Category: Opinion

A comment John T. Reed makes is that if you’re unable to look a grown adult in the eye, listen to them passionately argue why you should do something, then say “No” to them, you shouldn’t be a real estate investor. It’s an easy thing to hypothetically say “sure, I’d just say no”, but the reality can be much harder.

Beyond real estate, this holds true for almost all investments. My grandmother got pulled into mutual funds when she got talking to an investment advisor years ago. No one in the family believes for a second that she understood what she was purchasing. We’re all happy that they worked out OK for her (although she had one fund that’s been averaging about 0.5% for the last 5 years), but she invested because she couldn’t say “No” to the guy trying to sell to her. NOT because she thought it was a good investment.

Some time ago I rented a room from a friend of the family. He and I got talking when I mentioned that I was interested in learning about real estate and would like to take him out for a beer and pick his brain sometime. One thing lead to another, and once he’d figured out I had some cash, he wanted me to loan it to him. Hesitantly I told him I’d consider it if he provided me with full details about his financial situation and credit history (including his credit report) and let me discuss it with a friend who was a banker. A period of time went by and one day he left me a message saying his lawyer would contact me to arrange the money transfer. After I couldn’t get in touch with him, eventually the lawyer called me and I told him I hadn’t been given the paperwork I needed for the loan. Things heated up when my landlord demanded the loan, threatened to end our “friendship” if I didn’t go through with the deal (without any of the paperwork he’d promised to provide) and eventually he evicted me. This actually created a conflict with the family member I knew him through and we no longer talk (my family member or the landlord friend).

Saying “No” can be tough, especially if you have a sweet, sensitive soul like Mr. Cheap.

Multi-level marketing schemes (such as Amway) are built on it being hard to say “No”. People pressure their friends, who join and get indoctrinated into pressuring more people to join. Most people wouldn’t be interested in the “opportunity”, but having a friend or family member passionately trying to convince us, it takes a strong heart to listen to them out, smile and say “No thanks”. When someone you care about starts getting angry that you aren’t agreeing with them, a little voice in the back of your head always seems to chime in “why not just go along with them?”.

A blog post I read sometime back (can’t remember the site or I’d link to it) detailed the difficulty the blogger had in being the heavy and telling her tenants that they couldn’t have a party. This is part of being a landlord, and if you can’t hack it, stick to ETFs.

I love to learn about new investments and business ideas, but it’s tough to talk to someone about it for a while than say “thanks for the info, but I’m not interested”. I’ve had people get quite upset with me when I wasn’t interested in being a part of their business venture (and they got even more upset when they pushed and I explained the problems with their business and why I wasn’t interested). Venture capitalists love to say to people that they “aren’t ready to invest right away but they’d love to talk to the principals when they get the business more developed”. Newbies don’t realize this is a nice way of saying “No”.

Most of the bad financial situations I’ve gotten into in life, I had a bad feeling going into it, but just found it too hard to tell the person “No”.

What have you said “Yes” to and immediately regretted? Has anyone gone from being a “Yes (wo)man” to a “No (wo)man” and how did you do it?

SWM seeks a good woman who:

• Knows how to keep books, do taxes, and earns a good income
• Knowledge of Canadian investment or real estates laws and taxation rules would be a plus
• Can manage rental property duties such as:  screening tenants, small repairs, renovation estimates, managing contractors, rough property appraisals, negotiations, etc
• Lives frugally, doesn’t like expensive food, vacations or entertainment
• Ideally owns an extensive investment portfolio and / or real estate

Please include pictures of the real estate and copies of your portfolio holdings when you contact Mr. Cheap at [email protected].

I hate tipping of any sort and I wish the practice didn’t exist. Don’t get me wrong, I tip at restaurants and bars like everyone else, but I don’t like it.

I’ve heard that tipping is a way to make up for a lack of a decent wage for waiters, delivery persons etc who have to work hard. My question is why can’t they get paid a market rate like everyone else? What is different about restaurants and bars?

Another reason I’ve heard is that you should tip for good service. My question is, if the person is just doing their job then why do you have to pay extra?

Most workers get compensated for doing a good or exceptional job by raises, promotions, bonuses which comes from the employer. I realize this compensation gets passed back to the consumer and I’m fine with that. I’d rather that food prices in restaurants go up 10% to pay for a better wage for workers (if the wages are too low). I also haven’t noticed any correlation between tipping and service – it appears that most waiters expect a tip and their performance is based on other factors.

There are some odd occupations that can get tips, baggage handlers at the airport? Shouldn’t you get arrested for that?.  One of the things that bugs me the most about tipping is why some workers get tips and most don’t?

It seems that waiters and bartenders, delivery workers are the biggest recipients of tips. But if you tip a bartender for grabbing a beer and removing the cap for you, why don’t you tip the person who works at the beer store who has to go into the back and grab the beer? What about gas stations attendants? What about the postman? Do you give them a tip for making it to your house that day?

How about if you get great customer service on the phone? Do you offer to paypal a tip to them? And what about the ten year old in Asia who spent part of his 12 hour work day on your new running shoes, did anyone tip him? I just can’t understand why some people get tips and others don’t.

In Australia, there are no tips in restaurants and when I was there a few years ago, I didn’t notice the service was any worse than it normally is here in Toronto. The other great thing about Oz is that both tips and  taxes are included in the menu price so whatever the menu price is, that’s what you pay.

When you go to the dentist/doctor – do you give them a tip? What about their receptionist? If they do a great job why not reward them a little extra. What about your bus/street car driver? What about your co-workers? If one of them gives you a little extra help do you give them a tip?

And what about social situations where you have a group bill and different people want to tip different amounts? I personally think that generally 10% of the gross bill is sufficient, but many times I’ve been in the situation where I’m out with friends and the bill might be $100 – I think we should leave $10 tip, $15 max (we’re talking very average service here), but some guys want to leave $20, and some guys want to leave $30 or $35?

Never mind the fact that the amount they put in doesn’t always correspond to the amount of tip they think we should be leaving. Do I have to put in extra money to make up for the fact that someone else wants to overtip? Do they have to put in extra to make up for my lessor tip?

I read a great story a while ago (can’t remember where unfortunately) where the person went out to lunch with some co-workers, they had individual bills, and one of her co-workers thought she gave too much tip and proceeded to take some of the tip and put it in her own pocket (I call this stealing).

Am I out of line here? Does it not make more sense if tipping didn’t exist and let the work/wage equation sort itself out?

I was recently tagged by my blog partner Mr. Cheap in his post – Courses I’d Like To Take. I’ve managed to take the fun and creativity out of this meme by putting serious courses with boring names – but that’s what I came up with 🙂

Following in the tradition of Mr. Cheap I’d like to suggest a couple of courses that I’d like to teach as well as a couple that I’d like to take:

Courses to teach

Financial & retirement planning for DIY wannabes – it’s not as hard as most people think it is so this course could allow people to either become DIYers or at least know what they are talking about when working with an advisor.

Home staging course – my wife & I have fixed up and staged three homes, watched countless hours of HGTV and attended many open houses, which as far as I’m concerned makes us world class experts. This course would cover the basics as well as trying to focus on big improvements for low costs rather than just ending up with the best looking house.

Courses to take

Financial planning courses – no I don’t want to take the same course I’m teaching – but one of the ideas I had was to be a financial advisor in retirement or possibly as a second career. I don’t know how realistic this is since I’m not interested in doing sales and working only part time might not fit too well either. Unfortunately giving financial advice is not something that you can legally just start doing – you need certain qualifications.

Handyman courses – I’m thinking electrical & carpentry here – I’m not crazy about doing renovation work but being skilled at this sort of thing would lead to a good part-time or occasional work in retirement if desired (or needed!). Electrical might be a problem since you have to be licensed so maybe carpentry might be more feasible.

Ok, I’ve been tagged by my buddy Brip Blap to publicly declare a goal and hopefully by making it public I will be able to stick to it. So even though he conveniently didn’t make a declaration himself :), here’s mine…

Lose 10 pounds!

This isn’t a difficult goal since I’ve done it before however I’d like to be able to lose the weight (and possibly more) and keep it off.

Some history

In July of last year I hit a personal best weight of 201 pounds (I’d guess my ideal weight is 165 pounds) so I started watching what I eat/drink and managed to get down to about 182 by April of this year. Unfortunately over the last six months my weight has crept back up to 192 which is not good. So the goal is to get back to 182 and stay there.

How will I do it?

If it worked once then it will work again…these are some of the things for me to focus on:

Beer – I love beer. In my perfect dream world I would spend every night on the couch watching bad movies and my favourite sports teams (Leafs & Bills) and drink beer. The problems with beer are that it’s not an overly healthy food, when I drink it I tend to stay up too late and get hungry and eat everything in sight, and lastly if I have too many then I’ll be tired/hungover the next day and will be more inclined to eat crap foods instead of healthy foods.

Action Item #1: Drink less beer.

Diet – I’m pretty partial to eating healthy foods such as salads however I do like to eat a lot of unhealthy foods in unhealthy quantities. I also eat a lot of carbs for which I’ll blame my wife who is addicted to them 🙂

Action Item #2: Concentrate on eating better – less fat, less carbs, less quantity.

Exercise – I do stay pretty active but clearly more needs to be done. For the last six months I have been riding my bike to work everyday (20 minute ride), I play hockey once a week and I usually go roller blading for about 40 minutes once or twice a week. This may sound good but in my younger days I used to be an exercise fanatic. While I don’t think I can ever get to the fitness levels I had 10 years ago, I can do a lot better. I will also have to make up for the fact that I won’t be able to ride my bike and roller blade much longer due to the weather.

I hate to blame my lack of fitness on age because at my age (39) there are guys playing pro hockey and climbing mountains so clearly I’m not “too old”. My theory as to why it is harder to exercise as we get older is because of lifestyle. When I was younger and didn’t have a family and not many obligations, I had plenty of time and opportunities to exercise. For example in a one week period I might have had 15 opportunities to exercise – so even if I only took advantage of six of those opportunities, that was still quite a bit of exercise. Now I might only have five opportunities to get exercise a week so if I only take advantage of two of those times, then that’s not very much exercise.

Action item #3 – Increase exercise by going jogging once a week. This might have to increase once my bike riding & roller blading stops.

So that’s my public declaration – I’m not going to tag anyone else since I think Brip Blap already tagged half the internet 🙂 but I’ll leave it up to anyone reading to carry it on if they wish.

Still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets

After much soul-searching (and spending half of every other day fixating on how much I didn’t want to be there) I quit my new job on Monday. To be fair to them, they were an amazing group of friendly, smart people.

Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet

My reason for quitting is somewhat hard to explain to non-technical people, but basically they had a very complex system they wanted me to work on, and I wasn’t able to get the other members of the technical team to provide me with information about how it worked. The other people there have been working on the system for years, and I think they didn’t realize (and I wasn’t able to convince them) that one sentence responses to questions aren’t enough to get people up-to-speed. I tried talking to the group and making adjustments, but it just seemed to stir up bad feelings (and didn’t get me any further to getting up-to-speed). In all fairness, this is probably a cop-out. I could have just started digging through the code-base and traced what they’ve done over the last 5 years and figure out how the system works from the ground up, but I suspected they’d get impatient with me going through this exercise (it would have taken months) and I wasn’t too happy to dive into that when there’s someone sitting next to me who could give me the information I needed but wouldn’t. Plus their system was built on custom hardware, which isn’t my forté (damn, damn serial communication!), so I was struggling even with this approach.

So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test

I’ve hit the point where, given that it didn’t work out at what was in almost all respects a great company, that I’m really not cut out for 9-5 life. After a string of bad experiences, at some point I have to admit that the common element is me. People are amazed at how little cash I live off of, and it’s really not due to much beyond that I find standard employment far, far more painful than most, and therefore have had to figure out a way to get by on less. Paul Graham perhaps put it best, when talking about the transition from school to work, that “You’ve gone from guest to servant.” I don’t care how modest the house is, but I need to be master of it.

Ch-ch-changes
Just gonna have to be a different man

Given that I’ve failed at being an entrepreneur and repeatedly failed at being a good little worker (pity poor, poor Mr. Cheap! 😉 ), I’ve decided that I’m going to focus on moving for the rest of the month (I’ve found a new place, and I’m going to start trying to get rid of “stuff” before the move). Starting in November I’m planning to decide on areas that I’m interested in applying to for a PhD, then spend the time between getting the applications in and the start of the program on figuring out what makes me happy (I want to become more of a Tigger and less of an Eeyore), what I want to do with the rest of my life, and maybe the occasional short-term contract just to prevent me from going TOO deeply into debt (I figure I can probably last about 6 months before I have to get into my line of credit). My hope is that I may be able to find happiness as a researcher, academic or teacher (and failing that I’ll be a bum on the street hanging out in front of Mike’s house trying to scam grilled salmon and beer off of him 😉 ).

Ch-ch-changes
Don’t want to be a richer man

PhD programs provide a stipend for students to live off of (at least in Canada most do). It’s reasonably generous (around $24K), which is more than enough for me to live off of (and pay back whatever debts I accumulate).

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through

I’ll apologize if any of my posts over the next few months get overly bitter or introspective (Mike, please pull anything too poisonous before it goes live – you’re too late for this one 😉 ). Obviously the “retire in 3 years” plan is off the rails and my cost of living is going to swing from a surplus to a deficit almost immediately.

With respect to the poet Bowie as popularized in the classic film “Shrek 2”.