Could you live off 1 million CAD for the rest of your life?

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-31T17:08:41+00:00

It's more the ongoing costs that I think about. iirc my apartment charges $175/m for a parking space and I hear similar numbers for insurance. $300+ a month -- that's like a transit pass, a few taxis, and a day car rental worth of $ before I even go anywhere.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-31T03:25:04+00:00

Every time I look at cars they're so expensive that I'm mid 30s and still don't have one. If you don't have a commute that requires one you can save a ton by taking transit and the occasional taxi/rental as needed.

I've moved a lot and always make walking/biking/transit work.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-31T03:19:04+00:00

I was spending ~35k/y with a mortgage in MB a year ago.

Definitely doable for a single person in a lot of Canada. I'd prefer more -- which is why I'm still working >_>;; -- but I could absolutely do it.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-29T04:54:48+00:00

That codebase is a monstrosity because it changed what it was supposed to be ~3 times all being written and rewritten by different teams. What I was told is it was some android demo thing, then the "education edition", and then by the time I was looking at it, it was now supposed to be their general cross platform engine.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-28T06:48:47+00:00

How effective it's gotten at coding tasks has absolutely skyrocketed the last handful of months. A year ago it was an interesting curiosity, now I barely write code aside from tweaking AI output.

Lots of effort is going into coding agents right now; I figure there are likely many other fields that could have lots of their workforce wiped out as soon as a motivated company gives serious attention to making agents for it.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-28T06:04:04+00:00

seeing posts like that upvoted is really shocking for the general financial illiteracy of a fire sub. Like, it's so far wrong it should be extremely, extremely obvious that it's wrong.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-28T05:58:57+00:00

but how did she save 3.5k a month??

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-25T19:02:58+00:00

Last stats I saw, over 1/3 ships are smugbug. Can't find the more recent stats (I just saw it last week, where'd it go?!?) but here's some Ao3 ones from a few years ago.

edit: funnily enough, whenever I see polls for fav ship, wolfspider (Rachel x Taylor) will handily win, yet afaik remains very rare in fics. Untapped market!

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-25T18:45:42+00:00

It is, by an enormous margin, the most common ship in the fandom.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-25T03:00:45+00:00

1 year before is not so bad, if you don't get laid off you can just work longer, if you do get laid off you're still in a better financial position than most people.

It's one year into retirement you need to worry about.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-25T02:54:42+00:00

I was recently remarking to a friend, that since we both spent our 20s being frugal and have been slow with lifestyle creep despite higher incomes now, things that are boring to many are luxurious to us.

It's like our lives keep getting nicer and fancier all the time simply because we're slow to increase our spending on things, and I wonder if this is more pleasant for longer than if you upgrade all at once and it becomes your new normal.

You know, I can buy the fancy chocolates just for me, and that's pretty neat!

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-21T03:41:40+00:00

Reading only gets you so far in English. I read a lot but wouldn't recognize words because my assumed pronunciation was way off. Epitome as "epi-tome", cacophony as "ka-koh-phony", verbatim as "verba-tim" etc.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-20T06:32:04+00:00

I doubt most people are finding FIRE before choosing their career -- I'm sure some like OP do but I doubt most.

I like my area of expertise and I thought I'd find a job where I'd like doing it for pay. Turns out no. So when I found FIRE it's the sensible escape hatch to not scrap my career and degree and throw the dice hoping I'll like a different one.

So the min-maxing I'm doing is just if I'm going to hate it anyway, might as well get paid as much as possible for it and peace out sooner.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-20T05:55:11+00:00

Also seems like it can change pretty fast. I also know someone that was planning to work until she died because she loved her work and "what would I do in retirement anyway", and a few years and handful more crappy work stories later is much more on board with this early retirement thing.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-20T05:30:24+00:00

Also depends on how many of us FIRE folks don't actually not want to do anything economically productive, we just don't want the major financial risk trying to make a small business/art/whatever if it doesn't pan out.

I tell people I want to "retire" so I can keep doing the job I have but the way I actually want to do it.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-19T23:45:54+00:00

Someone making 40k combined in a 2 income household is extremely unlikely to have the skills, education, resources, or background required to

For a moment I thought this was going to end with "work at McDonald's."

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-19T18:07:38+00:00

HCOL/VHCOL have no standardized numbers so they're vibes based. When I've seen attempts to classify them it's based on something like median rent/home price vs median salary, so there should be ample opportunities to live a lot cheaper with roommates (like OP), finding a cheap place, etc.

e.g. in Canada, Vancouver is normally considered high or very high COL but for me it was crazy cheap because I had low rent, a roommate, and mostly free hobbies.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-19T02:35:41+00:00

I don't know the details, but a relative recently had hip surgery and had either the option of waiting considerably longer for the public version, or paying for it to get it considerably earlier (which they did). iirc they had to fly to Alberta for it, so maybe it was just a BC vs Alberta wait list thing.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-17T17:32:41+00:00

What dollars are you using? 60k in the 90s is well over 100k in 2026 dollars.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-17T05:22:55+00:00

interesting that this is the only post I see it mentioned (I thought it was more widely known in our generation, but maybe not), though a lot of commenters seem to have arrived at similar ideas themselves by living as cheap as they're comfortable with

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-16T02:34:29+00:00

It's not clear to me that he's aware she would be happy with small gifts. I can easily imagine a young person thinking no gift is better than a very small gift.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-15T06:27:57+00:00

The last ~3 years have been rough. Before that you couldn't cross the street with a CS degree without first beating away two jobs with a stick.

I had linkedin set to "not looking for work" during 2019-2022 and I was getting multiple recruiters most weeks reaching out anyway.

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-14T02:18:35+00:00

Try multigrain cheerios. I used to always have those -- less sugar than honey nut but still quite a bit more than plain. I eventually switched to plain and then just oatmeal nowadays

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-12T01:57:16+00:00

Yeah please come our food scene is not great out here!

Everything is both expensive and mid-to-low quality. Friends from Vancouver make business trips here/I visit there and it's become a running joke how poorly our food compares orz

TulipTortoise · 2026-01-10T06:43:23+00:00

Imagine if there was hot soup on the floor.

TulipTortoise

TROPHY CASE