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brin_bellway[cw: poverty, government bullshit, illness, other medical stuff, (fairly mild) death]
Them: [literally anything involving TFSAs]
Me: :'-(
(Although it is unclear to me whether TFSAs are *more* dangerous than non-registered accounts, or merely equally dangerous. I know that if you play your cards right you *can* knock the effective penalty for certain non-registered ETFs (including, notably, all three of the Vanguard/Blackrock/Horizons lines of all-in-one funds) down to between USD$150 and USD$600 per year, depending on whether or not you would otherwise have had to hire a tax specialist that year (since you can't do most of the taxes yourself and hire them *just* for the hard bit: it has to be a package deal) and how complicated your other taxes are. If you think of that as being part of the MER, it becomes a workably low percentage fairly quickly as your investment quantity rises into the tens of thousands. Will have to ask a tax specialist for clarification on TFSA rules at some point, though it's not urgent given how much of the List remains.)
---
Them: >>Thanks to some frugal habits now and then, [this couple, who already own their home outright]'s after-tax spending needs are about $55,000 per year.
Me: ...okay, yeah, I am *definitely* living in some kind of parallel universe.
(We spent less than that last year on three people plus supplying room-and-board to a fourth, and yeah we barely drove anywhere but also we only owned ~half our house equity. And we replaced both the roof and the water heater in 2020, too, so it wasn't like the home-maintenance costs were artificially low that year by all taking place in other years.)
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Them: [stuff about how most retirees want to travel the world, expand their horizons, and extend their subjective lifespan through more of said life being filled with vivid novelty]
Me: *thinks about how days don't increment properly if I don't sleep in my own bed, which leads to things like being caught off guard by menstrual phase-changes because I wasn't expecting them so soon*
Me: *thinks about how I had to just /accept/ the inevitability that after going to a major global tourist destination I was going to have to completely write off 3 - 5 days of my life due to con crud, and the best I could hope for was that all of the written-off days would be at home and not directly interfering with the trip*
Me: ...*extend* my subjective lifespan??
(like, I *do* suspect my ideal lifestyle would contain somewhat more *day trips* than my current and near-future lifestyles, but my adaptedness to Ontario on psychological and physical levels were both hard-won, and they are not something to be lightly abandoned or ignored)
(and as for filling your life with novelty, pretty sure I'm too autistic for that shit: I don't even fill my *diet* with novelty)
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Them: >>For a 55-year-old couple:
(Both of these quotes are from Pacific Blue Cross, just for an example. (No affiliation by My Own Advisor.) There are many other carriers.)
The healthcare plans cover:
Me: ...under what circumstances is this *ever* a good idea? Only in the very worst timelines, where several horrible things happen to you all in the same year, would you even turn a profit *that year*. And yes, insurance *is* supposed to be for those long-tail worst-case scenarios, but look at those *caps*! Even if several horrible things *did* happen to *both* of you at once, you'd get maybe $30k of payout! A $30k expense is not an overwhelming catastrophe for the sort of household that can afford to spend $410/month on supplemental health insurance. If I'm going to pay $410/month to insure something, I want *way* more than $30k of coverage, and if at all possible it should be split between fewer buckets too.
Me: The only way I can see this making any sense is if they're burying the lede somewhere within "miscellaneous benefits", but you'd think if there were any major draws there they'd have put them front and centre.
Me: (And those of you living in timelines where you *are* spending $5,000/person/year on medication should almost certainly apply for the Trillium Drug Program. Ontario isn't completely lacking in drug coverage, not even for people between 25 and 65: your medication expenses are effectively capped at 4% of your household income.)
(I had much the same reaction to the health insurance my university offered me a while back, which is why I did not take it. I pay out of pocket for my prescriptions (maybe $40/year, though I'm well aware that this cheapness is unlikely to last as I age: Mom is closer to $800/year), my vision checkups (~$150 every two years), and my dental checkups (~$150, ideally every nine months but in practice more like every couple years; hope to go back to every nine months once I'm making decent money).)
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Them: Hey, a lot of us have heard of Vanguard's VEQT these days, but have you heard of Blackrock's version, XEQT? Still excellent stock diversification, fees that are if anything slightly lower, and less home-country bias! And make sure to check out Horizons' HGRO too, which despite the name is *not* equivalent asset allocation to VGRO and XGRO, but is in fact 100% equity.
Me: Ooh. *takes notes*
---
(part 2)
Them: [literally anything involving TFSAs]
Me: :'-(
(Although it is unclear to me whether TFSAs are *more* dangerous than non-registered accounts, or merely equally dangerous. I know that if you play your cards right you *can* knock the effective penalty for certain non-registered ETFs (including, notably, all three of the Vanguard/Blackrock/Horizons lines of all-in-one funds) down to between USD$150 and USD$600 per year, depending on whether or not you would otherwise have had to hire a tax specialist that year (since you can't do most of the taxes yourself and hire them *just* for the hard bit: it has to be a package deal) and how complicated your other taxes are. If you think of that as being part of the MER, it becomes a workably low percentage fairly quickly as your investment quantity rises into the tens of thousands. Will have to ask a tax specialist for clarification on TFSA rules at some point, though it's not urgent given how much of the List remains.)
---
Them: >>Thanks to some frugal habits now and then, [this couple, who already own their home outright]'s after-tax spending needs are about $55,000 per year.
Me: ...okay, yeah, I am *definitely* living in some kind of parallel universe.
(We spent less than that last year on three people plus supplying room-and-board to a fourth, and yeah we barely drove anywhere but also we only owned ~half our house equity. And we replaced both the roof and the water heater in 2020, too, so it wasn't like the home-maintenance costs were artificially low that year by all taking place in other years.)
---
Them: [stuff about how most retirees want to travel the world, expand their horizons, and extend their subjective lifespan through more of said life being filled with vivid novelty]
Me: *thinks about how days don't increment properly if I don't sleep in my own bed, which leads to things like being caught off guard by menstrual phase-changes because I wasn't expecting them so soon*
Me: *thinks about how I had to just /accept/ the inevitability that after going to a major global tourist destination I was going to have to completely write off 3 - 5 days of my life due to con crud, and the best I could hope for was that all of the written-off days would be at home and not directly interfering with the trip*
Me: ...*extend* my subjective lifespan??
(like, I *do* suspect my ideal lifestyle would contain somewhat more *day trips* than my current and near-future lifestyles, but my adaptedness to Ontario on psychological and physical levels were both hard-won, and they are not something to be lightly abandoned or ignored)
(and as for filling your life with novelty, pretty sure I'm too autistic for that shit: I don't even fill my *diet* with novelty)
---
Them: >>For a 55-year-old couple:
- A medically underwritten plan will cost $264/month.
- A group conversion plan will cost $410/month.
(Both of these quotes are from Pacific Blue Cross, just for an example. (No affiliation by My Own Advisor.) There are many other carriers.)
The healthcare plans cover:
- 80% of the cost of prescription drugs up to a maximum of $5,000 per person per year.
- 80% of basic dental services up to a maximum of $1,200 per person per year with 2 recall visits per year.
- 50% of major restorative services.
- 50% of orthodontics.
- $300 per person every 2 years for vision care.
- $500 per person per year for registered therapists and health practitioners (physiotherapists, chiropractors, etc.).
- $5,000 per person per year for medical services and supplies not covered by government plans.
- Miscellaneous benefits such as private duty nursing care, accidental death & dismemberment, etc.
Me: ...under what circumstances is this *ever* a good idea? Only in the very worst timelines, where several horrible things happen to you all in the same year, would you even turn a profit *that year*. And yes, insurance *is* supposed to be for those long-tail worst-case scenarios, but look at those *caps*! Even if several horrible things *did* happen to *both* of you at once, you'd get maybe $30k of payout! A $30k expense is not an overwhelming catastrophe for the sort of household that can afford to spend $410/month on supplemental health insurance. If I'm going to pay $410/month to insure something, I want *way* more than $30k of coverage, and if at all possible it should be split between fewer buckets too.
Me: The only way I can see this making any sense is if they're burying the lede somewhere within "miscellaneous benefits", but you'd think if there were any major draws there they'd have put them front and centre.
Me: (And those of you living in timelines where you *are* spending $5,000/person/year on medication should almost certainly apply for the Trillium Drug Program. Ontario isn't completely lacking in drug coverage, not even for people between 25 and 65: your medication expenses are effectively capped at 4% of your household income.)
(I had much the same reaction to the health insurance my university offered me a while back, which is why I did not take it. I pay out of pocket for my prescriptions (maybe $40/year, though I'm well aware that this cheapness is unlikely to last as I age: Mom is closer to $800/year), my vision checkups (~$150 every two years), and my dental checkups (~$150, ideally every nine months but in practice more like every couple years; hope to go back to every nine months once I'm making decent money).)
---
Them: Hey, a lot of us have heard of Vanguard's VEQT these days, but have you heard of Blackrock's version, XEQT? Still excellent stock diversification, fees that are if anything slightly lower, and less home-country bias! And make sure to check out Horizons' HGRO too, which despite the name is *not* equivalent asset allocation to VGRO and XGRO, but is in fact 100% equity.
Me: Ooh. *takes notes*
---
(part 2)
no subject
Date: 2021-05-16 09:48 am (UTC)(Financially speaking, you are lucky to have cheap tastes, but most people don't. The world is full of people who play MTG and go on two-month trips to the USA.)
(Also: I'd be interested in any high-quality recommendations WRT finance blogs. I haven't run into anything good in the genre for a good while now)
no subject
Date: 2021-05-17 04:24 am (UTC)I don't even know where that would be, although I suppose the insurance company would tell me.
I gather that I'm fortunate to have gotten in with a primary-care doctor (and a good one at that), but *having* done that I really haven't had many problems with the public healthcare system (*knocks on wood*). All of the waits seem like reasonable triaging: it's always been very clear that had my need for [insert medical care] been more urgent, I would have been treated sooner. (The only unreasonable wait that's coming to mind was in fact with a plastic surgeon (regarding keloid treatment) who was *not* government-covered†.) Specialists do have a bad habit of assigning you appointment times without asking you first what a good time would be, but you *can* start negotiations if they give you a bad one.
Someday, most likely (and perhaps quite soon), I'll have supplemental health insurance through my job and will see how much value I get out of it.
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>>Financially speaking, you are lucky to have cheap tastes
Some of it's luck, but I think "nocebo effect from stuff being expensive" and "more willing to test whether something is to my taste if it's cheap" are also factors. Although maybe some of the luck is in experiencing that nocebo effect.
(Semi-related: in my travels through the personal-finance blogosphere I've encountered a lot of pushback against the Latte Factor. They're concerned about people straining the gnat and swallowing the camel, worrying too much about optimising small expenses and not enough about the much bigger gains to be found in optimising the Big Three expenses (housing/transport/food). And while there's a point in there...when it comes to lattes specifically, I find the way our culture normalises caffeine addiction very disturbing? Especially given tolerance: presumably a lot of them aren't even enhancing their performance much at this point, they're just getting back up to baseline. It feels like...not just a waste of resources (though it is that), but also a waste of attack surface: they have this extra vulnerability in their lives that they didn't need to have and--since, again, tolerance--are getting very questionable amounts of value out of.)
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>>and go on two-month trips to the USA.
Now that is *definitely* a good reason to buy private health insurance.
I'm pretty sure this is *also* a nocebo thing, but I swear when you go to the States you can *feel* absence-of-public-healthcare permeating everything, a metaphysical brittleness in the fabric of society. I always breathe a sigh of relief when I cross back through the border and feel Canadian societal fabric wrap around me again.
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>>Also: I'd be interested in any high-quality recommendations WRT finance blogs. I haven't run into anything good in the genre for a good while now
I don't know about "good", necessarily, plus I've been focusing on Canadian stuff. I'm pretty sure I like Michael James on Money; My Own Advisor feels slightly off (overly polished?) but worth keeping an eye on; Modern FImily feels somewhat uncomfortably reminiscent of the parenting/fashion/romance-novel bloggers I used to work for, but she's a dual US/Canada citizen who spends ~$30k/year on [two adults + one child + house-debt interest], so she strikes me as unusually likely to have relevant-to-my-life tips.
I know I've seen some people with .com.au website addresses in the comments of these blogs, but I haven't looked into them.
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†So I'm told, anyway: he never actually charged me for that treatment. Possibly his plan was to charge me at the end of the three rounds, but I decided after the boredom-followed-by-agony-followed-by-lingering-pain of the first round that I'd rather keep the keloids than go through that two more times. ↩
no subject
Date: 2021-05-17 01:15 pm (UTC)... it's fairly possible there is a big international difference, though also this stuff is more topical for not-incredibly-acute surgical stuff where you're spending weeks in and out of hospital rather than, like, urgent wounds? So yeah a part of it is just less-busy specialists and a nicer room if you have to go in to get your appendix out or equivalent.
>> Some of it's luck,
yeah I do appreciate the deliberate effort you put in but also not wanting to do international travel At All does seem to be a huge edge in this regard.
(There's a small part of me which would, if I were incomprehensibly rich, spend six months living in every major city in the world kinda deal, I like living in interesting places (give or take covid-trauma) but I am an awful tourist so holidays are much less appealing to me. Maybe if I end up with a much larger retirement fund than expected I would be able to afford rent? IDK. But it's a thing that sounds appealing to do. I think most people have stuff like that.)
>> Now that is *definitely* a good reason to buy private health insurance.
... you know I have no idea if the guy who I was referencing there did buy insurance for that. I hope he did but really could not say. Might ask him, next time I see him.
>> I'm pretty sure this is *also* a nocebo thing
... I don't think I can feel things like that. Maybe that's what everyone was so annoyed at me for not being able to answer questions about what it was like in norway.
>> I'm pretty sure I like Michael James on Money
I'll add the former to the pile; the latter is not topical to my financial interests, and My Own Advisor has an unpleasant website on a ten-second read and you didn't recommend it highly enough for me to move past "this seems like it would be a pain to archive binge".
no subject
Date: 2021-05-17 04:18 pm (UTC)I think I've heard the occasional Canadian saying they like having supplemental health insurance because it gets them a private room at the hospital rather than being in a ward. Maybe that's the analogue.
(...which I suppose would probably be valuable, given how much trouble I have sleeping in the same room with snoring people. Maybe not $410-every-month valuable, but OTOH I'm not a 55-year-old couple trying to transition into a personal private plan without having their health re-checked.)
((I've tried earplugs, and they give me nightmares about waking up and taking the earplugs out and finding my ears are still clogged. I was prone to earwax clogs as a child (and they *were* often triggered by plugging my ear with something else!), and I was always worried that one day they would happen in both ears at once and I'd end up nearly deaf for ~3 weeks. I guess it left a mark on my psyche.
...I have *not* yet tried sleeping through other people's snoring with acoustic earmuffs on, though I do own a pair. It would probably be uncomfortable, but it might be better on net than not wearing them.))
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>>I like living in interesting places (give or take covid-trauma) but I am an awful tourist so holidays are much less appealing to me. Maybe if I end up with a much larger retirement fund than expected I would be able to afford rent? IDK. But it's a thing that sounds appealing to do. I think most people have stuff like that.
It does seem like most people have something like that, which means a lot of them talk about how to pull stuff like that off on a more achievable quantity of retirement fund. I haven't actively pursued that line of research since my interest would be purely academic, but you might find it worth some digging.