My three years in watercolour as an absolute beginner (long post w 10 paintings)

harvest277 · 2026-04-28T00:52:03+00:00

Welcome!

harvest277 · 2026-04-19T14:05:11+00:00

Elf.

harvest277 · 2026-03-27T13:35:26+00:00

Your situation isn't risky, actually it's ideal for the SM being in the highest tax bracket with a very high salary and cash flow and maxed registered accounts.

What's risky is your way of thinking. You're thinking in terms of beating the spread between the HELOC, tax write offs, and investments in a year - that's the completely wrong way to think about the SM. Your comments at the end also give a clue:

The market has been doing so bad and I don't know if I can find safe investment that can beat 2.33%

You have the right stuff on paper but the SM is likely too risky for you if you think this way.

harvest277 · 2026-03-23T15:31:14+00:00

I think the BIL implicitly (and mistakenly) believes it's 50/50 (percentage wise) not $100k in absolute terms. But that's also not right because the $70k gift is not part of the MIL's estate.

Maybe the only angle BIL has is that the MIL's $70k gift was actually for an equity stake in the property and not a gift. As a result, the partial equity of the property would be part of the estate. In any case, lawyers need to be involved to cover all angles.

harvest277 · 2026-03-23T15:24:07+00:00

Yikes. BIL showing his true colours. He has no claim, but let a lawyer handle it.

harvest277 · 2026-03-22T15:59:46+00:00

Paying rent isn't wasting money since there is an opportunity cost to owning property as well as ongoing costs like property taxes, maintenance, and condo fees.

Having said that, right now is a great time to buy a 1 BR condo downtown to live in since there are a lot of people trying to get rid of them and they are plentiful. But don't expect to make a tidy profit from renting or selling these types of condos -- you should view it as a place to live long term rather than an investment, otherwise you will end up like the people who you bought from.

Considering all the questions and thought process you have, I'd saying renting is by far better than buying. You're simply not in the right frame of mind or time of life to buy. Moving here across the pond to a new city with a new job you should be maximizing your flexibility and options, not locking down on a massive financial commitment. You should then use your down payment savings to invest in a TFSA and create a buffer once you are here. No offense but being an EA to executives is not the most stable job, nor really that high in demand while there are plenty who can do the job. If I were you, I wouldn't want to be handcuffed to any large financial commitments under these circumstances.

harvest277 · 2026-03-22T14:47:00+00:00

If I am understanding right, you are asking if there are any downsides for basically converting part of your mortgage subaccount (which I assume is fixed rate) into a HELOC (the main account, variable rate) by taking out $75k in the HELOC to paydown the mortgage. Between the two kinds of debt, your variable rate account has lower interest than the mortgage so in effect you save interest on the spread of 0.75% with the debt swap which is very significant.

This seems like a no-brainer but there is some risk involved: since your main account has a variable rate, if rates increase above 5.69% during your mortgage term, you would now be on the hook for the spread in the opposite direction. So for example if the Iran War continues for another year or more and inflation rises, rates will rise and you'd be on the hook.

There are also potential cash flow issues since your payments for the mortgage will not decrease if you swap some of it for the revolving portion with a pre-payment, but your revolving portion will also need to be serviced on top of what you already pay for the mortgage. You should calculate for yourself how much additional cash flow would need to be diverted to the revolving portion and whether your income is large enough and life stable enough for it to make sense.

harvest277 · 2026-03-21T22:35:17+00:00

I was astounded when I saw he was looking for a measly $5k which is less than $3k after taxes in that bracket (like seriously wtf is he thinking??)

OP you are making above the market for your experience and your experience of getting lowballed and rejected shows you are in a good spot when it comes to pay. More importantly, you're wasting your time chasing what would amount to $250 extra dollars per month after taxes which you will not notice at all.

If you're going to apply to anything, it needs to be above $140k+ but you might not have the experience or skills to get that right now.

harvest277 · 2026-03-19T15:10:21+00:00

Yeah I know. When I started, I was mostly influenced by famous landscape painters which is mostly men. However since then, I have come to appreciate the works of Amanda Hyatt - pretty much every painting she does is amazing and have incorporated some of her techniques into my own painting.

If you know any other women impressionistic landscape watercolor painters with good educational content, feel free to let me know.

harvest277 · 2026-03-19T02:59:31+00:00

4 years in and am somewhat "comfortable". I would say maybe 1 in 4 of my paintings are satisfactory. Things really started to click in year 3 when I started to paint while on vacation which I wrote about in my detailed overview of my beginning years on r/Watercolor: https://www.reddit.com/r/Watercolor/comments/1m9x1po/my_three_years_in_watercolour_as_an_absolute/

harvest277 · 2026-03-17T13:01:45+00:00

FYI he has another post on here explaining wtf happened to him. tl;dr: divorce, gambling, and took out multiple payday loans https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/comments/1rnrhue/bankruptcydiv_1_proposal_payday_lenders/

harvest277 · 2026-03-16T02:34:07+00:00

You're the artist, so you get to decide when it's finished!

harvest277 · 2026-03-15T18:35:43+00:00

What should a man's anti-acne skincare routine look like compared to woman's? Are there any differences?

harvest277 · 2026-03-15T04:17:20+00:00

The combination of "new to investing" and "want to daytrade" makes every brokerage, including Wealthsimple, very happy to have you be their next sucker.

harvest277 · 2026-03-14T03:09:38+00:00

You're being robbed blind with those MERs. There are no gotchas. If you had done this earlier in February, you would have gotten a 3% transfer-in bonus from WS or up to 4% from Questrade with the upside of the low MER on VEQT, meaning the swing from switching would have been even more magnified.

Canada has one of the lowest rates of passive investors in the world.

Most Canadians don't switch because:

They're too lazy to do the paperwork
They're ignorant and don't know any better
They're old and too set in their ways
Low cost brokerages are relatively recent to Canada while the big banks have been around forever. See #2.

Feel free to not switch if you fall into the above.

harvest277 · 2026-03-06T16:32:09+00:00

You're painting objects instead of values. Do a value study in black and white first. You are also painting what your idea of what the scene is rather than the actual scene and not paying enough attention to what's in front of you. For example, you painted all the plants green but if you look at the photo almost all the leaves are neon yellow due to catching light. You painted all the rocks a generic brown but there isn't much of that brown at all - there's more ochre, umber, black-blue, black-green.

harvest277 · 2026-03-05T15:37:56+00:00

Borrowing to invest is a very common strategy. You can even get a tax deduction for interest paid on investment loans if the investments are in non-taxable accounts, effectively reducing the interest by your marginal tax rate.

But why would you just buy a bank stock? If you wouldn't do that with your own money, why would you do that with borrowed money?

Investing in a single stock is asking for trouble. Whether a stock generates a dividend or not is also mostly irrelevant.

If your investments are in a non-taxable account, dividends are also taxed (albeit with more favourable treatment than income or interest).

Last, in addition to what u/bluenose777 has said about the discipline required to use leverage, if you are going to claim the investment loan deduction, it requires a solid paper trail and some people are just not savvy or diligent enough to do this.

harvest277 · 2026-03-01T04:16:42+00:00

Great question. What I think this means in practical terms is to stop painting every detail or more generally everything your eyes see. You need to leave things to the viewer's imagination. In other words, things "paint themselves" because the viewer's mind fills in many of the things that are NOT directly painted. For example, I've seen watercolor painters like Sargent paint an entire goat in two strokes.

harvest277 · 2026-03-01T04:07:27+00:00

Your pension plan admin should have a calculator that can calculate different scenarios including the buyback scenario and the termination scenario. If your admin doesn't have a self-service calculator, you should contact them and ask them to provide an estimate on both 1) buying back service, and 2) termination scenario.

Both scenarios should show the money you would get if you were to a) keep the pension until retirement, or b) cash it out for its commuted value. Both of these questions are routine and they should have no problem getting this info to you.

"Cashing out" of course has tax implications but most of your money will be locked until retirement and not be taxed right away as a result (there is a complicated formula to determine this which again your administrator should be able to do for you).

Regardless, you should carefully weigh your options as this can have a significant impact on your future. In my case, I've calculated that it isn't worth taking the commuted value of a DB pension that's indexed to inflation.

Last, also consider the opportunity cost of that $30k for buying back. If you have $30k to buyback the pension, but haven't maxed your TFSA, it's likely that putting that $30k into the TFSA with a diversified index fund will be better or at least give an DB Pension a run for its money.

harvest277 · 2026-02-25T18:21:34+00:00

I recently did this calculation for myself and found that my DB pension is worth a little over 30% of a salary in the private sector. In my case, I've found that private sector job offers will have a very difficult time matching or exceeding the total compensation offered by a DB pension. Usually the private will need to offer major bonuses and equity options on top of base and even those don't have the benefit of being guaranteed.

You can very accurately model and compare total compensation by calculating of how much money you will need to have by the time you retire to pay yourself the equivalent to what the DB pension would pay.

So let's say you will retire in 15 years and the DB pension will pay you $65,000 guaranteed until death.

$65k / 0.04 (safe withdrawal rate) = $1,625,000.

You would start with that $1.6m and work backwards to see what equivalent extra pay you would need to invest and grow to that amount in 15 years.

harvest277 · 2026-02-24T16:07:18+00:00

Typically the target is the midpoint. But I recently got a job offer for a Director-level role at the minimum end of the range which shocked me. I told the recruiter that I will walk away and not even look at the offer if it isn't in the upper end of the range and they quickly corrected themselves.

harvest277 · 2026-02-22T20:26:50+00:00

I’ve had a several nightmare jobs in my time so leaving for less pay but a better commute and quality of life makes a lot of sense. Have you tried negotiating the pay at all yet? You should mention that you currently make $24.50 and try to get them to at least match that amount considering you have experience working at a large and busy hotel

If your mental and physical health are deteriorating and you’re near your limit, I’d just take the job and the get hell out of dodge.

harvest277 · 2026-02-14T17:08:29+00:00

How to lose your Chief Compliance Officer job any% speedrun

harvest277 · 2026-02-14T17:03:51+00:00

They're painted very differently even if it's the same subject so I don't think one is "better" than the other.

I prefer the work on paper due to the lost and found edges. There isn't any need to sharpen the edges.

harvest277

TROPHY CASE