Canadian FIRE

Images by Ali Tawfiq (top) & Frank McKenna (bottom) on Unsplash If your FIRE-podcast listening experience has been anything like mine, you've probably learned far too much about how great America is to live for next to nothing, invest with low MERs and buy real estate in. And yet you've probably also heard that they have over a billion different account types making retirement options very complex and of course the elephant in the room: healthcare. Today, we're going to compare these two countries FIRE and see who has an edge on one another. It will of course be a completely biased article since I'm Canadian and I want my country to win :P Okay let's see how we do. Cost of Living (COL) In the US, COL ends up being cheaper for a number of consumer staples, food and gasoline being the two prime examples. Simply put, goods just cost a lot less in the US and us Canadians see the difference everytime we travel south of the border. Even though everything from iPads to

Photo by  Ashkan Forouzani  on  Unsplash When Canadians drop their phones in a public toilet and race home to try the rice-trick (and it fails because why would something everybody says works ever work for you!?) they get this compulsive urge to replace the newly coronavirus-ridden device with a brand-spanking new financed phone with a 2-year contract.  That contract provided a $0 brand new phone... what's not to love?* It's never zero dollars. You've made a terrible decision. To give you an idea of how lucrative this cell phone + plan bundling business is, I went ahead and looked at my local mall to see how many stores sell phones and plans. It's a Cadillac Fairview mall so it's quite big with 120 stores (for comparison the Eaton Centre in Toronto is 235 stores and the West Edmonton Mall is 800+). It may (or may not) surprise you that of the 120 locations to be leased, 18 of these locations are betting they can sell you a cell phone + plan, or a whopping 15% of th

Photo by  Micheile Henderson  on  Unsplash ** As usual, hello everybody! Blog update at the bottom for my regular readers! ** A Savings Rate (SR) is the act of putting a certain percentage of money into savings or investment account to be used for a purpose down the road in your life, such as retirement or emergencies. This can be a high-interest savings account, an RRSP or TFSA, etc. The higher your savings rate, the earlier you can achieve FIRE . That means everybody in the FIRE movement is obsessed with calculating their SR. So how on earth do you calculate a SR? Nobody can agree on one formula for some reason: "Can I include my mortgage payments?"  "I save money for my kids RESPs so that must count, right?"  "Do I calculate the gains on my stock options at work?"  "I didn't get ice cream on the way home from work.. does that count?" As you can see people have a hard time wrapping their head around a concept of putting money into a

Photo by  Benjamin DeYoung  on  Unsplash Why do you need to stay with the FIRE movement? The same reason you need diet and exercise. It's good for you and you know you should be doing it. Financial literacy and frugality are two important components of any financial success, not too mention your happiness. Below I have 5 reasons you should be staying true to your FIRE dreams. #1 Inventory Control - FIREwalkers treat pretty much all aspects of their personal lives and possessions like a business. It is impossible to operate a business successfully when you're throwing away your food and time. While I didn't expect members of this movement to own latex gloves and face masks before (and I still don't to this day) I cannot believe the amount of uneducated masses rushing to the grocery store and buying up all the toilet paper, bleach and for some reason the meat department? It is also incredibly inefficient to be heading to the department store every other day for mo