Walking – April Health Challenge

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In April, Annie and I decided to move a bit more. I probably do around one to two thousand steps per day, but could I ramp that up to two-hundred thousand in a month?

As I do with most challenges, the first part was the easiest. I was doing nearly ten thousand steps per day for a week, while Annie, who was still working on school work, was doing around seven thousand per day. We aren’t really competitive with each other, but we hoped that comparing and contrasting would keep us engaged in the challenge.

By the end of April 15th, I was at 105,665 steps, a little past the half-way point in both steps at the half-way point in days. I felt fairly confident that not only was I going to be able to complete the challenge, but I was going to go well over. Annie, now finishing up school, started to increase her pace. She was the only one of us to get days over 10,000 steps and she ended the month with three such days.

I know these numbers are small compared to what others are able to do. You know who you are!

Anyways, by the end of the month, we both only had a few steps left to go, and we both completed the challenge. Annie finished a day early with over ten thousand steps on April 29th to cross the finish line, and I finished on the last day of the month.

May Challenge – Journaling and Gratefulness Log

In May, Annie and I are going to journal each day at least one hundred words, and include at least one thing we are grateful for. The goal is to try to keep our spirits up during the pandemic that never feels like it is going to end, as well as trying to remember how lucky we are.

Self-reflection, taking time to audit how your day went and how you want it to go tomorrow, can be a very positive mental exercise, and not one I’ve been taking time to do lately.

I love writing, but with how busy I’ve been lately, this might actually be a difficult challenge for me. I’m hopeful that at the end of the month, I have at least thirty short write-ups of how my month went.

Tracking Mood – March Health Challenge

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In March, Annie and I decided to track our mood several times a day on a scale of 0 to 10 to see how we were feeling. Little did we know the world was about the change. I had long wanted to do mood tracking and when I mentioned it to Annie, her eyes lit up as it fits with her schooling in Psychology.

It took a bit to find an application that worked easily and allowed for a larger scale than just a one through five that most applications seemed to have. In the end we settled on Mood Log created by AR Productions.

Starting March 1st at eight in the morning, we started tracking when we woke up, at eleven in the morning, two-thirty in the afternoon, six-thirty in the evening and then before bed, typically around eleven at night. I felt like that five data points per day should give enough insight into how we were feeling, but the application only allowed for three reminders per day maximum and those reminders were silent, with just an icon showing up on our phone’s status bar, so we had to set-up alarms.

By the end of the month, I was very happy to turn off those alarms.

Over the month of March, I collected 154 data points. My average mood ended up being a 5.6 out of 10, which is higher than I had expected. I have struggled with depression and anxiety for over twenty years now and so I assumed that at best I would get an average of around 5, so to get through the month self-assessing at an average of 5.6 seems great to me.

As you can see from the above image, I did have some down points as well as some high points. I never reached a zero, as in my mind that was “I give up, I’m going to completely shut down” and a ten was a level of elation that I’d save for something super special, but nothing ever happened that pushed me to either extreme. I do know that one of my tracking points that shows a nine out of ten was due to finding out our offer on a house got accepted, but I’ll talk more about that soon.

You can, however, see a noticeable dip around March 21st, where I found it difficult to stay positive. Previous to this challenge, I had been ranking myself on a positive five to negative five scale which fits on this scale very nicely with five being a middle of the road, not positive, not negative moment. So to see so many data points below that mark was a little rough, but I was honestly feeling really rough around that point. I don’t think it was specifically related to what’s happening in the world, but I know that it didn’t make it any easier to deal with my “Darker mind”.

Annie averaged a much higher 6.5 over the course of the month, but felt that was lower than she was expecting. It is interesting to me the perspectives we have on the data we collect. Another interesting thing to me is that her tracking never fell below four, so while she did have some data points that were her not feeling great, she didn’t have the emotional range that I seem to go through. She couldn’t say for certain why that was other than to point out that most of her tracking first thing in the morning, where she’s unhappy to get up and get out of bed, might have skewed her results lower than she anticipated. She also went through a down slide near the end of the month as we geared up for quarantine. As someone that’s an extrovert, this whole change has been very hard on her.

In the end, I feel like we learned some interesting things and we will have to spend more time pouring over the data we collected.

April Challenge – 200,000 Steps

In April, we are doing a step challenge, which wasn’t my first choice for this month, but the state of the world means that I don’t have access to the apartment gym.

Our goal is 200,000 steps over the course of April. This shouldn’t be too hard, except that we can’t go mall walking, we don’t have anywhere to go when walking, so all of our walking is pretty much just taking Luna out around the back streets late in the evening.

This whole pandemic thing can stop any time now…

Avoiding Added Sugars Retrospective – February Health Challenge

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In February, we tried to avoid added sugars. This meant that we could have things like 100% orange juice, but not many other things. You’d be amazed at how many things have sugar, but also how poorly you can still eat without added or processed sugars.

My wife continued to join me in this challenge and struggled near the end of the month. We both had a few days where we failed for the day, but overall, I feel we did quite well.

Over the twenty-nine days of February, I had two days where I failed to avoid added sugar. One was my sister-in-law’s birthday cake and the other was that some of my Big John’s Beef Jerky had some added sugar that I didn’t realize until Annie told me. Sure the sugar in the jerky was really low, but I still counted it as a fail day.

One of the interesting things from this month was getting used to reading labels. We should all be doing that anyways to get a better understanding of what we are putting into our body.

This month wasn’t crazy great for weight loss, but I did seem to lose some over the course of the month. I started the month at around 277 pounds and ended it with a weigh in this morning at 271 pounds, so around a six pound loss. Based on the trend-line of the month though, I think I’m probably closer to around 273, which would still be around four pounds down, or about a pound a week, and that’s sustainable.

I didn’t have too many points where I felt ravenous about sugar. I had lots of fruit, veggies, no-sugar added juice, and the odd little bit of honey. I gave in on honey for a number of reasons, and I think it made it possible to succeed over the course of the month.

I made oatmeal, banana, strawberry muffins a few times. I got the recipe from Bebe and Bear. It is a modification of a recipe found on greenlitebites that swaps out chocolate chips for strawberries. I made a few changes though, so here’s my recipe.

Malcolm’s Honey Sweetened Strawberry Banana Oatmeal Muffins

Yield: ~12 muffins

Ingredients

  • 3 cups rolled oats
  • 1 cup of 2% milk
  • 2 eggs
  • 3 ripe bananas
  • 1 tbsp baking powder
  • 1-2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 tbsp honey
  • 1/4 cup chopped frozen strawberries

Directions

  1. Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. Mash the bananas with the rolled oats. Course mash is okay, but you want the oats to look wet.
  3. Mix in the other ingredients, leaving the strawberries for last and mix well.
  4. Fill up your muffin tray and bake for around 25 minutes.

Notes

We used quick cooking rolled oats, and that seemed to work fine. We also liked how having the higher fat in the milk made the muffins taste, but the original recipe calls for unsweetened vanilla almond milk instead. And of course, the more ripe the bananas are, the more of a sugar kick you get from them, and the lower the amount of honey you’ll need to make it have flavour.

The first time I made these, I did it with a teaspoon of honey, the bananas were not very ripe and I didn’t put in enough vanilla. It ended up tasting like a block of dry oatmeal without other flavours. I was pretty bummed but felt that I should eat them because they were healthy and filling. My other batches turned out better, so you’ll have to play with the recipe based on your preference.

March Challenge – Mood Tracking

In March, Annie and I are going to track our mood. We are going to grab five data points per day and then we can plot out our mood over the course of a month. For me, this is a check in to take a moment to reflect on how I’m feeling more often and to have data showing that my meds are not only working but that I am having more good days than bad. This is a mental health month.

This doesn’t mean that we won’t be looking for opportunities to eat better, and I know Annie has other elements she is considering for her health in March, but the process of a year of health continues.

Conclusion

I highly recommend everyone try at least a week without added sugars and see how that makes them feel. I think today, Annie and I might go a little overboard compensating for our month without, but I hope once we get that out of our system, we can continue to eat more fruit and veggies, and avoid added sugar here.

Retirement Savings and Depression

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I never expected to live this long and now as I near forty, I am freaking out a bit over the idea of living into retirement.

When I was in my twenties, I got married, we bought a house, I even took a government job far from that home to try to set us up for a good life. I tried to be fairly frugal but still racked up some debt. I constantly was in my own head, fighting with myself over every little mistake or setback. When that relationship fell apart, I put myself in more debt to move and start over.

I lived in a tiny furnished room in someone else’s house. It was cheap and worked well for the nothing that I owned. I had a decent job and made okay money, but I hated myself and my life and went back and forth between self-sabotage through poor money management and trying to buy my way into happiness. I continued to be in debt and not save anything.

Years flew by and life continued to ebb and flow, then I married Annie and we started our life together. I still struggled with depression and still spent like a fool. No investing, no saving, just spending.

Now, here I am at thirty-seven. I thought I wouldn’t make it into my twenties. I was once confident that I wouldn’t survive past twenty-five. I thought for sure I wouldn’t make thirty. I am quickly realizing that I have to contend with the likelihood of being around for a good long time.

You know what’s frustrating about that though? Realizing what retirement might look like. I play around with different retirement calculators and they all basically say the same thing. If I want to save for a decent retirement for Annie and I, I’ll likely need to invest around one third of my income until I retire, and since I’m at the upper end of what someone with my skills can likely earn, that’s a bit difficult given the cost of living we currently have.

Don’t get me wrong. Annie and I have a fairly comfortable and happy life. I am not complaining at all. We don’t want for much, but that’s potentially part of the problem sometimes, isn’t it? We don’t want to live in a crummy apartment with roaches or bed bugs. We don’t want to drive a decade old vehicle that isn’t reliable. I don’t want to try to do my job on an Internet connection that would only be considered fast in a third world country.

In some ways, through surviving what I have dealt with, I feel a little like I deserve some comfort. I’m sometimes afraid that creating too much discomfort and sacrifice might make my depression worse.

My hope is that when Annie is done school and begins working that we will be able to save more aggressively to make up for the lost time we’ve had, otherwise retirement won’t ever be an option. The power of compounding interest is being ever reduced by our life delays… I have read a bunch of articles though that makes it sound a little like this is the plight of my generation.

Wallace – My Artillery (Evnovo) Sidewinder X1

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So today, I received the main part of my new 3D printer set-up, the Sidewinder X1.

This isn’t the 3D printer I thought I was going to get, but I’ll get to that story soon. I’ve been wanting a 3D printer for several years now and watching the features increase and the price decrease until last year when I decided to do my 1 Million Calories Challenge, I included a small thing where I decided my reward for hitting my goal was going to be a 3D printer.

Continue reading “Wallace – My Artillery (Evnovo) Sidewinder X1 “ →

Intermittent Fasting Retrospective – January Health Challenge

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In January, I decided to try intermittent fasting to see if it would help me lose weight and feel better. I decided to do something difficult and stick to a 18/6 schedule where I don’t eat for eighteen hours per day, and only eat for six.

My wife joined me in this challenge, while working on her own additional health challenges. With her school schedule, there were difficult days where she had to break fast early or eat a bit later than expected.

The goal was to only eat between noon and six in the evening. Most guides on intermittent fasting say that you should start with something easier, with the goal to have at least twelve hours of non-eating time so your body can work to clear out all the sugars and carbohydrates you ate.

The biggest thing that I learned in doing this health challenge was that I’ll have to revisit intermittent fasting when I have a better control over my eating.

Basically, for the first week, it was great. We were cooking our meals, focusing on healthy food, lots of vegetables, and then it took a slide into crappy eating. It likely doesn’t really matter much how short of a window you give yourself to eat if all you do is stuff yourself with high calorie, high sugar, high processed carbohydrate foods, and that’s basically what ended up happening.

I’d get to noon and feel ravenous. My willpower would be next to zero and I’d eat junk to satiate myself. I’d eat until I was nearly exploding and then do it once more around four in the afternoon to try to get in as much food as I could to make it until noon the next day.

I am pretty certain you can see why this is dumb.

It wasn’t just a willpower issue as that would be overly simplistic. It was also a time and energy issue. I work from home, but I’ve been very busy lately trying to juggle many different projects. Annie is back in school and focusing on that. Between the two of us, we just don’t have the interest in managing the process require to purchase, prep, cook, and clean for meals each day, especially since we weren’t thinking and planning ahead.

If we were smarter, we would have had a meal plan, we would have prepped ahead of time so that at noon, we would have had healthy options at the ready. Instead, it was like runners at a gate, waiting for the gun to go off to signal them that they can sprint away, except instead of a track field, it was chips, pop, donuts, candy, juice, bread, noodles, and cold cuts and instead of running, it was like competitive eating.

So, was it a failure?

Well, I was able to stick to the schedule, every day except three. On the ninth of January, I broke thirty minutes early to eat some fresh from the oven cookies that I had made. On the twenty-fifth, I finished Annie’s Coke at my aunt and uncle’s place after the normal cut off time. And on January 31st, I broke an hour early to have fresh from the oven cinnamon buns that I made before Annie had to head off to class.

As for my weight, I didn’t gain, but I also didn’t really lose any. I went from 278.8 pounds at the start of January to 277.9 pounds at the end of January. A loss of less than a pound and thus, a statistical nothing.

The hardest part of this whole thing was not snacking in the evening. After a long day of work, wanting to unwind with eating something or watching a late night television show or even YouTube video, and I wanted to munch on something, anything…

I don’t remember ever feeling like I was going to bed hungry, but I do remember waking up feeling hungry on more than one occasion.

Would I do this again?

Yes. I’d like to maybe try again later in the year using what I’ve learned and hopefully, finding a month where Annie is not in school, my schedule is a bit more reasonable, and planning meals and healthy options ahead of time. I think I could be more successful with intermittent fasting than I was in January, but I am also proud of the small victory of sticking to the timing for twenty-eight out of thirty-one days.

February Challenge – No Added Sugar

As for February, we are going to try to do a no-sugar added month. This doesn’t mean no sugar or no carbs, but instead avoiding added sugars or processed sugars in our foods. So we could eat a steak, potato and corn, but we couldn’t drink juice with it unless it was fresh squeezed with no added sugar. The one thing that I gave my wife was that she could have honey. Because it isn’t a processed sugar in the same way as maple syrup, I told her that she was good to go.

We will also be looking at reducing our overall carbohydrates during February. I am hopeful that, even if I don’t lose any weight, that maybe the weight I do have won’t be so concentrated on my gut.

Canadian Federal Political Platform Imaginings

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As I did with a quasi-Provincial level platform, I wanted to spend some time thinking about what a Federal platform for me would look like.

I started this before our last election and have been working on it on and off for a while now. I am sure there is still a ton of learning I need to do to really understand the scope of the things I’m saying, but I like the general direction I am trying to go in. Feel free to rip into any part of it as I am not married to any of it. I am hoping to push people to talk about this stuff.

Taxes

  • Raise the basic personal amount to $26,000 by 2026. 
  • Cut the tax rate on income under $60,000 from 15% to 13%.
  • Cut the tax rate on income between $60,000 and $105,000 from 20.5% to 20%.
  • Keep the current tax rate of 26% from $105,000 to $155,000.
  • Increase the tax rate on income between $155,000 to $215,000 from 29% to 30%.
  • Increase the current top tax bracket rate from 33% to 35% on income over $215,000 up to $400,000.
  • Create a new top tax bracket on income over $400,000 with a rate of 37%.
  • Create a “super-wealth tax” of 1% on wealth exceeding $10 million.
  • Work to close tax loopholes, credits, and write-downs/offs that the wealthy often exploit.
  • Allow partial income splitting for joint-filing couples, thus creating the opportunity for the higher earner or single-earner to transfer income of an amount up to the available basic personal amount of the spouse, to the lower or non-earner spouse. 
  • Increase the federal corporate tax rate from 15% back to 18% as it was previously in 2010.
  • Spend $5 million dollars to investigate the feasibility of enacting an automation tax on corporations that are replacing human workers with machines or computer software.
  • Impose a financial transaction tax of 0.1% on the financial sector for all investment transactions (stock, bonds, ETFs, etc…)
  • Legitimize the B Corporations Certification in Canada and provide businesses with a 5% non-refundable tax credit on revenue for B Corporations.
  • Companies proven by the CRA to be shifting corporate profits for the express purpose of tax evasion will be fined.
  • Put a 12% tax on luxury vehicles (cars, boats, aircraft) over $120k (value to increase with inflation, rounded to the nearest $1000) with exemptions for electric vehicles. Make sure that this tax applies to people (not corporations importing for resale) importing vehicles as well.
  • Put a 2% tax on junk food (chocolate, chips, candy) and sugar added beverages (pop, sugar added juice, chocolate milk).
  • Increase the excise tax on tobacco, marijuana, and alcohol by 2% per year over the next four years.
  • Place a 20% foreign buyers tax on purchases of residential and commercial properties by foreign corporations or people who are not citizens or permanent residents.
  • Remove the GST from home heating and energy bills.
  • Increase the overall budget of the CRA by 2% per year for the next four years. With a focus on technological efficiency and modernization and a mission to focus on high income earners and large corporations.

Economy & Affordability

  • Create a basic income called the Valued Canadians Dividend. Provide all citizens and permanent residents over 16 years old with $1800 per month. This will replace various income support programs typically making up payments below this threshold. This amount will increase with inflation.
  • Remove the federal minimum wage, but allow and support cities, counties, and provinces in enacting their own minimum wage as best fits their regional area.
  • Eliminate the Old Age Security system and its complicated sliding scale payment system in favour of the VCD.
  • End the Canada Child Tax Benefit as the VCD and other listed changes are better.
  • Eliminate GST/HST credits. As tax credits for regular people only creates additional complexity and doing your taxes should be simple. Also, payouts from VCD will offset more than this amount.
  • Increase the Child Disability Benefit by 5% per year for the next four years.
  • Remove corporate welfare and federal financial transfers and investments in industries like oil and gas, petrochemicals, and chemical companies.
  • Require Canadian telecom services and packages to be within 20% of average G7 rates for similar services.
  • Lower investment and citizenship requirements for new telecom players to increase competition in the Canadian market.
  • Create a $X billion dollar per year venture fund to invest in innovation companies with a focus on green industries and high-tech industries. These investments will be made with the expectation of partial ownership in the invested companies and thus a return on investment with successful companies. 
  • Create a $XXX million dollar per year venture fund to invest in transforming Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba economies towards an economy focused on research and innovation. These investments will be made with the expectation of partial ownership in the invested companies.

Jobs & Skills Training

  • Eliminate all fees from the Business Development Bank of Canada, Export Development Canada, and Farm Credit Canada for business advisory services like mentorship and training.
  • Create a Canadian Apprenticeship Bursary providing up to $15,000 per apprentice for every new position created to a maximum of 1,000 positions over four years.
  • Improve credential recognition to make it easier for immigrants with equivalent skills or training to garner employment.

Deficits & Debt

  • Ensure that Canada’s debt servicing to GDP growth ratio stays the same or improves over an eight year fiscal horizon.

Health

  • Put in place a national head to toe healthcare plan. Medically required vision care, preventative or prescribed dental care, prescribed mental health services, and prescribed medications should all be fee free for Canadians.
  • Create and fund a Canada-wide drug purchasing agency to work at reducing the cost of medications.
  • End the ban on blood donations by men who have sex with men. 
  • Spend $XX million per year on a program within Health Canada to support community based organizations offering targeted LGBTQ2S+ youth mental health and well-being services.
  • Spend an additional $XXX million per year on a National responsible drinking, substance use, and support information/education/advertising campaign directed at youth and young-adults.

Energy

  • Eliminate all fossil fuel subsidies and tax write-offs. 
  • Ban hydraulic fracturing operations.
  • Create and fund a national Renewable Energy Development Committee to work with provinces to grow Canada’s leadership in renewable energy.
  • Invest $XXX million in additional funding towards nuclear energy programs, redevelopment, repairs and upgrades.
  • Educate and engage the public on options for Gen 4 nuclear fission reactors in Canada.
  • Invest $XX million per year in energy storage research and development as well as trial installations in at-risk areas of Canada.

Climate Change & Environment

  • Increase federal carbon tax to $60 per tonne from $50 and increase it to $120 per tonne by 2026.
  • Have 100% of Canada’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2030.
  • Invest and hire teams to plant XX million trees per year and provide support to monitor and manage growth of the new planting to increase tree survivability to maturity.
  • Ban dumping raw sewage into waterways.
  • Ban the sale of internal combustion engine passenger vehicles for non-commercial or industrial needs by 2026.
  • ICE commercial & industrial passenger vehicle sales to be banned by 2030.
  • Provide a 5% tax credit to businesses purchasing all-electric semi-trailer trucks. 
  • Double investment in electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
  • Add a minimum of two electric vehicle charging stations at each and every federal parking lot.
  • Increase gas tax 5% over the next four years.

Indigenous Affairs

  • Establish and fund a National Council for Reconciliation.
  • Establish a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
  • Invest in Indigenous history education programs for all Canadians.
  • Create and invest $XX million per year on an Indigenous Culture Archive with a focus on preserving and promoting Indigenous languages, cultural history, stories, music and digital records of art.

Immigration & Refugees

  • End the cap on applications to sponsor parents and grandparents. 
  • End the Temporary Foreign Workers Program.
  • Allow provinces and territories to set their immigration limits. Each year they’ll report how many people they are willing to receive, and the government of Canada will use that combined number to determine the total Canadian immigration number with the understanding that the Federal government is not going to mandate that new entrants live in a specific province or territory.

National Defence

  • Increase the number of military service personnel by an additional 2,500 per year for the next four years. This is over top of current expected growth. This will create federal job opportunities and expand the ability for the Canadian Forces to be staffed and available for domestic emergencies, as well as better staff replacement scheduling for overseas deployments.
  • Create non-deployment positions for enlisted Canadian Forces members and allow anyone injured or unfit for deployment to carry on in the Canadian Forces if they have the skills or interest in a non-deployment position within the Canadian Forces rather than having them released. These positions are only available for service people to transfer to, thus protecting the universality of service as an entry requirement for new members.
  • Increase the per capita equipment spending on military service persons by an additional five percent per year for the next four years. This should help resolve some lapses in equipment maintenance and purchasing that has contributed to morale issues.
  • Provide an immediate one-time salary adjustment of X percent for all non-commissioned members and adjust payment schedule based on this increase. Despite a recent increase that happened, this is to further make the Canadian Forces pay structure more competitive with the private sector.
  • Sign and ratify the Treaty to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
  • Upgrade the Royal Canadian Navy’s submarine capability.
  • Establish an arctic naval fleet to focus on Canada’s arctic sovereign rights.
  • Require a mental health screening review every three years for all active Canadian Forces members.
  • Increase civilian mental health practitioner employment opportunities to support the Canadian Forces members and their families.

Public Safety & National Security

  • Ban all military-style assault and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.
  • Continue and strengthen the handgun ban in Canada as 60-70% of all homicides committed using a firearm over the last half decade were with a handgun.
  • Invest in a national firearms safety training service to provide no-cost firearms safety training.
  • Require the Communications Security Establishment and CSIS to have a warrant before accessing the communications of Canadians.
  • Institute Canada’s Digital Charter so people can control their personal data and their right to be forgotten. This means allowing you to have social media services not just hide your account, but actually remove all of your data from their service. 
  • Require that ISPs can only release data when required by a warrant, except in imminent emergencies where people would be physically harmed by waiting for a warrant.

Infrastructure

  • Reduce interest rates to municipalities on loans for infrastructure projects via changes to the Canada Infrastructure Bank.
  • Change the national building code to require new construction to meet net-zero emission standards by 2026.
  • Reduce the red-tape for airline travel companies in Canada to improve services and prices through potential competition. 
  • Investigate the options and opportunities to invest in the new generation of low Earth orbit satellite Internet options being launched with the goal of making sure Canada has access to these services and secondarily to find opportunities for investment for the benefit of social programs funding.
  • Reduce restrictions on autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles on the national highway system.

Retirement & Seniors

  • Develop and fund a national dementia strategy.
  • Amend Medical Assistance in Dying legislation to allow everyone the option of “dying with dignity”.
  • Invest $XX million dollars over four years into innovation opportunities in Elderly care.
  • Place details on Federal costs relating to elderly care online for research and educational purposes to highlight the trends and issues we face providing services.
  • CPP will no longer be taxed as income.
  • Adjust the Criminal Code with penalties for elder abuse.

Housing

  • Impose a 15% surtax on foreign buyers.
  • Add a 2% annual tax on properties owned by those who are not Canadians and who do not live in Canada.
  • Invest $XX million dollars as seed money to create the National Housing Development Corporation, a home building firm to build affordable and mid-market housing. The goal of the company is to increase the Canadian housing supply while also employing Veterans and other experienced people that may normally have difficulty finding or retaining employment. The expectation is that beyond the fourth year this company will be revenue neutral. If it is unable to meet that goal, then reassess and potentially shut down the company.
  • Invest $X billion dollars towards building new affordable housing in the first 24 months.
  • Invest $XX million dollars per year to increase and improve youth and homeless shelters.

Education

  • Make all one year certificate, two and three year diploma college level education tuition free for students without a diploma or degree.
  • Increase access to Canada Student Grants for full-time students to a maximum of $5,000 with it increasing at a rate of inflation plus one percent per year.
  • Eliminate interest on federal portion of student loans.
  • Establish free online services and resources for learning English and French as second languages.

Child Care & Family

  • Provide adoptive parents with the same access to parental leave benefits as natural birth parents.
  • Invest $XXX million dollars over the next four years in public non-denominational not-for-profit child care.
  • Eliminate GST on all construction costs related to child-care spaces.
  • Invest $XX million dollars over the next four years in Pregnancy & Infant Loss services and support.
  • Extend maternity leave benefits to parents that have experienced a miscarrage. Up to 15 weeks at a 55% benefit rate.

Agriculture & Food

  • Provide a $X billion dollar grant fund over the next four years for farmers wanting to modernize, automate or innovate in the food production industry. With a focus on environmentally friendly technologies and techniques for sustainable farming.
  • Require boat-to-plate traceability standards for all Canadian seafood products.

Foreign Affairs

  • Decrease spending by 5% over four years towards supporting UN peacekeeping missions.
  • Adjust spending on foreign aid with a focus on moving funds from countries with a Human Development Index over 0.6 to countries below that bar. For example, Canada has a Human Development Index of 0.926, India is currently at 0.64 and Madagascar is currently at 0.519.
  • Review NATO commitments with a focus on efficiency, long-term planning and Canada’s needs. Look for budgetary cuts in this area and re-commit to only a 1% GDP maximum.

International Trade

  • Create a $10 million a year export investment grant for small and medium sized businesses (under $200,000 in exports per year) to grow their export opportunities. Reducing the complexity compared to the CanExport program. 
  • Create a central Import/Export corporation website that provides insight domestically and internationally to connect business to each other in a more seamless way.
  • Open discussions with provinces and territories regarding co-investing in opening provincial trade representation offices in strategic global markets. Set aside $X million per year for set-up and staffing of such offices.
  • Spent $X million per year on creating training sessions for helping businesses understand the process to expand their operations Internationally and export Canadian products/services. 

Justice

  • Immediately financially support provinces/territories so that they can hire over 200 new Crown prosecutors and 100 new judges to help reduce delays.
  • Introduce criminal code for possession of a smuggled firearm.
  • Give trial judges greater discretion in criminal sentencing by reducing reliance on minimum sentences.
  • Increase federal funding for legal aid by 20%.
  • Decriminalize all drug possession so we can send those with issues to treatment instead of prison. Of course, any associated act while on a drug will still handled like the crime that it is.
  • Pass legislation to end solitary confinement that lasts over 48 hours.

Youth

  • On a Canadian citizen or permanent resident’s 16th birthday, provide eight free Via Rail open destination travel vouchers to travel anywhere in Canada that the rail service allows. 
  • Develop and implement a national autism strategy for youth.

Democracy & Governance

  • Federal Election Voting Day to be a National holiday.
  • Lower the Federal voting age to 16. This will allow students to register at their high schools, learning party platforms can be part of the discourse at schools, and we can place voting stations in high schools to make it easy to vote. It has been proven that if you start someone voting, it is highly likely they’ll continue to vote.
  • End First Past the Post voting via electoral reform and replace it with Single Transferable Vote. This will create a system of governance that better reflects voting patterns and remove the feeling of wasted votes and reduce the fear of strategic voting.
  • Reduce maximum campaign spending for Federal election campaigns to the median family income in the riding the representatives are running in or $50,000, whichever is lower.
  • Require all printed election marketing material to be recyclable.
  • Provide a yearly chart available online, broken down into a single taxpayer dollar to show how federal tax dollars are being spent in an easy to comprehend way.
  • Freeze Prime Minister and Member of Parliament salaries for the next eight years.
  • Reduce MPs office expense account budgets by 25%.
  • Reduce the number of Federal Public Sector employees through retirement and attrition thanks to shutting down multiple money management programs within the Federal Government and switching to a more streamlined system.

Veterans

  • Clear backlog of Veterans’ benefit applications within twelve months.
  • Provide one caseworker for ever 24 veterans instead of one every 32.5.
  • Expand the veterans education benefit, making it easier to be approved.
  • Provide all veterans a job guarantee up to the age of 65. If after one year post service, a veteran is experiencing difficulty with employment and they are not in an educational program, provide them with a Federal civilian occupation in infrastructure, housing, veteran services, or another best fitting opportunity.
  • Increase access to preventative mental health services for veterans and their families by funding mental health support training to active service people and their families on military bases.

Arts & Culture

  • Provide $5 million dollars every four years in financial support for Indigenous theatre at the National Arts Centre.
  • Allow income tax averaging for artists and cultural workers. This allows them to lower their taxes slightly by leveling out their income over multiple years to deal with the inconsistency in their income. For example, if they have one year where they earn $20,000 and the next where they earn $100,000, they could submit their taxes as two years of $60,000 each.
  • Immediately increase the per-capita level of funding for the CBC to that of the BBC.
  • Establish a public board of qualified people to oversee the CBC. Working towards it becoming an arm’s reach crown corporation and run more like other media organizations with a focus on reducing its Federal funding requirements. The continued amount of decrease to be determined after a four year period of investigation.
  • Finance free tickets to all children/youth (ages 0-16) to enter museums, galleries, and cultural venues.
  • Exempt stage theatres from collecting/remitting GST.

Genomics

  • No experiments that alter a human’s or animal’s reproductive cells and/or gene drive genetics programs should be allowed to leave the laboratory environment. This law should be reviewed every 4 years and removed if for some reason it benefits Canada to do so.
  • No living entities with the changes above can be imported into Canada.
  • Any person, even at the request of a corporation, caught defying these rules will be subject to up to ten years in jail.
  • Corporations caught defying these rules will lose their license to operate within Canada and be heavily fined.
  • We will put political pressure on companies creating human health related gene therapies to price them reasonably.
  • Create a Genetics Science Council to monitor and report on projects being undertaken in Canada and around the world to better inform both government officials and the public regarding genetic engineering developments.

Artificial Intelligence

  • Create an Artificial Intelligence Council together to monitor and report on projects being undertaken in Canada and around the world to better inform both government officials and the public regarding AI developments.
  • Work with the Alberta Provincial government to grow an A.I technology hub in Edmonton to take advantage of the high quality students graduating the Artificial Intelligence programs from the University of Alberta.

If you made it this far, you deserve a medal!

Health Tracker 2,000,000 – Building a Simple Web Tool for Family

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My sister-in-law wanted a simple tool to track water, fruit and vegetables, and protein intake kind of like what she and others are used to with WW (WeightWatchers) and so my wife asked if I had the skills to build something like that.

This is what they wanted me to replicate.

It seemed like a cool and quick little project, so I started thinking about how I could do it quickly and easily. I considered creating an actual Android app, but realized that the learning curve would make it too large of a project for me, and one of the main users is an iOS user, and I am not paying a hundred dollars to publish a pet project.

I then thought about using Godot to make it but that came with the same set of problems as I don’t currently know how to use the Godot UI options well enough. I wanted something I could whip up in a few hours and not a few weeks.

PHP to the Rescue

I have done some web development using PHP over the last seventeen years. I am by no means a good coder, but I can pretty much hack together any simplistic thing without too much fuss.

At first, I was thinking I’d install WordPress and customize a Gravity Forms form to do what they need, but decided against that when I realized you would actually have to click a “save and continue” button and that it wouldn’t just remember your selections on the form.

So, I guess my best choice was to build it from scratch…

I don’t think I’d ever want anyone to look at my code as I know there are better, faster, and cleaner ways to build what I put together, but over the course of an evening on one day and a morning on another, I put together Health Tracker 2,000,000!

This is what I built.

v1 Features and Functionality

So I decided on a very simplistic way of managing things without user accounts: cookies. I create a cookie when a user selects a checkbox and then when anyone comes to the site, I check for the cookie and if they have it, I use the cookie value to retrieve what values were last checked off.

The cookie is just a hashed reference ID. I take that cookie and use it to check the database to see what is checked off. The cookie is set to expire on the same day as it is created but at midnight Eastern time.

The database just stores a unique, auto-increment ID number, the hashed reference ID, the date the record was created and which fields have been checked off.

Overall, it is pretty simplistic and seems to work on computers, Android phones, iPhones and more.

v2 Thoughts

Ideally, the tool would include some basic login system so that you could start the checklist on your phone and finish it on your tablet or computer. With the references already being stored in the database, creating a basic user management system wouldn’t be too difficult as I would just have to associate the unique IDs from one table with a unique user ID in another table.

It would also be nice to have some kind of archive to see how you did on previous days. If I add in the user management feature, this shouldn’t be too difficult either.

My wife would like it to have charting to present the data nicely and everyone seems to want it to have some kind of gamification features/functions. I don’t know what kind of charts I’d create, but I could maybe use something like canvasJS to build out the charts.

As for gamification features, I’ll probably release a small update to v1 that includes a congratulations for completing all the checkboxes in a day.

Conclusion

Adding complexity to something like this takes time, more than I think most people realize for someone with my development skills, but here and there, this might be a cool challenge to pick up and move forward a bit more.

I also have to keep in mind that it will likely only ever have around four users. This isn’t something I’m trying to make a service out of. There are plenty of tools in the marketplace that do similar things. I also have many other projects that need more attention going forward, so as much as these diversions can be fun, teach me new things, and help out family, I have to balance it with the work that pays the bills.

Including all HTML, CSS, JavaScript (except jQuery) and PHP, the tool comes to around 300 lines of code. It took me around six hours to build from start to finish including researching how to do certain things, dealing with roadblocks and sorting out the icons that I used.

It was a fun project, and I am hopeful that it serves the needs of those using it as a great way to remind them to eat better, drink more water, exercise every day and try not to go too crazy on junk food.

1 Million Calories Final Summary

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Well, as I write this, 2019 is ending and so is the year I spent tracking my calorie intake for my 1 Million Calorie Challenge.

I fizzled out on a bunch of parts of the project that I thought I was going to enjoy, like recording videos, taking photos of food and really sticking hard to making better food choices within the calorie limit that I set myself, but life and my ability to persist on long projects got in the way a little. I am thankful though that I continued to track all year long, so I consider it a small victory.

How Did I Do?

In the end, I ended up with 142,461 calories remaining out of the 1,000,000 calories that I started with. This means that I ate 857,539 calories over the course of the year, or approximately an average of 2349 calories per day.

If I was wrong by around ten percent on my tracking, we get a likely more realistic number of 943,292 calories used for 2019, still short of my 1,000,000 calorie limit, but not nearly as impressive.

If I was wrong by around 500 calories per day, a number that a 2018 article from USA Today reports that calorie counters are off by, then my total for the year goes to 1,040,039. A full 40,000 calories over my goal!

I tried very hard to make sure that I was tracking high each day so that my numbers would be more representative of the year that I had, so hopefully, I am not off by ten percent or more.

I started the year weighing 295 pounds and ended the year at 276 pounds. A total loss of 19 pounds or what amounts to a loss of 1.5 pounds per month. I should note that at my lowest I did get to 266 pounds, a further ten pounds lighter. But with many days over my calorie goal in the second half of the year and a larger number of calories coming from carbohydrates, specifically processed sugars, I’m not too surprised.

Some Data

I skipped breakfast 121 times, lunch 75 times, and supper 26 times. I had only 81 days without a snack. My median calorie spend for breakfast was 380, for lunch it was 640 and for supper it was 924. My median snack was 400 calories.

The most calories I used in a single day was 4118. The lowest was 0, when I tried a short fast a week before Christmas to see what it was like. I had ten days where I had less than or equal to 1,000 calories. I had sixty-eight days where I went over my daily limit of 2739 calories.

The first month where I had a day where I went over my daily limit was February around my mom’s birthday. The only months where I had zero days over my daily calorie limit were January, March, and April.

The month with the most calories spent was October with a total of 81,599 calories and the lowest was April with 63,660 calories used.

For most of the year, my weight hovered around 275 pounds.

What Did I Learn?

A big takeaway from 2020 was that it is easy for me to overeat and I often oscillate between over and under eating. Instead of having a relatively consistent amount of food each day, I find myself naturally going between around 1800 and 3000 calories per day. In retrospect, that doesn’t seem like a good idea and I need to do more research on this to better understand why I naturally do this and what it means for my overall weight and health.

My wife and I traveled for a month out of the year and I still tracked my calories, though being outside of my routine definitely made it harder to manage what I ate and there were days where I went over calories but I know it was due in part to my body trying to compensate for the amount of exercise I was getting walking around in the summer heat.

I also learned that food tracking seems frustrating to most people because they think they have to be perfect. I tried to track everything, often overestimating size or selecting something with higher calories in MyFitnessPal so that I could feel like I was on the right side of tracking. Tracking doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be a strong guide.

I was also reminded of my inability to stick with things when doing this project. Yes, I completed tracking, but all of the secondary things that I wanted to do with this project all fell to the wayside. I also really didn’t think I would have so many days where I went over my calorie limit and looking back at all the red highlighted numbers in my spreadsheet make me feel like a failure, despite the other results.

Lastly, I learned that people wanted to see me succeed. Throughout the entire year, even after I had stopped posting on social media about the challenge, people continued to ask how it was going. Some people were apologetic, assuming that I had given up, others were openly curious, and still others just looked to make small talk, but it felt nice to be asked how things were going regarding this, and no matter my response, everyone was so supportive and encouraging. I think we all need to celebrate health victories, even the small or temporary ones, so that those that are struggling can hopefully be more open to sharing, more open to collaborating, more open to challenging themselves publicly.

Heading into 2020

So, I am sure you are wondering what I’m going to do in 2020. Will I continue to track calories? Will I do a more restrictive challenge?

There were times that I thought that my next step would just be making the challenge more difficult for myself and roll into 2020 with 200,000 fewer calories and do a challenge focused on staying under 800,000 calories for the year or maybe something like 750,000 to make it the three-quarters of a million calories challenge, but I decided not to do that.

I had a difficult time constantly tracking my calories, not because it was difficult, but because I was sick of making it a priority. I lost passion for this project about half way through the year, and decided around the same time that in 2020, I’ll be doing much shorter challenges in hopes of keeping my interest higher to improve my health.

I think that in 2020 each challenge will be between one and three months long. Each challenge will be focused on health. This means that I can go beyond just focusing on calories and work on my mental health, improving my general fitness through exercise, and/or continue to work on eating challenges.

My January 2020 Challenge

I am thinking that January will be intermittent fasting. I am considering a schedule of having 18 hours of fast time per day and 6 hours of available eating time. I’ll continue to track things like my mood, my weight, and other notes in hopes of learning new things about myself and seeing what I can take going forward.

Annie has said that she may try to join me on doing intermittent fasting, though her school schedule might make it more difficult to be strict on timings as we don’t want her to be in class and thus miss her opportunity to eat.

Other Challenge Ideas

Some other ideas I have in mind include:

  • No processed sugar for a month
  • Whole food, plant based diet with nuts and legumes for a month
  • 1 hour of meditation and mindfulness per day for a month
  • 5 Data points of emotion/mood tracking per day for a month
  • 1,000 push-ups in a month
  • 5 KM of tracked movement per day for a month

If you have other suggestions on things I could try, I’d certainly be interested in researching it and maybe adding it to my rotation. I know some of these might seem super easy to some of you, but I want 2020 to be more approachable, more flexible in what it lets me do, so that I can give more creativity, more energy to other pursuits but not completely lose track of needing to continue to learn more about my body and how to sustain a healthy self.

I hope you’ll all join me and find some small way to make 2020 a better year for your own health and happiness. Thank you again to everyone that took the time to encourage and support me in 2019!

Affordable Houses in Canada

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My wife and I are struggling to own a home and have been for some time and I recently saw an article that compares places to live at a $600,000 price point across Canada that made me feel inadequate and frustrated.

My first response was, “what does something more reasonable look like?”

What is reasonable?

I took a look at the median household income across Canada and then found the average of those reported numbers. It came to $88,368.57 per year. This number seems rather high to me, but not impossibly so.

I jumped over to the Realtor.ca Affordability Calculator and punched in that income with zero expenses and got the following numbers.

So if you have $106,325 saved up, you can get a $531,624 house. That’s still almost $70,000 short of the $600,000 homes that the article I read looked at.

On the right side, you’ll see a $400,00 house as an option if you have $20,000 for the down payment. I put these values in to see what the calculator would give for only five percent down.

My wife and I have been looking at houses in the $275,000 to $360,000 range.

What is the current average price of a home in Canada? According to a CBC article from April 15, 2019, it is around $481,745. Again well short of the $600,000 comparison despite the article saying that places like Toronto and Vancouver skew that number higher due to their more competitive markets.

Some fun rules:

  • In this post, I’m not going to include condos (apartment condos, row house condos, etc…)
  • The house has to already be built, as houses to be built typically end up costing more than their listed price as a builder’s minimum specifications at the “low end” of the market tend to be fairly crummy.
  • I am also going to filter out mobile homes and modular homes as their resell value can end up being rather weak and they are typically on land leases that end up being like condo fees.

Houses Across Canada for $400,000

Of course this doesn’t take into account houses that are listed for a few thousand over $400,000 that could be sold for under that line.

British Columbia

You aren’t going to get something in one of the major cities for this price if you want to meet the criteria I’ve put in place, but outside of that, there are still opportunities to be found.

Chilliwack

$389,900 – 2 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, Single Family home. It is 1196 sq ft and in a 45+ gated community.

Penticton

$389,000 – 2 Bedroom, 1 Bathroom, Single Family home. It is 860 sq ft and allows for a 1000 sq ft carriage home.

Alberta

I am impressed with what’s available in the big cities in Alberta. They went through a hard financial reset and are still in recovery, so their houses seem to be a strong value.

Calgary

$384,900 – 3 Bedroom, 3 Bathroom, Single Family home in Evanston, Alberta. It is 1442 sq ft and only nine years old.

Chestermere

$399,900 – 3 + 1 Bedroom, 4 Bathroom, Single Family home. It is 1688 sq ft.

Edmonton

$400,000 – 4 Bedroom, 3 Bathroom, Single Family home. It is 1394 sq ft and has a gourmet kitchen.

Northwest Territories

There wasn’t anything listed in the Yukon or Nunavut for the filters I’ve put in place, but there was something in the Northwest Territories… Just one though.

Yellowknife

$399,950 – 4 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built in 1967 and has two separate living spaces and a commercial shop.

Saskatchewan

At first, with my search selections, I couldn’t find anything in Saskatchewan. I realized that the filters I was putting in place for the type of houses I was looking for was causing the tool to filter out everything.

Saskatoon

$399,900 – 3 Bedroom, 3 Bathroom, Single Family home. It was built in 2019 and has 1472 sq ft of floor space. The basement is legal suite ready and open for future development.

There were a ton of newly built homes in Saskatoon for around $400,000 and many of them list that they can be used to rent out to people, either with a basement suite or houses setup as more than one unit. It seems to be a major focus of the market.

Regina

$399,900 – 4 Bedroom, 3 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built in 1972, it has 1805 sq ft of floor space. The basement, of course, has a second kitchen and is ready to be used as a rental suite.

Manitoba

Winnipeg seems to be a mixed bag. You can get a little bit of everything at this price point.

Winnipeg

$399,999 – 4 Bedroom, 3 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built in 1958, it has many renovations, especially in 2019 as they got ready to sell. It has 1514 sq ft of floor space.

Winnipeg

$392,500 – 4 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built in 2017, it only has 990 sq ft of floor space. It is set-up as two units with the lower unit having 708 sq ft.

Ontario

My wife and I live in Ontario and so this section is the most interesting to me. I know that in some locations, a really nice house can be had for $400,000 but in the more populated areas where the jobs are, it can become quite difficult to find something fitting the criteria I’ve set.

Thunder Bay

$399,900 – 3 + 1 Bedroom, 4 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built in 1990, this house has 2312 sq ft of floor space.

Sudbury

$390,000 – 4 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, Single Family home. Corner lot, granite counters, and a cozy breakfast nook are the main selling points of this house.

Windsor

$400,000 – 3+1 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, Single Family home. Basement apparently has a marble and hardwood floor.

London

$399,999 – 3+1 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built twenty years ago as a model home.

Cambridge

$399,000 – 2+1 Bedroom, 1 Bathroom, Single Family home. Separate side entrance to the basement.

I tried to find a place in Kitchener/Waterloo but was unable to under the criteria I’ve put in place near the value I’ve selected. There were some houses under $400,000 but they were handyman specials that almost needed to be knocked down.

Guelph

$395,000 – 2 Bedroom, 1 Bathroom, Single Family home. They talk more about location than the house and note that it is being sold in ‘as-is’ condition.

As you can see thanks to Guelph, as we get closer to the GTA, the house you get drops quickly. Land is more expensive as you get there, but is labour also more expensive? What about building supplies? The pricing change due to supply and demand, this far out seems huge!

Ajax

$369,000 – 0 Bedroom, 0 Bathroom, Single Family home. Property being sold ‘as-is’ due to a previous fire in the house.

This was one of the closest to GTA single, detached family houses you could buy under $400,000. Amazing, right?

Oshawa

$399,900 – 3 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, Single Family home. Another property being sold ‘as-is’, but it has some recent upgrades like it’s shingles in 2017.

A little further out in Oshawa, you start to get more choices again, but they all seem to have some serious problems or weird compromises.

Kingston

$389,900 – 3 Bedroom, 3 Bathroom, Single Family home. It is on the west end of town and has a fairly long lot at 181 feet.

As I said, we live in Kingston, and the prices here have gotten fairly high, competing with large areas like the edge of the Greater Toronto Area and Greater Ottawa Area. There are many homes in Kingston under $400,000 but they are old, small, in disrepair and/or right on the busy railroad tracks.

Ottawa

$389,900 – 2 Bedroom, 1 Bathroom, Single Family home. The listing says the house needs a lot of TLC, but it is on a 150 x 100 foot lot.

Quebec

Longueuil

$399,999 – 4 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built in 1987, it looks well taken care of and updated, but no listing information is really shown on Realtor.ca

Quebec City

$399,000 – 3 Bedroom, 1 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built in 1951 with a sunken garage and laundry in the kitchen.

I feel like the province of Quebec has some really great house pricing, especially for the size of the cities and towns they are in.

New Brunswick

Fredericton

$399,500 – 4 Bedroom, 3 Bathroom, Single Family home. They call it an executive home with an attached double garage.

Nova Scotia

Halifax

$399,900 – 3 Bedroom, 4 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built in 2010 and interestingly it lists a public price history showing it sold in 2011 for $319,900.

Prince Edward Island

Charlottetown

$399,000 – 3 Bedroom, 4 Bathroom, Single Family home. Built in 2007 in what the listing calls the most desired neighborhood.

Newfoundland & Labrador

St. John’s

$399,900 – 3 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, Single Family home. It comes with a detached garage, the house has nine foot ceilings and was built in 1970.

Conclusion

So, there you go.. That’s a cross-section of houses in Canada for under $400,000. If your family earns more than $90,000 per year and you have around $25,000 saved up, you can buy something out in the market, but depending on where you look, you’ll end up with something of a small size and/or low quality. If you are okay with that and feel a strong need to own your own place, then hopefully this helps give some ideas and thoughts.

If more people were able to take advantage of remote work, then maybe more people could spread out over our wonderful country instead of concentrating into a few large metropolitan areas.

While I do work from home, I need to wait until I’m done my taxes for 2019 before I could qualify for a mortgage. We also need to save up more as our expenses are rather high, but we are making progress.

Why do we want a home of our own? It is a nice forced savings program and there’s a nice sense of control in home ownership. I hope you enjoyed this post. I think I’ll be writing more about housing in the future.