Blessed by the Potato

I’m not much of a big spender most of the time, so I usually manage to stay on-budget (or nearly so) without being obsessive about putting things in spreadsheets every day. Nonetheless, it’s still important to review things every month or two to make sure I’m staying on target and what-not, so I collect all my receipts in a box and add them all up (plus a generous estimate of my receiptless spending at Timmies) to see where I am. Well, with the wedding in October and what-not it turns out I haven’t sat down to do that in over 4 months. Ugh. My little box is overflowing and I think I’ve topped 100 receipts here to add up. The spending is outrageously overbudget, but to be fair includes Halloween spending, two car repairs (plus maintenance for that period), a new computer for myself (which had 3 different mail-in rebates totalling $100, none of which has arrived yet… grr), xmess presents, and an xbox (bought with xmas money). Aside from that stuff we didn’t do too bad.

Overall for the year we’re 11% over-budget, not counting wedding-related expenses (which, one way or another, will be one-time things) or my new computer. Oddly enough, the usual suspects of eating out and entertainment weren’t what sunk us. Instead, it was car repairs (30% over what I estimated/hoped/budgeted), gas (both natural gas for the house and gasoline for the car were 25% more expensive this year), groceries (almost 10% over every month, fairly consistently, with a small extra spike at the end thanks to glutardation), and hydro (~30% extra usage compared to last year, especially through the summer — I didn’t think I had the A/C on that much more, but I can’t think of anything else to explain it). That’s not a killer, because we had some pretty aggressive savings goals in that budget for a new car soon as well as a house at some point (Wayfare wants to get one in < ~2 years, but even with Toronto housing prices coming down 10%/year, it's going to take >3 years before it makes sense to buy vs rent; I’m also selling the rental plan, baby, selling it, because unless a miracle occurs I’m probably not going to have a firm long-term career established the instant I graduate).

On top of spending more than we’d hoped, our savings were hurt by the market downturn. I became fully invested in June, and since my car & other assets are next to worthless that means my overall net worth tracked the markets down, down down…

John Scalzi wrote about the Law of Internet Invocation 5 years ago, nearly to the day. It states simply “If you name them, they will come.” Through the magic of trackbacks and Google, it is far more likely that someone on the internet will find out that you’re talking about them and drop in for a visit. This can take reviewers by surprise since you don’t often expect or intend to invoke someone by talking about them, though this was the accepted pattern of devilry through the ages. Now it has come true for me a second time, as Jon Chevreau has appeared to accuse me of not reading all the way to the end when I reviewed Findependence Day.

I can see where there might be some confusion. I said the story was not great, which some would take to be a nice, obtuse way of saying it was terrible. It wasn’t — it was not great, as in just okay. It was decent, and as I said, worked very well as edutainment. But bored high school English students of the future are not going to be forced to write essays on the relationship between Jamie and his shrew-like wife Sheena, or exploring the role of Theo as a father figure in their Findependence Day unit sandwiched between MacBeth and The Mote In God’s Eye. Conversely, Twilight touched on some matters regarding the magic of compound interest, but I won’t be recommending that book as educational in the slightest.

I talked earlier about useful holidays gifts… in addition I got myself an Xbox with the monetary gifts. At $240 on a boxing day sale it seemed like a steal even if I only use it as a media centre… however, with another $100 needed for a wireless adapter (or $50 and a headache to set up an access point near the TV) and $60/year for Xbox Live, I’m not sure anymore that it was the best use of my money. Ah, well, the PS3 might be a better media centre (with blu-ray) out of the box, but all my friends have Xboxes so I hope to actually game with it. I also planned to pick up Rock Band for it, but holy crap, that’s another $200! Add in two more games at $80 each and that’s my entertainment budget for the whole year blown! On top of that I got a return or refurb unit, as it already had an Xbox Live ID set up as well as a connection to “Aaron’s HP Media Center” set up, which kind of bums me out (but not enough to actually get my butt down to the store to return it).

From Wayfare I got a Soda Stream/Soda Club home carbonated drink maker. It’s basically a CO2 tank that you can use to make carbonated water at home, to which you can mix in concentrated syrup to make your own sodas. I haven’t tried their cola flavour yet — as a die-hard Coke (or recently, Coke Zero) fan, I doubt I would like it — but the lemon-lime and root beer has been pretty good. It’s a bit of a novelty to mix up your own drinks at home, and they also claim that it’s cheaper and more environmentally friendly to do so. On the surface, that makes a lot of sense: why ship fully prepared/diluted pop around the country along with the extra packaging that entails? You’re basically paying to ship water, when it makes much more sense to just send the syrup and dilute it with carbonated water at home/on site (like movie theatres and restaurants do with fountain pop).

Unfortunately, while it might be slightly better for the environment, at the prices they’re charging it’s not cheaper. A big part of the problem is just with their implementation: they don’t have the kind of volume or distribution network that Coke or Pepsi have. I think this scheme would work really well if Coke or Pepsi decided to start offering in-home fountain pop units and sold syrup boxes at the grocery stores instead of cans and bottles. For Soda Club though, you don’t just walk down to your local grocery store (at least, not in Canada) and pick up a bottle of syrup and a carbonation tank. There are only two places that seem to sell the carbonation tanks, one in Paris, Ontario, the other in Mississauga; and nowhere local that sells syrup.

To order online, you can get 2 carbonation tanks at $25, which is rated to carbonate 120 L of water. In testing, we found that the sodas were fairly flat at the recommended carbonation level, so realistically this would probably carbonate 90 L. A syrup bottle is $5, which can be diluted into 12 L of pop, but again in testing we found the sodas “weak” at the recommended dilution, so 9 L would be more realistic per bottle. So to make 90 L of pop would cost $25 + (10x$5) = $75 plus $5 shipping, or $80. And that’s US dollars. To be generous, let’s peg the exchange rate at 1 USD = $1.10 Canadian, so $88 for 90 L (or to be very optimistic, 120 L), and we’ll also ignore the cost of the machine and CO2 tanks in the first place. To put that into 355 mL can servings, that would be $0.347 per “can” (or $0.26 per “can” if we want to be very generous with how far the supplies will stretch and what the exchange rate will be).

That does compare favourably to full-priced pop at $5 per 12-pack ($0.416 per can). However, I never buy pop at that price. Deals of 3 cases for $10 come up quite regularly ($0.278 per can), and I often stock up on pop at prices as cheap as $2.50 per case ($0.208/can)!

There is some benefit to avoiding the environmental impact of having to recycle all those pop cans, but I’m not sure I’m willing to pay 60% more for my pop to get it. Plus, the carbonator is loud, which makes sneaking a pop while Wayfare sleeps harder, and all this is assuming that I’m ordering enough syrup to make 90 L (equivalent to 253 cans, 21 cases of 12) at one time. I would drink that well within the ~6 month shelf life of the syrup if that was all the pop I was drinking… but while the lemon-lime and root beer flavours were passable, I haven’t tried the cola yet. If that is “off-brand” and I still drink Coke the majority of the time I reach for a soda, then those secondary flavours might sit around longer, and I might need to spread the syrup orders out, increasing the shipping costs.

The Tax-Free Savings Account is now live. For those not keeping up, it’s the new complement to the RRSP and the only good thing “Canada’s New Government” has given us. You can contribute money to it ($5000 per year) to grow tax-free until you feel like taking it out. While the banks might charge a fee to withdraw, there’s no tax penalty (unlike an RRSP), and you can recontribute any withdrawls in later years so you don’t lose the tax shelter space (again, unlike RRSPs) so it’s a great account not only for retirement, but also for medium/long-term savings goals — no longer will the interest on that car down payment get taxed for the 3+ years you’re saving up while you drive your current one into the ground!

I filled my $5000 up this morning. For myself, I went with a brokerage TFSA at TD Waterhouse so I could hold stocks/mutual funds in it. If you’re going to hold cash/bonds for the long term, it makes sense to shelter those in the TFSA, but at the moment I’m nearly fully invested in equities/income trusts. I was planning on putting my holdings of Fort Chicago (FCE.UN) in there, in part because part of that distribution is interest income (which should be sheltered), but Yellow Pages (YLO.UN) was down to $7.11 this morning (and closed down at $7.02), which meant I could fit an even 700 units in there (vs the 687 of Fort Chicago) which just seemed neater and cleaner to my mind, so I did that even though it might not have been the most tax-efficient thing I could have thrown in there.

Wayfare, if all went according to plan, should have also contributed to her TFSA today, holding cash in a high-interest savings account at PC Financial to represent our need for cash savings.

I was talking to Netbug about the TFSA over the holidays, so hopefully he remembered on his own to contribute to the one he was going to set up (also at PC Financial). If not, consider this your reminder!