Seven Post Links

Posted by Canadian Dream on October 21, 2011

Well the seven link meme has been running around the blog-o-sphere for a while and I got tagged by Jacq from Single Mom Rich Mom, somehow she assumed I’m running out of stuff to say after doing this for almost five years and 1200 posts later (yes there will be a contest and prizes in early Nov).  Ironically I have a back list of posts I need to write…I still have too much material, but I blame that on my fellow writers here on Canada Dream (yep, I’m looking Robert, Dave and Gwen). Keep up the great work of keeping me inspired!

1. Most beautiful post – By far I would have to say this post was my best where I told the story of how I dealt with my son being born 10 weeks early.
2. Most popular post – I have to say I don’t have the slightest clue how to rank posts as I don’t keep that close of an eye on the stats for each one.  Yet I think Dave’s post about wanting to live in a tiny house was great.
3. Most controversial. This is sort of hard to measure, but the one that stands out for me was the post when I talked about charity and how I don’t ever give money to any group that feeds people.
4. Most helpful post . I would have to say that should go to Robert’s post on TFSA Misconceptions…heck I even learned something from it.
5. Post whose success surprised me . Ugh, how do you really know that anyways?  I guess that one that did got a lot of attention was when I realized I no longer needed my day job.
6. Post I feel didn’t get the attention it deserved. I have always had a soft spot for this post, where I talk about how to start with personal finance and it doesn’t involve money.
7. Post I’m most proud of. It was a minor thing, but when I started to blog under my own name for the first time I felt really good about the decision.  Not to mention that paid off nicely when I got the offer to write for Moneyville which requires you to use your real name.

Who else should do this link post….hell I’m not going to research who has been missed so far on this one.  So consider this an open invitation for anyone else to post their seven links.

What the ‘Occupy’ Protesters Want

Posted by Canadian Dream on October 20, 2011

With the number of protests starting to multiply, I’ve started to pay a little bit more attention to the Occupy movement.  While the mainstream media might be a bit confused by what the Occupy movement wants I find the answer a bit more obvious.

The rallying cry of the groups has been how the top 1% of the world has the majority of the wealth (at least in the US, Canada it is a bit more even).  People find this unfair and generally I have to agree.  Having several more million doesn’t marginally improve your life after the first few millions.  So the concept of billionaires is somewhat obscene.

The problem with the mainstream media and somewhat the protesters themselves is they know that this inequity is wrong, but don’t realize the issue isn’t really a problem.  Rather the wealth distribution is in fact a symptom of a much larger problem.

This is where some people start to lose my point, but I’ll try to explain this anyway.  The issue is in fact the hierarchy is basically married to our civilization.  From the company where you work to where you can choose to live there is a hierarchy which always will result in the concentration of wealth towards the top.  This isn’t to say the business you work for or where you live is evil, but rather the by product of our civilization.  By frame of reference when I say civilization I’m referring to 99.99% of the world population, the handful of tribes still living their traditional lifestyles in remote places are excused from this generalization.  Civilization as it stands is great for businesses and products, but rather sucks at being good for what people need.

So when you have any hierarchy it goes really well for those at the top.  They get the best of everything while everyone else just gets what is left over.  So occasionally the masses get so pissed off and remove those from the top of the hierarchy by way of revolution and then  put others into the top of the hierarchy.  Things might improve marginally for the masses at that point, but generally speaking things will end up in a similar point in the future because the hierarchy still exists and you will end up with concentration of wealth at the top.  The problem isn’t the people involved, but rather the social structure we keep using.

In the end, the Occupy movement really doesn’t want a different government or new banking rules, they want a different system than a hierarchy which effectively means an end to civilization itself.  The two concepts are so married to each other there is no way to replace the one without taking out the other.  This is why people find the entire moment without focus, because we refuse to even look at that idea.  We are terrified of the end of civilization, which is funny because the doesn’t mean the world will be worse off.  In fact, it might even get better.

So what other social organization could we use?  Well for humans we are lucky that we have several million years of evolutionary development that have weeded out the poor ones prior to our civilization.  The only other model that has survived is a tribe.  In a tribe, there may be a chief or leader, but this doesn’t make it a hierarchy since the leader is just another job that needs to be done and doesn’t make that person better than the rest of the tribe.  The downside of a tribe organization is you are limited to smaller groups since you need to know your other members to keep them accountable. So even if you used a tribe of tribes model (basically each tribe would have a representative in a larger group the represents all the tribes in a small region) to increase the total number of people in a area your upper limit for organization would be perhaps a couple 100,000 or so.  Likely less than that.

Now some people might reject this idea out of hand by pointing out many First Nations in Canada and the US have tribes and they have serious problems like poverty, crime and other social issues.  This is rather an unfair comparison since this is rather like comparing a healthy person you work with with someone in a  hospital dying of cancer since they both have brown hair.  First Nations have had a cultural collapse from what our civilization did to them, so they aren’t functioning the same capacity of what they used to do.  Their social fabric that once made them a successful tribe is utter been destroyed (By the way, how do I know they were successful? They were here we our civilization arrived, everything else had been weeded out by evolution).

So that is what the Occupy movement really wants: the end of civilization.  They want to address the core of the hierarchy.  Yet that kind of change would utterly alter our world.  Nothing would be exactly the same again.  Yet really, this won’t entirely be a bad thing since after all our civilization doesn’t have that good of a track record: global pollution, poverty, crime….you know.  It frankly can’t get much worse and for a species as creative as ours it makes sense to experiment with things when you realize they don’t work so well.

So what do you think the Occupy protesters want?

Working the Second Job

Posted by Gwen on October 19, 2011

This is a guest post from Gwen in Ontario, who is 39 years old with a grown daughter, and is trying to rebuild her retirement dream just 20 years too late for early retirement.

Just after I signed for my mortgage, I ran into a serious cash flow problem. Some of my expenses went up (such as car insurance) that I didn’t expect when I was figuring out if I could afford to buy my condo.  I had already put in a request for a salary review and was waiting for the outcome of that. In the interim, my net pay covered my monthly bills not including food or any other “luxuries”. So I did the only thing I could think of to solve the problem, I took a second job.

In my day job, I rarely talk to the public, instead I deal with paper and numbers. In my “second” job, I’m on the front lines, customer service at a sod farm. The increase in hours that I worked and the money stress left me utterly exhausted.  This 40 year old body cannot handle 65 hour weeks like it could when it was 20. Sunday was my day off. I slept, ate, rested, napped, any thing to recharge my batteries for another long week. I got through it by reminding myself that it was short term, and by watching my emergency fund get replenished.

Being a seasonal business, the hours they needed me to work decreased at the end of June. I worked for 6 hours on Saturdays, and no evenings during the week. I cannot say I was disappointed. My main job income had been increased (in my industry we are lucky if we get an increase once every 5 years).  While I still have to watch every dollar, if I’m frugal with groceries, I can put extra payments on my debt, and not panic when I discover an unexpected expense (more on plumbing problems later).

At the end of September, the second job didn’t need me at all any more, and has asked if I’ll come back next year. This got me thinking about other times I’ve done the two job life, and the differences between then and now.

A plan needs to be in place. Previously when I picked up a second job, I found we would eat restaurant or store prepared food more, we would fight more about chores not getting done, and I always felt like I needed a holiday after I stopped (get rested, or rewarded for my efforts). But there was never any “more” money in the bank at the end to pay for that holiday, or for anything else.

This time, there was no “extras”. No eating out or “day-vacations”. The boyfriend helped wherever he could, whether it was making meals, doing my home chores for me, and generally making sure that I could put my full attention and energy to making that extra money, and keeping it. I feel that having a plan and support are crucial to the success of working extra to help get ahead.

Will I do the second job again next spring? I think I will (providing my support is there again), but I will definitely not work quite as many hours, maybe just Saturdays and 3 nights a week.

Have you worked a second job? Any tips to help make it successful?