up a disciplined investing program. You need to have money transferred electronically into your investment account from your chequeing account every time you get paid, or once per month.” [emphasis mine] Ok, maybe it’s just hyperbole, but there are lots of ways to set up a disciplined investing program — as individual as the person. Sure, I’m a big advocate for automation: there are lots of good reasons for it to work and it’s proven². I make a strong case for it in my new book, too. But it’s not the only way. Indeed, automation is very much a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do recommendation: for my situation, with highly seasonal spending and freelance income, I do almost all of my saving in the first half of the year. If I went automated I would just have to compensate with a larger savings account to buffer the changes in my budget. Plus a natural frugal inclination means I don’t worry about blowing my budget just because I don’t hide my money from myself. I recognize that there can be better ways: some people for instance, respond best by taking out a loan for the next year’s savings to invest, and then target paying down the loan. Others may target a few “no spend” pay periods and save in say 3-4 bi-weekly binges (even those who just save the “triple bonus” pay periods that come up twice per year on a bi-weekly paycheque system manage to hit a 7.6% savings rate, which is not terrible). Whatever works³.

A penultimate, minor quibble: the first table is near-useless. It’s a table of “if you get X% return saving $Y per month, after 30 years you’ll have $Z pile of money.” It’s completely dissociated from the message of the article. Would have been much more useful to combine the first and second tables: pick a rate of return (say 6%) and show that you would have enough to buy the average house price (or not, or buy two, whatever the case is) for each city if you rent and invest the difference.

A final complaint: he ends off with a specific mutual fund recommendation. I know he doesn’t phrase it precisely as a recommendation, instead as an example backing up what returns to expect (which is sadly needed when many readers may think investing means a HISA at 1.2% nominal), but still, the mention of one specific fund to end a column titled “…guide to successful investing” irked.

1. As an aside, if the real life ratio spreadsheet is targeted at potential home buyers I would have built-in defaults on some of the calculations based off purchase price, like mortgage payments, property tax, insurance, and maintenance, because first-time buyers may not know these numbers in advance.

3. Which yes, is usually automation/pay-yourself-first.