We recently received a reader email asking about a travel crib Emily mentioned when detailing the cost of travelling with a baby. Our wonderful reader, a fellow Torontonian, noticed the aforementioned travel crib is available for $198 on Amazon.com; however, a hop over to Amazon.ca lists the same crib for $327.30. My bad.

It’s no secret that buying stuff is cheaper in the US than it is in Canada. US consumers have access to a better selection of products, many of which are not available in our home and native land. To add insult to injury, many retailers do not ship to Canada due to the complexity of international shipping regulations.

Such is the case with the travel crib. We wanted to buy the same product over a year ago. At the time, it was a fairly new product. It wasn’t offered in any Canadian stores nor was it available to be shipped from the US. How did we end up buying an item not available in Canada?

I’ll let you in on a little secret: we used CBI USA. Continue Reading

We’ve been on a roll over the last year in terms of getting our financial house in order. We checked off some pretty significant items off of our to do list: We optimized our savings by maxing out last year’s annual contribution to my TFSA while contributing plenty to Emily’s RRSP. We also added to our son’s Registered Education Savings Plan for the second year in a row. Not only did we contribute to these savings accounts, we defined an investing strategy- choosing to start with passively managed index funds. Considering we’ve never maxed out an annual contribution to a savings account before, it was definitely a breakout year.

Yet with our recent success, there are items on our list that remain; items that should have been checked off long ago. I’ve been procrastinating on them for one reason or another and I really should get to them sooner rather than later. Without further ado, my bucket list, if you will, of things that still need to be done that I haven’t gotten around to just yet. Continue Reading

Challenge Recap

We started the second month of yearlong quest to simplify our lives with a game where Emily and I competed to rid ourselves of our excess stuff.

The gist of the challenge was to get rid of n number of items for the n^th day of the month. On the first day, we each tossed one item. On the second day, we each got rid of two. 28 days later, the grand total of all items purged would be 406. All items were supposed to be out of the house by midnight. The tally to date: Emily 208, Daniel 153. Bollocks. Continue Reading