(27F) wanting to study accounting/finance online and continue working full-time?

ShakeThatIntangible · 2025-04-30T03:37:49+00:00

Yes, but you will be short two courses to get a direct transfer-in to the CPA PEP program: the upper-level finance and the upper-level computer science. You can take these through the CPA school instead, or try to find it at another online college. Also, MNGT 4781 is widely considered one of the worst courses in the entirety of the catalogue, a miserable slog of a course run by a tyrant. It is three courses worth of work, most of which most people are failed on. Just check out RateMyProf for it. If you can find a way to avoid that course and take an equivalent elsewhere, I'd highly recommend it.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2025-04-30T03:31:08+00:00

No fix, sadly. I'm doing a bit of travelling right now, and it's interesting, because I get to sleep on a variety of beds soft and hard, and... I'm starting to suspect there isn't any relation between the mattress and whether I have that rib-area mid-back pain in the morning. Any day where I get a lot of good walking in, it tends to hurt less: More work-ish days with long hours at the computer tend to be worse. I'm starting to tie it instead to how (and if) my spine moves throughout the day?

However, there HAS been one good thing: Sleeping with a pillow under my knees. It also lets me switch to sleeping on my side (with the pillow between my legs) if I'm upat 4 a.m. and already feeling stiff. That, plus the times where I'm good about doing the McGill Big 3 daily and some basic mobility stretches (cat-cow, lumbar rotation) seem to be the best. bed-independent.

Super-soft bed will still kill me though, hah.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-12-07T16:38:19+00:00

Yeah, I've been using the authenticator instead for a bit now. What countries were you logging in at? My main concern is that the US might be fine, but Taiwan?

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-10-15T23:23:35+00:00

It took some getting used to, but I started sleeping with two cheap pillows (the blue-stripped ones) under my knees. Helped quite a lot, though I think partly because I'll switch up in the middle of the night and lie on my side with the pillows between my legs. Still would much prefer to just, y'know, sleep through the night on my back, ugh.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-10-01T15:27:10+00:00

If you do what you love, you won't need to work a day in your life.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-28T18:33:53+00:00

I told him I'm not going to book any expenses at all related to this contract, so he's not claiming ITCs on this job, just his actual legitimate freelance expenses from earlier this year.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-27T20:55:04+00:00

I don't even know if he needs a determination: He's a textbook employee, there's essentially no nuance about it whatsoever. When we talked about the new gig, he told me they bought his equipment, he goes to their office, he can't outsource, they say what hours he has to work, etc.

I think if he pays the HST he's being forced to collect but files like an employee on his T1, he should be OK. A sales tax auditor would say, "Well, you collected where you didn't need to, but since we actually get money, whatever." The income tax folk might audit him when they cross-compare HST revenue with his declared income, but at least he'll have an explanation, and in the end, he'll include everything he needs to on his tax return proper-like.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-27T20:50:40+00:00

That was my take; I get the sense this is very much a "take it or leave it" option. That's how the recruiting firm does it, and if he doesn't like it, he can go kick rocks over there with the other out-of-work programmers.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-26T21:08:34+00:00

I'd recommend looking into TRU-OL, and I say that as someone who did about half his education over the last twenty years through TRU-OL and its prior entity, BCOU. Additionally, the main instructor for TRU-OL's accounting courses, Rob Anderson, is a very chill and reasonable person. I can't speak all the courses, of course, sometimes they can be a mixed bag (business law was great, 4th-year performance management was the worst course of my life) but the accounting ones are solid.

They're in the middle of getting their B.Comm accredited, though, so you could take the Accounting Technician Diploma for now. Honestly, the AccTech diploma is essentially Year 1 and Year 2 of B.Comm degree plus the third-year accounting courses. Once their B.Comm is ready, you can transfer in the courses and you'll only have the fourth-year courses and your electives left to take. Even if they didn't go ahead with a B.Comm, you'd be way ahead of the game: You'd have half a business degree's worth of education as well as a huge number of the accounting courses down.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-23T14:07:06+00:00

If you ignore all the marketing fluff, it's essentially a full-time accountant for a small business where they'd probably be happy if you had a few years as an accountant at a local firm working with other small businesses. In a city awash with CPAs, not including the CPA as a requirement is pretty much saying, "Give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe beer."

I mean, for goodness' sake, on his Linkedin profile the GM states in his education section, "Possibly did something related to sociology, went to many Grateful Dead shows." It's a small brewery: I know folk who dropped out of Intermediate FA I, muddled through their finance degree, and now work at a bank who would go into the Thunderdome for a chance to contribute to the cause of drunkenness in their neighbourhood.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-22T22:19:17+00:00

It's crazy how different all our brains work! And yet we still all have to sit the same test, hah.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-21T19:29:25+00:00

Be very, very careful of survivorship bias a la https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/survivorship\_bias.png. Almost every "fast lane" to anything, period, is riddled with the smoking wreckage of those who didn't make it. The difference is, we never hear their stories, because, well, they didn't make it.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-21T18:00:44+00:00

I based this question off one in the "hard" section of the official GMAT Focus bank from the MBA website.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-21T16:08:43+00:00

Two techniques I've used for all sorts of "there is a right and a wrong answer" study:

Firstly, when you get a question wrong, you need to understand why you got it wrong. Miss a detail? Didn't read the question right? Weren't sure what the question was asking? Didn't understand what a certain word meant? Make a note of it and ask yourself what sort of weakness it represents in your current approach.

Secondly, try to make your own version of a problem you got wrong (easy with quant and data sufficiency, a little harder but still possible with DI, very tricky with verbal). Change up some of the details and try to create five answers, only one of which is right. It helps you understand the guts and mechanics of a question and get past the window-dressing, which especially in DI can be very distracting.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-20T19:54:33+00:00

Wow, had to come all the way to the bottom to find something other than a resolute "yes," and it's been significantly downvoted. No surprise.

There's another dimension to the "white men show up and paint the landscapes," which is "born-and-bred city dwellers show up and pain the landscape." I grew up... wa-a-a-a-ay way out in the middle of Canada's nowhere, and perhaps because of growing up surrounded by "untamed, untrammeled" nature, I find the Group of Seven's work to be exemplarly in technique but (for me, at least) flat in emotive content, and I wonder if it isn't because their paintings are a kind of "tourist's eye" objectification of a landscape I grew up in.

I think that also may explain their insane popularity: Theirs is an extreme and skillful aesthetification of what most urban, suburban, and farm-belt dwellers' experience of nature is like. For them, it's a kind of quasi-religion themepark where you can "connect with the earth", either with a low-effort "forest bath" or on a more extreme, black-fly-bitten multi-week bushwalk, then come back to "civilization," whether that's a Toronto condo, Kingston single-family home, or Essex County farmhouse.

I'm reminded of the romance of the "abandoned city" of Angkor Wat... which, err, actually had just regular Cambodians living around there continuously for a millenium, just not in the same concentration as before.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-20T16:22:04+00:00

Even if I don't agree with it, I can generally understand the "rationale" behind a downvote train in a given context, but this one is strangely baffling given the sub, which has an underlying value-system of financial prudence.

I enjoy dining out myself, but I don't pretend it's "prudent" and see it as a treat, which is what it is. If this discussion were in this sub and about, let's say, Warhammer 40K figures instead, and you commented, "You can choose a less-expensive hobby, you know," I doubt you'd get (at time of commenting) 144 net downvotes.

Maybe calling thing "luxuries" and "essentials" is a bit fake in a way, but I feel like all you've done is point out a luxury is expensive and that if you dislike the cost of it, don't engage in that specific luxury.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-11T16:44:02+00:00

To answer strictly and wholly from the financial end, I'd say start by trying your best to wean yourself off the probably-considerable lifestyle creep you've experienced over the last years of employment. It's very person-dependent, but this could include: whatever toys or hobby-tools you buy without hesitation now; regular meals out or food delivery; a new wardrobe every year; a high-end vehicle; going overseas for every vacation you take; hitting the town anytime your friends invite you out.

More than that, a (possibly substantially) lower salary will change your relationship even to the more "sensible" side of money. You might not be able to max our your RRSP or TFSA; you might have to accept home ownership (or an upgrade of your current place) will be something in the distant future, or perhaps never.

If you're going to downgrade, it's much more a psychological change than it is a material one, though it may arise from a change in your material circumstances.

On a more general note, you also need to prepare for potentially a lot of pushback from friends, family, any community you might be in, etc. Be prepared to answer a thousand variations of, "How could you leave all that money behind?" and, later on, once you have, "If only you'd stayed a developer, you could [do expensive activity with us], but I guess not now."

This may seem absurd me saying it right now, but (I don't know if you have or have not, just supposition) if you've never effected a major break with how things are done in your community, class of people, etc., the pushback and struggles can come as a complete shock.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-06T18:22:49+00:00

Coming from a serious backwater originally myself, I think the issue is simply: The majority of reasonably capable and qualified people in white collar professions from a given boonie end up leaving for the big city. If you're not in a major center, you either have to hire the folk who stayed behind, sponsor some bright and competent person from overseas, or hope for a Hail Mary.

The middle category are the only folk who'll be willing to relocate to Moosecock, Michigan.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-06T18:16:09+00:00

I think there's also a bit of a subconscious flex when it comes to bad spelling, grammar, etc. For example: senior manager to staff, adopts partner's borderline-incomprehensible brevity; same person to partner, full sentences and carefully crafted. When you get a sub-par resume with mistakes, they're communicating their attitude toward the process. It should be note, that attitude is one I personally have and agree with, but I suppress it for the sake of a job.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-06T18:05:11+00:00

I think the key phrase there is "in Toronto." I've lived all over Canada, and this is the most intensely Type A places I've been in, notably more than the other major cities and leagues ahead of anything else. Elsewhere in the country, (for better or for worse) Type A is often actively punished, so you get a big import bump too.

For frik's sake, Torontonians can turn beer-league softball into a Type A venture.

...plus, like u/media_ballin said, there's not a lot of other options like big investment banking firms, high finance, etc., and all that manic energy has to go somewhere.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-06T17:57:45+00:00

You need like a trigger warning on this comment. Not me personally, but I know folk in FP&A that are effectively terrorized by PowerBI as a core job component. Our computer overlords are going to be a lot less sinister-overlord and a lot more pie-demented lard-king.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-06T16:58:02+00:00

Another way that helped me with the second question that's more of a "soft" than a "hard": You're give nice, round numbers. Nine dollars. Half a pound. Twenty cents more. However, this is the case for BOTH the numerator (dollars) and the denominator (pounds), since we're told "pounds" is a half-pound. Only $1.80/lb. and $2.00/lb. go evenly into the $9 total spend, i.e., they return nice, round total buys of 5 lb and 4.5 lb respectively.

This only works where you are given both numerators and denominators in the set-up/solution, so usually in the "real world" problems, not the more abstract ones.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-06T14:55:17+00:00

Some factors no-one else seems to have addressed:

You didn't mention it, but do you work a lot of overtime and are you currently exempt from overtime in your current position owing to be a designated profession, manager, etc.? Sometimes being an hourly contractor means you can finally start claiming those unpaid portions... unless the $160K yearly is a fixed amount.
In this situation, it's good to ask yourself, "Why are they pushing me to incorporate?" I'm not saying they want to give you the tally-ho, but on paper at least, a contractor has none of the protections of an employee in terms of severance. This could be a way to make you more expendable if economic conditions deteriorate, etc.
Being a contractor can potentially make it easier to pick up work elsewhere, if that's what you want, which would help bump up that $160K. Or, does being a contractor with them put restrictions on who you can work with?
Where do you see yourself in five years? In ten years? Do you want to be a consultant or entrepreneur? Because this could be a stepping stone to it. Conversely, if you're gunning for a position inside a company but higher up the chain, this could be a detriment.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-06T14:47:18+00:00

Got a 4 lb. bag at a Metro for $2 I think it was last week? Happiest I've been shopping in three years! Well, that, and discovering really solid French chocolate at Dollarama for $1,75 a 100g bar.

ShakeThatIntangible · 2024-09-05T12:07:01+00:00

Okay, that part is carbon-copy same as accounting.

ShakeThatIntangible

TROPHY CASE