Life

About $4,000 got removed from my bank account this week to pay off the credit card bill from the trip that I just took. After doing some calculations, I deposited a bunch of money that I had lying around the house from old red packets that people had given me from Chinese New Year and birthday gifts in the past, that I had just been reallly lazy about and never ended up depositing into the bank until now, plus about $180 worth of remaining Singapore money that converted into $170+ worth of Canadian dollars, into my RBC bank account. I also transferred a bit over from my Scotiabank account, while making sure to leave me with the requisite $6,000 there to avoid the monthly existential fee on my account.

According to my calculations, after those transfers, I will scrape by with about $5 left in my RBC account in the financially narrowest part of next month, the period of time after my rent is withdrawn (Jul 01) and before my first paycheque comes in (Jul 06-07). After that, I should be fine, and will be accumulating money again from there going forward, with all my remaining expenditures from my trip paid off except for an amount that I owe Kel for living at her place for some time and for her booking some things for me on her dime (so that I could return her the amount in Canadian dollars and bypass an exchange fee on her part, while lessening the immediate expenditure load for me while I travelled). That one I will probably pay off near the end of next month. Having $5 left in my bank account will be pretty wild though. (I charge most purchases to my credit card so this shouldn’t affect my day-to-day living.)

I have about $64,000 in the RBC account locked up in short-term investments that will unlock in the middle of July though, and with that, along with $8,000 more in my First Home Savings Account, I will look toward finally taking the first steps toward buying my first home, and use that amount as a downpayment toward the home. I went to speak to my RBC mortgage agent this week and got preapproved for a 5.07% 3-year fixed interest rate loan for a $280k mortgage over 25 years or something like that. Together with the money I have on hand, we agreed that I should aim for about a $350k home. He said he would try to get a better rate (than 5.07%) for me from the bank too due to “loyalty rates” but that he would get back to me on that. As of the end of the week, he hasn’t gotten back to me on that.

He put me in touch with a realtor that RBC works with, who set up a realtor portal for me, filtered to properties worth 300k-380k or so around Edmonton and with a few other filters on top of that. I then promptly took that portal and shared the link with my parents and siblings as well as my online friends to browse. I doubt I will find my perfect home right away, since I ideally need one near a transit station and/or a good supermarket, but we shall see. The times, they are somewhat exciting. However, since this came in the same day as the Steam sale started this year, Jun 27th, and since there’s a lot of things on my backlog from my trip still, there are a lot of other things vying for my attention that need doing.

My mortgate specialist at RBC also helped me lay out some of what my finances would look like going forward. On a 350k house, my mortgage payment per month would be around $1,640, property tax would be $265, house insurance would be around $150, and utilities would probably be around $500. In total, I should expect to set aside about $2,555 per month just for all that. I make about $4,300 a month after taxes, so that leaves me about $1,750 left over, $1,250 after the monthly tithe to my parents. That would go toward food and other purchases, which is more than fine as I usually do somewhere between $500-$900 in a typical month, but what does worry me a bit is how I build a nest egg from there to deal with ongoing house costs that will definitely pop up from time to time. That and initial furniture costs. I’ll probably aim to save at least a hard amount of $400 a month toward that, but try to put at least $500 a month if possible to start.

There’s other things that will help with that over time too — inflation, for one, will probably slowly raise my salary while the monthly payment wouldn’t really increase. As I understand it it’s sort of built in to the interest rate I have to pay already. If my parents move in eventually, that would help a lot too, though I’m not counting on that as a sure thing.

I feel like I will need to set aside at least $20,000 in savings before I feel like I can cover almost any eventuality with the house. I also want to see if I can get some solar panels going as soon as possible since that will pay itself off over time, but I will need a spreadsheet of all the things that normally need replacing in a house, and how long since they were last replaced, so that I can figure out when I have enough of a window (where I don’t expect anything to be replaced) for that. Don’t know how I’m ever going to afford a vehicle though, or go on vacation ever again, but that’s fine. Maybe I should find a secondary source of income at some point.

Still, home ownership is exciting to think about! And this is only possible because my Japan study abroad trip got cancelled. And I look forward to this, because even though my new neighbours are relatively speaking a LOT quieter than the Ukrainian moron above my old place, especially at night, I still do hear random thumps now and then, sometimes sudden and loud enough to make me jump.

Talking about inflation and money, seeing this made me irrationally angry this week:

As recently as two weeks ago, Safeway was selling their 5lb bags of potatoes for $5.99 per bag — I have receipts stating this since I bought one back then. But this week, they were suddenly at $7.99 base price. Inflation? More like profiteering off of essentials. I rage passed on buying potatoes from the store after seeing this. Coming back the very next day, I saw that they had put a discount on it and pretended that it was a good price:

So $7.49 instead of $7.99 on a discount — how kind. I think my next house has to be near an actual good supermarket. Maybe a Walmart or a No Frills, plus an Asian supermarket of some kind, would be the best. I’d even take a Superstore over Safeway and Sobeys at this point, although I’m not sure they’re any cheaper.

I got tired of the pigeons returning to my balcony so I picked up a water gun from the dollar store this week. It leaks if I put it down on the table on one side but not if I put it down on its other side, which is weird, but whatever. I haven’t given the birds their comeuppance yet but it will come.

I went to the Asian supermarket this week for the first time since coming back to Canada, and along the way I passed the little power spot pavilion nearby that I like.

While standing in it, I saw a cat in the front window of the house next to it. And I snapped a picture of said cat.

I took a nice walk over to the supermarket, and while there, I found a bottle of a very familiar bottled Japanese tea, my favourite Juurokucha from Asahi. It was expensive though, but who am I to complain? I was happy to find it in Edmonton at all, even though it tasted slightly different. It had a totally different bottle wrapper design that I had never seen before as well, so I had to buy it just for that if nothing else.

All those teas are around a dollar back in Japan though. I also like trying out new ingredients in my “Immunity Soup” hotpot dish that I make several times a week, and this trip I bought a packet of dried lily petals to add to the soup. So far they have either tasted fragrant but a bit mushy, or got completely overwhelmed by all the other ingredients in the soup, though.

I also saw this week that they had added more bins to the recycling area outside the local overpriced Safeway.

The actual recycling area is to the right of these bins, there’s a bunch of large blue bins for things like books and cardboard and other things to throw away. Cars come by regularly to toss things into those bins. This white bin has never been here though, and the green bin has been here but it used to be that it would only be here through the summer months, and then removed for the winter. Last year, the year I donated stuff to it in preparation for the Japan study abroad session that never happened, it stayed for the entire year. Now, there are two of them!! I approve.

The Japan Jam 2024 festival that I went to with Quintopia in May released their online concert broadcast this week, although instead of showing the full footage of all the concerts they just played a couple of songs from each artist and called it. They also showed some backstage scenes and stuff though and that was nice. I found our mugs in two segments of the concert footage, for Atarayo (あたらよ) and Yamato Mori (森大翔) below respectively, and we joked that it was nice that he wore a recognizable hat for me to find us in the videos. (They probably centered a couple of shots on him because he was practically the only visibly Caucasian foreigner there though. There were barely any overseas visitors at all since tickets were obnoxious to get a hold of.)

I downloaded something like 25 GB of the concert footage since they’re only up on a password-protected archive site and only until Jul 07th. I even had to grab a video downloader addon (I used one called Ant Video Downloader which also required a locally installed app) to get it, but it worked great. This also reminded me to back up all the videos from that Japan Jam blog entry page (and replace a few links that were not working outside of Japan).

Lastly, here are some nice skies from this week. Firstly a couple of shots from last Sunday, the 23rd, when there were angel ladders in the sky at around 7:10 pm.

Then from Thursday the 27th, when it was overcast and on-and-off raining for nearly the entire day, with the temperature hovering around 16-17 degrees Celsius for most of the day. It was very nice weather.

And here are some sunset squiggles that I liked seeing splashed across the sky on Friday evening at 10:11 pm.

I also received this email about a First Responders Appreciation BBQ event happening in two weeks from now in the south parking lot of Southgate Centre:

I hadn’t been subscribed to their newsletter until recently so I never heard about it, but although my new apartment has no view of the little courtyard in the middle of the apartment complex where I live, where the annual Midwest Residential Appreciation BBQ is held, I apparently should have a pretty great view of this one, since that’s the parking lot on the left side of the shopping mall in the pictures above!