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brin_bellway[fairly strong cw: what it says on the tin, aging]
Paying Canada Pension Plan taxes on your tips is opt-in. Each year, you can check a box on your tax software to have them remove an amount equal to 12% of that year's tips from your refund (or add it to what you owe) and add it to the amount you've paid into the system; otherwise they don't.
I've never pressed the button before. This year I did. Fast food is not a tipping-dependent job, so it only added about eight dollars to my CPP contribution, but it's the principle of the thing.
---
I'm told that back in the day, Dad had a notebook where he kept track of what everything cost, and knew exactly what was a good price and what wasn't.
These days, he's constantly slipping up whenever he goes to the grocery store by himself. I cringe with almost every receipt of his that I scan into the household accounting software. It's usually *relatively* small: thirty cents in lost cashback from using a suboptimal credit card, a dollar overpaid because he failed to check whether he could price-match his muffins. But every bit counts. And it's the principle of the thing.
He was one year older than I am now when he had his first heart attack.
---
He and Mom went to the grocery store together recently, just the two of them.
She bought a bunch of clearance Easter candy, which is to be expected. But she failed to get multiple of the things that she had *written on her list*, and not because they'd run out. The list felt like too much of a jumble, she said: she got overwhelmed trying to read it.
Dad had to go back and return one of the bags of Easter candy the next day (fortunately they let him), because she'd sworn the sign said it was nine dollars but it was actually fifteen (and not worth it, even by her own values). The sign may well have said that: I'll believe it, having seen how often grocery stores fuck up their signs. But the cash register said fifteen, and she was at self-checkout, with the cash register's screen in full view.
---
I'm currently letting my dad have legal title to approximately all of my savings, because he earns 8.2% on the marginal dollar and I earn 2.5%. Every bit counts. (And it's more than a bit, really: 5.7% adds up *fast*.)
A while back, I gave him a secondary card on one of my credit-card accounts. It's been months since he's used it correctly: every single time he's used it since late October, he would have gotten better cashback with his own card, and his card wasn't already maxed out.
(I'm pretty sure he's overestimating how much benefit you get from using that card at stores owned by the same company. I suspect that the exact issue may be that he can't keep track of when they're having limited-time promotions and when they're not, and he is responding by acting as if there is always a promotion "just in case".)
I'm planning to replace that credit-card account with a slightly better one. I told them, as I was signing up, that I wanted two secondary cards in my parents' names. I'm having second thoughts about activating them.
---
The Ontario Disability Support Program, if we ever successfully manage to make it through their bureaucracy and out the other side†, will internally consider me to have the legal status of "boarder", not "household member". To make ourselves legible to them will require a certain amount of disentangling our finances, especially when it comes to giving Dad additional money to put in the HELOC.
---
I learned recently that Rogers has a credit card that--to give the short version--gives 3% cashback on everything up to the cost of your Rogers Internet plan each month, and 2% on everything thereafter.
I already knew that Rogers offers *very heavily* subsidised Internet plans to people on ODSP.
Give Connected-for-Success!Mom a Rogers Mastercard, and Dad a secondary card on that account, and the correct answer for which credit card to use could always be clear to them. They wouldn't even have to worry about card networks: a few stores don't take Visa, many stores don't take American Express, but every store that takes credit cards at all takes Mastercard.
(And we're on a merely-haggled-not-subsidised Rogers plan currently, so if Mom *doesn't* get into ODSP, the answer simply flips to giving *Dad* a Rogers Mastercard and *Mom* a secondary card.)
---
There are four options to avoid the ever-present threat of Passive Foreign Investment Companies (five, if you count *not* avoiding them and simply tanking the ~CAD$600/year in additional tax-preparation fees; six, if you count renouncing your U.S. citizenship), when looking to store and grow your savings. You can have things that are not legally *passive*, that are not legally *foreign*, that are not legally *investment*, or that are not legally *companies*.
I'm currently mostly in option 3, "buying back some home equity from the bank is legally absence-of-debt and not an investment", with a tiny bit of option 4, "a savings account is not a company". But option 1 and probably even 2 are also available to me, and if someday I am operating at six-digit scales, option 5 becomes feasible as well.
---
I'm in the process of cancelling my chequing account in favour of just using my hybrid chequing/savings account.
The original reason I wanted them separate was because the savings account didn't have a debit card, but I've found that I never use my debit card, to the point of leaving it in a drawer and paying cash if I encounter a cash-and-debit-only store.
If I can arrange to consistently have enough money in my hybrid account to cover routine bills at any given time, I can sign up for autopay, and have neither [the careful triage analysis every fortnight of which credit-card bills to pay now and which to leave for closer to the due date] nor [the wastefulness of leaving any remotely substantial amount of money in a chequing account earning no interest].
---
Next year, my parents will become eligible for U.S. Social Security.
Dad had a very good American job, once upon a time, with large social-security taxes accordingly. If they claim immediately, it will be about 42k CAD a year between the two of them: enough to support themselves, albeit not by much.
But that would probably kick them off ODSP for being too high-income (and at minimum reduce their payments by a lot), if indeed Mom is on it by that point. And--I was at the intake phone interview with Mom's caseworker, on speakerphone, and I made very sure to ask this--ODSP doesn't *demand* that Dad take advantage of U.S. Social Security until an additional five years after that, when he reaches ""full retirement age"". At *that* point, now *without* the early-claimant penalties, it's more like 60k: enough to run an entire household.
Dad failed to plan ahead for the possibility of being forced into an early retirement, failed to manage his money with the ruthlessness needed to survive, did not expect to have already run out of savings by the time he reached his 60s. But what was then his government forced him to pay into a pension plan, and they will save him from himself.
---
One of my former regular customers, who liked to ask me how school was going and sometimes shared his food with me when the multi-pack discounts were large enough to make it worth buying an extra and remembered my birthday, sat across from me on the bus to my internship a few days ago.
He looked much, much older than he did two years ago. He said, haltingly and clearly struggling for words, that he hadn't been around lately because he'd had a stroke. He was on his way to physical therapy.
---
Brain damage, including but not limited to aging-related brain damage, sometimes makes people paranoid and hostile. This likely happened to my great-aunt, to some extent, and we are still paying the price for it.
My-parents-as-they-are-now would never kick me out of their house. The consciousnesses inhabiting their bodies ten or fifteen years down the line may have other ideas.
---
It's not a pleasant topic, but that doesn't make it unimportant.
---
†The parts of the bureaucracy we've encountered thus far *do* seem fairly positively inclined towards Mom, just very slow-moving and in need of some prompting. Prompting that, of course, people with Long COVID brainfog are bad at remembering to do, so *I* have to prompt *her* to prompt *them*. I have a personal calendar reminder set for this evening to remind her to make a reminder note for herself to call her doctor tomorrow morning to remind said doctor about the paperwork that needs finishing, because any problem can be solved by adding another layer of indirection. ↩
Paying Canada Pension Plan taxes on your tips is opt-in. Each year, you can check a box on your tax software to have them remove an amount equal to 12% of that year's tips from your refund (or add it to what you owe) and add it to the amount you've paid into the system; otherwise they don't.
I've never pressed the button before. This year I did. Fast food is not a tipping-dependent job, so it only added about eight dollars to my CPP contribution, but it's the principle of the thing.
---
I'm told that back in the day, Dad had a notebook where he kept track of what everything cost, and knew exactly what was a good price and what wasn't.
These days, he's constantly slipping up whenever he goes to the grocery store by himself. I cringe with almost every receipt of his that I scan into the household accounting software. It's usually *relatively* small: thirty cents in lost cashback from using a suboptimal credit card, a dollar overpaid because he failed to check whether he could price-match his muffins. But every bit counts. And it's the principle of the thing.
He was one year older than I am now when he had his first heart attack.
---
He and Mom went to the grocery store together recently, just the two of them.
She bought a bunch of clearance Easter candy, which is to be expected. But she failed to get multiple of the things that she had *written on her list*, and not because they'd run out. The list felt like too much of a jumble, she said: she got overwhelmed trying to read it.
Dad had to go back and return one of the bags of Easter candy the next day (fortunately they let him), because she'd sworn the sign said it was nine dollars but it was actually fifteen (and not worth it, even by her own values). The sign may well have said that: I'll believe it, having seen how often grocery stores fuck up their signs. But the cash register said fifteen, and she was at self-checkout, with the cash register's screen in full view.
---
I'm currently letting my dad have legal title to approximately all of my savings, because he earns 8.2% on the marginal dollar and I earn 2.5%. Every bit counts. (And it's more than a bit, really: 5.7% adds up *fast*.)
A while back, I gave him a secondary card on one of my credit-card accounts. It's been months since he's used it correctly: every single time he's used it since late October, he would have gotten better cashback with his own card, and his card wasn't already maxed out.
(I'm pretty sure he's overestimating how much benefit you get from using that card at stores owned by the same company. I suspect that the exact issue may be that he can't keep track of when they're having limited-time promotions and when they're not, and he is responding by acting as if there is always a promotion "just in case".)
I'm planning to replace that credit-card account with a slightly better one. I told them, as I was signing up, that I wanted two secondary cards in my parents' names. I'm having second thoughts about activating them.
---
The Ontario Disability Support Program, if we ever successfully manage to make it through their bureaucracy and out the other side†, will internally consider me to have the legal status of "boarder", not "household member". To make ourselves legible to them will require a certain amount of disentangling our finances, especially when it comes to giving Dad additional money to put in the HELOC.
---
I learned recently that Rogers has a credit card that--to give the short version--gives 3% cashback on everything up to the cost of your Rogers Internet plan each month, and 2% on everything thereafter.
I already knew that Rogers offers *very heavily* subsidised Internet plans to people on ODSP.
Give Connected-for-Success!Mom a Rogers Mastercard, and Dad a secondary card on that account, and the correct answer for which credit card to use could always be clear to them. They wouldn't even have to worry about card networks: a few stores don't take Visa, many stores don't take American Express, but every store that takes credit cards at all takes Mastercard.
(And we're on a merely-haggled-not-subsidised Rogers plan currently, so if Mom *doesn't* get into ODSP, the answer simply flips to giving *Dad* a Rogers Mastercard and *Mom* a secondary card.)
---
There are four options to avoid the ever-present threat of Passive Foreign Investment Companies (five, if you count *not* avoiding them and simply tanking the ~CAD$600/year in additional tax-preparation fees; six, if you count renouncing your U.S. citizenship), when looking to store and grow your savings. You can have things that are not legally *passive*, that are not legally *foreign*, that are not legally *investment*, or that are not legally *companies*.
I'm currently mostly in option 3, "buying back some home equity from the bank is legally absence-of-debt and not an investment", with a tiny bit of option 4, "a savings account is not a company". But option 1 and probably even 2 are also available to me, and if someday I am operating at six-digit scales, option 5 becomes feasible as well.
---
I'm in the process of cancelling my chequing account in favour of just using my hybrid chequing/savings account.
The original reason I wanted them separate was because the savings account didn't have a debit card, but I've found that I never use my debit card, to the point of leaving it in a drawer and paying cash if I encounter a cash-and-debit-only store.
If I can arrange to consistently have enough money in my hybrid account to cover routine bills at any given time, I can sign up for autopay, and have neither [the careful triage analysis every fortnight of which credit-card bills to pay now and which to leave for closer to the due date] nor [the wastefulness of leaving any remotely substantial amount of money in a chequing account earning no interest].
---
Next year, my parents will become eligible for U.S. Social Security.
Dad had a very good American job, once upon a time, with large social-security taxes accordingly. If they claim immediately, it will be about 42k CAD a year between the two of them: enough to support themselves, albeit not by much.
But that would probably kick them off ODSP for being too high-income (and at minimum reduce their payments by a lot), if indeed Mom is on it by that point. And--I was at the intake phone interview with Mom's caseworker, on speakerphone, and I made very sure to ask this--ODSP doesn't *demand* that Dad take advantage of U.S. Social Security until an additional five years after that, when he reaches ""full retirement age"". At *that* point, now *without* the early-claimant penalties, it's more like 60k: enough to run an entire household.
Dad failed to plan ahead for the possibility of being forced into an early retirement, failed to manage his money with the ruthlessness needed to survive, did not expect to have already run out of savings by the time he reached his 60s. But what was then his government forced him to pay into a pension plan, and they will save him from himself.
---
One of my former regular customers, who liked to ask me how school was going and sometimes shared his food with me when the multi-pack discounts were large enough to make it worth buying an extra and remembered my birthday, sat across from me on the bus to my internship a few days ago.
He looked much, much older than he did two years ago. He said, haltingly and clearly struggling for words, that he hadn't been around lately because he'd had a stroke. He was on his way to physical therapy.
---
Brain damage, including but not limited to aging-related brain damage, sometimes makes people paranoid and hostile. This likely happened to my great-aunt, to some extent, and we are still paying the price for it.
My-parents-as-they-are-now would never kick me out of their house. The consciousnesses inhabiting their bodies ten or fifteen years down the line may have other ideas.
---
It's not a pleasant topic, but that doesn't make it unimportant.
---
†The parts of the bureaucracy we've encountered thus far *do* seem fairly positively inclined towards Mom, just very slow-moving and in need of some prompting. Prompting that, of course, people with Long COVID brainfog are bad at remembering to do, so *I* have to prompt *her* to prompt *them*. I have a personal calendar reminder set for this evening to remind her to make a reminder note for herself to call her doctor tomorrow morning to remind said doctor about the paperwork that needs finishing, because any problem can be solved by adding another layer of indirection. ↩
