Out Of The Shadows
For the first time in my life, I’m just about to break through into the sunshine list. As of writing this (the end of December), it’ll be the 2nd last pay before the end of the year, and I will have breached that mythical 100k salary barrier. And yet, I find the reality of it a bit strange…
It’s a strange thing, in part, because I wasn’t really expecting it. However, I began to realize the trajectory my pay stubs were on about half way through the year. Reaching this barrier is also strange because, in a way, I have been semi-consciously aware of getting closer and closer to making the list each year, and yet not having any interest in reaching that point. And it’s strange times three because the sunshine list is in fact, quite a meaningless statistic.
The List
First available to the public in 1996, the “Sunshine List” is an annually published list containing the salary of all public sector employees who earn at least $100,000 annually. Oddly, it has never been updated in regards to yearly inflation increases.
For example, $100,000 of goods and services in 1996 would now cost ~$172,000 in 2022. Or if you look at the numbers the other way, inflation since 1996 has destroyed 41% of that $100k’s purchasing power. So, while the “Sunshine List” was meant to provide greater transparency of where public funding and tax dollars were going, it’s really lost a lot of its meaning.
And let’s not forget that even if you make the list with $100k, it’s still only a gross number. The actual net amount after accounting for payroll taxes, health premiums, pension contributions, and other work dues, decreases the net annual take home pay down to the mid to high 60’s.
It’s Not About the Money
Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t like the extra money. But for me, it’s more what earning that money represents. It means that I had to put the time in at my job in one way or another to earn it all. It wasn’t free. That’s the deal as an employee. You trade your time – perhaps a part of your soul – for money in return. And by breaching the sunshine list, for myself it means that I’ve put in too much of my time.
As I said, I never really wanted to try and reach this point. In fact, during the last few years, I’ve purposefully taken more vacation (perhaps more than I was supposed too, hehehe) to avoid this. When I would run out of “paid” vacation, I would put in for “unpaid vacation”. That’s sort of an unorthodox approach for a full time employee. And yet I chose that route because even though I am paid quite well, in my opinion, I valued the time off more than the money. Time at home, time with family, etc.
Unfortunately, that plan came to an end, when my boss told me there was a complaint about all the “unpaid” time I was taking, and that I couldn’t do it anymore. First world problems, I know. Most people want to work more and get paid more. Ah well. In the grand scheme of things, earning more should help accelerate the path to financial independence, albeit at the cost of increased upfront time.
100,000 Choices
There were other factors propelling me into the sunshine list this year too. Our premiere, Uncle Dougie, tried to bribe certain voters with $5000 “bonus pay”, which I was one of the receivers of this (although he didn’t get my vote). Excluding direct salary totals, we’ve also been receiving decent child tax benefit payments every month, about $600/month, as well various government “educational” pandemic benefits for kids; $200 here, $400 there, etc. So, perhaps I may have unofficially been on the sunshine list last year and maybe the year before too.
But, I’m not writing this to gloat. Seeing the actual numbers officially on paper did get me thinking. With all this extra cashish, did I use it wisely? Whether it was this year’s totals or previous years’, had I made good monetary choices? Because a lot of the time it doesn’t matter how much someone makes, it matters how much they spend. I think most of it boils down to lifestyle choices.
Perhaps there is an argument to be made that the “middle class” and below don’t really have much room for financial choices, especially when there’s been numerous and numerous articles about the rampant inflation of gas, food costs and general affordability. But you can’t always put the blame on everyone else. We, as individuals must take some of the responsibility.
My choices may not be the same as yours. We are all in our own individual and unique circumstances. But I still believe that we all have choices to make, whether we are consciously aware of them or not. Whether we think we have power to make them or not. Or think that everything has been pre-decided for us by the government as part of a “conspiracy” to “destroy our freedoms”.
Your Choices
Do you think you don’t have any choices? You have many!
You have to decide if you drive to work, or take the bus? Do you pay for parking, or park farther away for free, but walk? Do you buy brand-name or no-name groceries? Do you upgrade your kitchen to make it all fancy like? Or only replace what “needs” to be functionally replaced? Do you go to restaurants 5 times a week. Or maybe just 2? Or maybe none? Do you continue your expensive hobby’s? Do you downsize? Do you work more or less? Do you change jobs? Do you decide to spend way more than you comfortably want on Christmas and feel guilty about it after, or do you decide to change it up? Do you consider any life style changes? Do you choose to make them? Are they increases or decreases? Do you buy a new phone? Do you need a new phone or just want a new phone? Where do you buy it? What did you do with your old one? Do you shovel your driveway, or just wait for nature to melt it? Do you read books? Do you stay up later than you should? Loblaws or NoFrills? Mustard or Ketchup? Both? So many choices. So many decisions.
Some of our choices vary from frugality based, to others I would consider more “luxury” based. And some circumstances ended up not actually requiring choices, but the result of being in a fortunate situation. I’m don’t plan on getting too in depth with them, but here’s a summary of our 2022.
My 2022 choices
I still choose to take my lunch to work. Even if it often consists of microwave dinners, which I get lightly made fun of for. But that’s ok. They’re not half bad. And it’s more of a convenience thing for me. I did order take out a small handful of times, yet was always disappointed with both the food’s low quality and high prices, which reinforced the “packing my lunch” mentality.
I choose to try and drive in an economical fashion, as in not “speeding up to a red light” only to slam on the breaks at the last second. Save gas, save your brakes!
I don’t really buy new clothes, or keep up with fashion trends, although it seems like I’ve been tearing through my jeans’ knees quite rapidly. I attempted to sew them, but it’s only a temporary fix.
We continue to use cheaper things like magic jack for our home phone service, $15/mos cellphone plans, and an alternative cheaper internet style “cable tv” plan. We have perhaps a few more streaming services than I would like, but those choices were more for an entertainment option for the kids.
Even though COVID seemed like it was winding down (well, the restrictions anyway), we still have no plans to go vacationing anytime soon, for a variety of reasons. Vacations are expensive! Especially with a family. Maybe one day. I’m all about the stay-cations though!
Some of the larger/expensive items we’ve been getting into are things such as my wife’s art business. She’s basically turned a hobby of hers into a small business. Initially there is a bit of an overhead, especially with quality items like canvases, paints, brushes, etc. But she has sold a number of pieces, and has generally recouped and actually exceeded the initial invested costs.
For myself, I’ve spent several hundred in the end of the summer doing “rust repairs” on one of our vehicles to try and keep the body in descent shape (It’s an old 2009 model by the way, no 2022 vehicles for us!). It turned out well, and is a lot cheaper than taking it to an auto body shop. I can’t say I’m an expert, but YouTube has been quite helpful with things of a DIY nature.
There’s also a garage project I’ve been working on the last couple years, and I’ve basically finished it this past fall. My plan was to fully insulate our attached garage. This of course, requires numerous bags of insulation, as well as various other things like vapour barrier and caulking, etc. I was a bit surprised at how much the pandemic caused the price of insulation to go up. Roughly guessing, finishing that project this year probably easily cost $800-1000. The goal being to have somewhat balmy temps in there through the winter months to be able to do some indoor projects or wood-working in that space. It’s an on-going experiment that I’m still running, perhaps I’ll talk about it more someday.
There’s also situations where we chose not to buy. I generally try to fix things that are broken if i can, before throwing them out or buying new versions (ie: fans, toys, electronics, etc). Surprisingly enough, I have a descent repair rate, but also have an equally interesting failure rate.
We made the decision to get a new OLED tv. I would consider that a luxury purchase. We were previously rocking an old LG Plasma which still worked for the most part. But had developed a couple vertical lines in the picture, and one of the speakers had died. We had the old one since 2010, so it has lasted us quite a a while. The new one was close to $2k, however it wasn’t an impulse purchase. I had thought about it since the year before, and watched and waited for the prices to come down, which they did significantly.
We also decided to get rid of our 2008 car this year, as it was entering the territory of “dangerously about to fall apart because of having a bad case of the rusties” syndrome. Perhaps a large part of this end result was making poor choices during the previous years of NOT getting it rust checked. But it’s too late to change that now. This was something we had been prepared to do for a while, and knew it was coming. We had also budgeted for it and were prepared and ready to buy a “new” used car in cash. Initially we were looking at vehicles in the 10-15k range, around 8 years or older. This was where one of the fortunate events occurred, because we ended up being gifted a 5-year old family car. If that had not happened, we would still have gotten a vehicle (used of course!). But I would never, ever purchase an actual “New” vehicle. $40,000? Pssht! No way in hell.
The last choice I wanted to speak of, is the recent (about a week prior) decision to purchase a small chest freezer. It’s something that we probably should have done a long time ago, but alas. Here we are. Nonetheless, it’s something I’m extremely excited about. But that’s because even without inflation adding to the cash bonfire, food for us is probably the highest monthly expenditure we have, and it’s also one of the things that has been bugging me the most. I’m hoping to fix that and let you know how it goes. I don’t want any part of this “Food will cost families more than $16,000 a year in 2023” nonsense. Forget that!
The Final Choice
Actually, there’s one more choice. And its probably the most important of all now that I think of it. Any extra money left over after each pay check whether it was $200, or $2000, I’d shove into my RRSP and TFSA investments, regardless of annual income. This year I’ve actually managed to finally max both out!
This choice was the opposite of spending. As the saying goes, save regularly and save often! That’s what we all should be focusing on here. Because whether or not you made the sunshine list, the choice you do NOT want to be making on the regular is superfluous spending. Just because you have it, doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to spend it.
That’s the funny thing about money. If you spend it, you won’t have it. But if you have it, it means you didn’t spend it!
These are just some of the choices we have made this year. I’d like to think they all provide value to us. Perhaps some more than others. But there are many choices to be made every day, every month, and every year that we all have to make. Even if they are different, and come at different times in different situations, and different income levels.
And more importantly, I think all these choices were made without considering “Oh, I’m entering sunshine territory, so it’s ok to spend all this extra money on silly things.” They were based instead on what we decided were valuable to us and already knew we were going to move towards regardless of income level.
So, what choices did you decide to make in 2022. Were they good? Bad? Or Essential?
