Tag Archive: lean-FIRE


Yes, I really do live in Canada on just $1K USD a month

Filed under: personal trivia — Leave a comment
March 18, 2024

Hello, new friends! – assuming you’re here because you googled my name after seeing or reading the news. Everything you’ve read and heard is true: I do, indeed, live quite happily on $1,000 USD a month – or somewhere around $1,354 CAD as of this writing.

How? Geographical arbitrage. If you’ve never heard about it, I’m happy to be the one to blow your mind with that amazing concept. I first learned about it from Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” That book is brilliant, it aged quite well, and it’s filled with fun ideas: setting up and outsourcing a business, or hiring a virtual assistant, or moving someplace much cheaper where you can enjoy the same (or even better) standard of living, aka geographic arbitrage. I don’t think Ferriss ever considered that one of his readers would move from Reno to Las Vegas to Fort Worth to Tampa to Seattle to Toronto to Quebec City in pursuit of that dream, but hey – that totally worked. (And yes, just typing up that list of cities took me a while.)

2008 was a bad time to be a brand new college graduate, especially in Nevada – the ground zero for the housing bubble. That’s how, after 18 months of hustling and bustling and trying to juggle broke roommates, I got a gig as a seasonal box packer at an Amazon warehouse in November 2009. I packed a lot of boxes, got my permanent badge, and eventually got promoted to a data geek in my warehouse’s quality department…

Each time I moved and launched a new warehouse for Amazon, I received a cash bonus. As their bottom-level warehouse-based analyst (level 3 out of 12, where 12 = CEO), I never made much ($15/hour or less, usually), but there was always lots of overtime, and the annual cash bonuses for moving were nice… After three years, the twice-yearly pay raises for hourly employees stop, which was the main reason I ultimately transferred to corporate in Seattle. (At that point, I was L4, aka the lowest lifeform on the corporate ladder outside the warehouse world.) That position finally got me some sizable stock options, though – once again – I never made $100K, even if you add the stock on top of my unimpressive salary.

That whole time, I lived frugally, and contributed 10% of my paycheck to 401k (a retirement account in the US) while also trying to max out my Roth IRA (another type of retirement account), cooking at home, avoiding food trucks and food delivery (I still maintain that food delivery is a profligate scam), and generally being a good little saver. There were months when I’d switch my 401k allocation to 90%, just to turbocharge my retirement account while living off my savings. There were two dirt-cheap tropical vacations to Costa Rica – staying in hostels and traveling around the country by bus… Good times.

I’d always had the idea to retire early – recently, an old college roommate confirmed I’d voiced that notion even when we were both 20. There wasn’t much to do for fun during the Great Recession, so I overdosed on personal finance blogs and books, and came up with my own motto: Earn More, Spend Less, Invest the Rest. That’s also one of the main ideas in my book on personal finance, “Let’s Retire Young: Embrace Simplicity, Escape the Rat Race, and Achieve Lean-FIRE.” (While you’re there, check out my other Kindle e-books!) “FIRE” stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” – and lean-FIRE is retiring early on a very lean, frugal budget. A bit like a modern-day monk, or a grad student – but permanently.

One key obstacle to FIRE fans in the United States is healthcare. That was one of the main reasons I tried getting a transfer to another, more civilized country – and after many attempts, it finally worked. (At Amazon, L4’s aren’t taken very seriously; likewise for our international transfer requests.) In March 2019, I moved from Seattle to Toronto (that was one long drive!) after the company helped prepare all the paperwork to get me a job as a financial analyst (still an L4) at a warehouse in Toronto’s suburbs.

Long story long, I worked and patiently waited for the required two years before I could get my Canadian PR (permanent residency): before that, I’d been in the country on a work permit, which meant if I lost the job, I would’ve had to go back to the US. (That would have been suboptimal.) I got my long-awaited PR in April 2021. I’d spent my 2020 selling my small stockpile of Amazon stock, investing in companies that were severely undersold during the covid market crash, and making a 193% return the following year. By April 2021, I had all the ingredients in place: just enough cash to retire early + a permanent resident status in Canada + a nice safety net in the form of my two US-based retirement accounts (they’ll keep growing for the next 22 years, till I can start withdrawing from them) and my fully funded Social Security benefits. The latter isn’t enough to live on in the US, but that alone could pay for my frugal lifestyle.

After leaving Amazon in May 2021 (ironically, right after the long-awaited promotion to L5: too little, too late), I hung out in Toronto for a bit, and then moved to Quebec City in September 2021. Why Quebec City? Well, let’s just say there was a reason I had become a financial analyst – it wasn’t just because of my seniority… I did a lot of research: the province of Quebec had the lowest rent in all of Canada. Within the province, two cities stood out: Sherbrooke had the cheapest rent of all (roughly $450-500 CAD for a studio apartment with all the utilities), while Quebec City had the second-cheapest. Quebec City was a little bigger and a lot prettier, and so…

My shiny 1-bedroom apartment is spacious and nice, on the second floor of a quiet brick building in the center of the city, within walking distance of everything. I live without roommates, and my rent is $674 CAD a month ($498 USD). The water and internet bills are included, and I pay only for electricity (or hydro, as they call it in Canada). With that sole bill and with the renter insurance, my total monthly rent is $734 CAD or $542 USD. That’s unheard of elsewhere in Canada, I know – and you might have a hard time believing it, but look it up – go on Facebook Marketplace, select Quebec City (or Lévis – the town right across the river), and search for “louer” – “rent.” You’ll find many other deals in that price range, and rental rooms for $450 CAD or thereabout.

Feel free to call me a liar. I know, these numbers look ridiculously low, but hey – Quebec is an awesome province with very strong rent control, and geographic arbitrage is a beautiful thing. You’ll have to learn French if you want to live here, but it’s not too hard: I speak passably decent pidgin French after just a couple of years here. You can too, eh. (The local francisation program will pay you $200 CAD a week to attend a community college – cégep – full time for a year to learn the language and the customs of your new home. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than DuoLingo.)

And so, $734 CAD for rent. My cellphone bill is $64 CAD, but I can probably lower it a bit if I try. My grocery budget is $300 CAD a month, and even that is too much: I cook at home, take advantage of sales, and live healthily yet simply. (Yes, I eat meat.) I also brew my own red wine, which is ridiculously cheap and fun. My budget also includes $100 CAD a month (or $25 CAD a week) on going out to eat. If/when I spend less than planned on groceries, that $95 CAD weekly budget ($70 + $25) goes into more trips to local diners and bakeries. The total so far is $734 + $64 + $300 + $100 = $1,198 CAD, or $884 USD. That leaves a whopping $156 CAD for random, non-going-out, non-grocery expenses, and that’s plenty enough.

It helps when you deliberately choose not to have a car: I sold mine shortly after leaving Amazon, and I never looked back. The cost of insurance + gas + parking + maintenance + the low-key stress the car might get stolen… I don’t miss any of that. Quebec City is remarkably pedestrian-friendly, and there are buses all over the place. (I use up one $3.40 CAD bus pass per week to get my groceries.)

For entertainment, I use public libraries, YouTube, and my book collection. For exercise, I walk around town and do body weight and dumbbell exercises at home. And yes, I do have a girlfriend – I’m not some chronically single weirdo living in a basement. The two of us are happy.

A few weeks ago, a journalist from Business Insider found one of my old Reddit posts (where I detailed my $1K/month plan) and asked for an interview, and I happily obliged. You can read it over here. In a matter of days, MSN reposted the article, then Yahoo Finance reshuffled a few words and reposted it too (that was quite funny), and then a local news channel based out of Montreal reached out for an interview too… Here it is – they mispronounced my name, but they got the story across, and that’s all that matters!

I genuinely hope that others will look into these concepts – FIRE, lean-FIRE, geographic arbitrage, and so many others – and will take steps to at least simplify their finances, if not move to an exotic new town/country/continent and retire early, a few decades ahead of the arbitrary schedule we’re supposed to follow for some reason.

My plans for the next couple of years include, in no particular order:

  • finding and agent to sell my newly finished science fiction novel, “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide”
  • writing my second science fiction novel! (See the blog post just before this one.)
  • hiking the Continental Divide Trail (my Pacific Crest Trail adventure in 2022 was glorious, and now I’m hooked)
  • joining the Canadian Army Reserves to help my new country fight natural disasters
  • joining a huge local community garden to level up my gardening skill and get a share of their vegetable harvest when it’s done
  • and much, much more…

There will, of course, be those who refuse to believe me, or – as the meme goes – will not be stopped by this blog post because they can’t read. Nonetheless… A very quick FAQ:

Q: Aha! You worked for Amazon, you rich tech-bro, you! That’s how yo managed to retire at 34!
A: Technically, that’s not a question… But no, like I said above, I never made $100K USD even if you add up my salary and stock grants. In fact, I’m pretty sure I never even made the median salary in any city I ever lived and worked in.

Q: You got lucky with your apartment, and you’re grandfathered in, and you’ll never find that deal again! Why are you bragging about this?
A: My apartment is, admittedly, cheaper than average, but you can find many others in this price range. And I moved here just 2.5 years ago: it’s not like I’ve been renting it since the 1960s. In fact, the rent has already gone up, technically: electricity (hydro) used to be included in the rent when I first moved in. There are many other deals like this.

Q: I can’t read, and squiggly characters confuse me! Where the hell do you live on $1K a month, Nunavut?
A: Nope – in the beautiful Quebec City. Sherbrooke is even cheaper! Also, that’s $1K USD, or $1,354 CAD – not $1K CAD.

Q: You lie! You got a huge inheritance, didn’t you? Didn’t you?
A: I did not, my cynical friend. Despite having buried my biological father and two stepfathers, the most I ever received from any of them was a collection of cool gems (not diamonds, no) and a beaten-up old bicycle. Also, a couple of worn white T-shirts. No riches or deeds to abandoned farms, sorry to disappoint.

Q: What the hell do you even do on that kind of budget? Sit around and watch the paint dry?
A: I do quite a lot, actually! I’m in the best physical shape of my life now, I do a lot of reading and listen to tons of fun podcasts (we live in the golden age of podcasting), I practice my photography and tinker with a couple of musical instruments, I play video games (classics are cheap, if not free), I volunteer at a local non-profit, and so much more… There’s a lot of fun stuff you can do without spending a penny. I hope someday you’ll find it too.

And with that, I’ll probably wrap up this novella. If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to comment here or use the “Contact me” form!

Good luck on your financial journey, y’all.

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My first-ever paperback!

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment
July 30, 2023

I’ve come a long, loooong way from my first awkward e-books. (In fact, I deleted and then completely remastered the very first one: it was frankly embarrassing.) I’ve gone from short-length FAQs to compendiums of public-domain literature to an actual, real-length book, eh.

I used to write about early retirement on my mostly abandoned personal finance blog. Then I turned all of that into an actual e-book with advice on retiring early: Let’s Retire Young. And after remarkably great reception and reactions from multiple people, I did a bunch more formatting work and voila – it’s turned into a paperback! Amazon, as always, takes most of the profits, but still, this is mind-blowing: there will be actual books with actual unique content (none of which is from public domain, for once) bearing my name, spreading my thoughts around the world.

For all our fancy technology, paper books still last a helluva lot longer than their digital counterparts. (Go ahead and try to open a Microsoft Word file from 1983…) This feels rather surreal: I’ve made something that could quite possibly outlive me, and/or gather dust in some library collection for decades and centuries. That is, of course, if people buy it: it’s not a fancy publisher deal, just a print-on-demand operation that’s run by Amazon. (That said: fancy publisher people – feel free to reach out to me!)

To celebrate – and generate a little ranking boost – I’m giving away the e-book version for free for the next three days. The giveaway will end at the end of Tuesday, August 1st. Ditto for most of my other e-books: you can find them over here. As always, feel free to share the links with your friends, and I’d really appreciate it if you left a 5-star review if you like what you see. (Even a single sentence will suffice.)

Thanks in advance, and happy reading, eh!

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New e-book! And a giveaway! :) “Let’s Retire Young: Embrace Simplicity, Escape the Rat Race, and Achieve Lean-FIRE”

Filed under: writing — 2 Comments
June 1, 2023

Okay, so the title is a bit of a mouthful, but you gotta be thorough with those things. Also, there are zero other e-books that have “lean-FIRE” in their title, and that’s just a damn shame, eh. (For the uninitiated: “FIRE” stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” – and lean-FIRE is the frugal version of that movement.) You can download my shiny new e-book over here. It’ll stay free until the end of Friday, June 2. I may do another giveaway in the coming weeks… If you like the e-book, please leave a 5-star review so others would be able to find it too!

As for what the book is about, I’m just going to shamelessly plagiarize my own e-book description here…

I retired at 34. I can teach you how.

My story doesn’t involve huge inheritances, rich relatives, or cushy jobs obtained through the Good Ol’ Boy Network. I’m a double immigrant: from Russia to the US when I was 16, from the US to Canada when I was 32. I never made six figures, never got huge scholarships, and my first job after college was as a box packer at an Amazon warehouse. (Thanks, recession!) Over the years, and by necessity, I mastered the art of frugal living and taught myself how to earn more, spend less, and invest the rest.

This book grew out of my personal finance blog, with a few extra chapters thrown in. Consider it your instruction manual for achieving frugal early retirement, aka lean-FIRE. (FIRE is a financial movement: it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.”)

This book is written in a conversational and informal (sometimes too informal) style, and it has something for everyone who wants to improve their financial situation. Even if you don’t replicate my journey entirely, you’ll still be able to avoid some huge mistakes and boost your savings rate.

This e-book is hands down the most book-like e-book I’ve ever written: for one thing, it’s long (317 pages, woot!), and consists entirely of my own writing, unlike so many of the public-domain e-books I’ve spliced together. In theory, I could’ve tried to pitch it to publishing houses to get it printed like an actual real-life book, but from what I understand about the industry, nowadays they prefer authors with huge social media platforms, and that’s not something I care to maintain. (You, dear reader, are part of a small and exclusive club!) So e-book format it is, then.

This e-book has a lot of rather personal information that average people never really share with one another: money permeates so many aspects of our lives, yet it’s considered faux pas to bring it up, especially so when you’re doing better than those around you. Not gonna lie, I had some doubts about releasing it, even as I cleaned up all my old blog posts and wrote a couple of new chapters.

I ended up clicking that “Publish” button anyway, and that’s due to two simple reasons. First, no one will remember any of us 150 years from now: our internal struggle, shame, or awkwardness don’t matter one bit in the grand scale of things. And secondly, if my e-book can help at least one person (and ideally, many more) streamline their financial situation and retire earlier, then all of this will be worth it. In fact, one of my PCT hiking buddies has already thanked me profusely: he’s a lawyer, but he never got a chance to learn the ins and outs of personal finance – until now. Looks like I’ve already accomplished my absolute-minimum goal – let’s see how many more I can help, eh?

And so, without further ado, head over here if you’d like to download the e-book for free, and please feel free to share the link with all your friends: my e-book has something for everyone. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope even more to get a shiny 5-star review from you afterwards. Have fun!

P.S.: To celebrate my e-book’s release, I’m also doing a two-day giveaway on most of my other e-books over here. Personally, I highly recommend 50 shades of yay: great thinkers on happiness. It contains useful perspectives on happiness from great thinkers across the millennia. (We could all use that in this stressful time!)

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New project: LetsRetireYoung.com

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment
December 4, 2021

I grew up reading personal finance blogs: there wasn’t much else to do for fun after graduating college during the 2008 bubble. I always wondered about that elite and mysterious tribe of bloggers, the influence they wielded, the lives they might have led. As tempting as it was, I never set up my own personal finance blog, if only because I didn’t want to be just another non-entity who was still stuck in the rat race, daydreaming out loud, sharing less-than-motivational updates along the lines of “just 51 more months till retirement!”

After I achieved my lean-FIRE early retirement in May 2021, life got a whole lot more fun and easier. Eventually, an online acquaintance teased me: “is it really a FIRE if you don’t have a FIRE blog?” (A bit like that joke about how to figure out if someone is a vegan – they’ll tell you within three minutes. Heh.) And so, the seed got planted…

I’ve launched my Let’s Retire Young blog just over two months ago, and it’s finally fleshed out enough (and not at risk of being abandoned like yet another infatuation) that I feel it can be shared with the world at large. It’s quite separate from this here blog because while a large part of that new blog is based on my own experiences, it’s mostly just money advice. Conversely, while this blog occasionally mentions money, it’s more of a personal memory repository. And, of course, “Let’s Retire Young” is far easier to memorize and pronounce than “Grigory Lukin.” (Which, if you’re curious, rhymes with “story” and “win” when pronounced correctly. Russian names are weird, I know.)

The new blog’s tagline is “Earn more, spend less, invest the rest” – and while I was pretty bad at the “earn more” part, it’s a valid part nonetheless. (Like this post I wrote about getting a tech job without learning how to code.) So far, I’m writing three posts per week: I meal-prep them every Friday (because, as we all know, Friday = “write day”), and there are already 24 of them out there. Once I make it to the big #25, I will have proven my commitment to the bit, and might be able to secure some sort of a semi-professional writing gig. (That’d be a pretty huge upgrade for this writing hobby of mine.)

Just for the fun of it, I’ve also set up a mirror version of my blog over on Medium: I may have missed that platform’s golden age, but it still gets me some readers, especially after I joined a publication for newbie writers – which, admittedly, accepts absolutely everyone, a bit like a tutorial level in a video game.

The blog itself is about early retirement, with a side of geographic arbitrage: I strongly believe that anyone’s financial situation can be changed for the better (if only a little), but that can require significant lifestyle changes, up to and including moving to another city or even country. My advice won’t suit everyone (it would be rather strange if it did), but for the right kind of person, my stories could provide a valuable blueprint. I escaped the rat race at age 34, without having rich parents or a huge inheritance or a high-paying job. (I never once made $100K USD in a year.) I found and exploited multiple glitches in the system, and managed to escape it in one piece, with my sanity mostly intact. Now I live on roughly $1,000 USD a month (rent is cheap here, eh), and loving it.

When I started that side project, I didn’t realize how interesting the monetization component would be: thus far, I’ve made $22 USD through AdSense on the main blog and $4 USD on Medium. Not exactly a huge income stream per se, but according to the r/blogging subreddit, search engines generally ignore you until you put out 25-30 posts. We’ll see how that plays out – but meanwhile, I’m enjoying this gamification process of all the different indicators that can be tracked and improved. Earnings rate, visitors, clicks, page loading time, etc…

Getting to the first 25 posts is the first major milestone. At the pace I’m going, I’ll cross the 100-post threshold sometime in June/July. (Unless, of course, that money-related reality TV show I applied for calls me back, in which case I’d probably be offline for a few months in early 2022. My life is pretty eccentric.) Once I get to that point… Perhaps I’ll be able to get a book deal, and get an actual, real book published from some of my best posts. Perhaps something else. Maybe I’ll switch to just one post a week, or end the whole project with just 100 posts so as not to dilute it with random generic gibberish. We’ll see.

In the meantime, though, head on over to LetsRetireYoung.com and check it out for yourself, eh. Feel free to leave comments, ask questions, share your favourite posts on social media, and tell your friends. I know that personal finance blogs are a dime a dozen these days (things have changed a lot since 2008), but hey – it’s better to have blogged and lost than never to have blogged at all, am I right?

Cheers, y’all.

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Bonjour, Quebec!

Filed under: on stuff and sundry — 3 Comments
November 27, 2021

This post is about three months overdue, but I have it on good authority that time is relative. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So much has happened… The move from Toronto to Quebec City was an exercise in organized chaos: I managed to pack all my stuff (including all the small detritus of life that takes up an alarming amount of cubic space) into plastic crates, moved them into the small Uhaul truck I rented, and drove it all the way to QC with an overnight stop at a rest area. (My original estimate of completing the 8-hour move-and-drive by 6pm was wildly optimistic.) Then it was all about unpacking and moving my stuff to that shiny, beautiful second-floor apartment that is my home. Returning the Uhaul. Walking back to the apartment, ogling all the French signs and sights. I hope those first memories will never fade away.

At some point, I’ll probably forget and normalize the memory of my first month here, before I got my furniture (mostly Ikea, and a couple of used furniture stores), but it was pure chaos: sleeping on my mattress on the floor before I finally got one of the last beds available at the local Ikea. (With another Uhaul rental – those things are like cheat codes for everyday life!), then navigating through all the furniture boxes in my living room, then slooowly assembling it all over the course of three days or so. Did you know that there actual online support groups for people who try to assemble Ikea’s Malm dressers? Ask me how I know…

There were casualties: I wasn’t careful with my gaming PC (just yeeted it in the back of the truck instead of securing it on the passenger seat like the precious baby that it is), and something inside got misaligned. The nearest computer repair store fixed it, got it working again, and then held it hostage for four days because the technician didn’t write down how much to charge me. Fun times… Didn’t help that they closed early on Saturday despite telling me earlier that day to stop by at 4. I fought that particular spike of rage by finding a great deal on a used 20-gallon aquarium and acquiring three little guppies to go with it. (And a fancy thermometer. And a big wooden decoration. And a couple of little plants. And an air pump shaped like a volcano. It’s pretty fun, eh.) I’m still figuring out the exact water chemistry, and will probably have to splurge on a tap water filter to make sure they get dechlorinated water when I change it. It’s an ongoing but fun project – and when it comes to the expense/cuteness/stinkiness ratio, fish are far better pets than birds or mammals. (There are also reptiles, of course, but they’re not as cute in my utterly subjective opinion.)

Quebec City itself is beautiful… Just google its pictures and see for yourself: that’s not just one small touristy block, that’s a good chunk of the city, and there’s more beauty in other parts of it, too. All the parks have lots of trails and pathways for pedestrians, bicycles, skateboards, etc. It turns out Duolingo had lied to me, and the Quebec-French is quite different from French-French. The few times I tried saying “enchante” (pleased to meet you) to new acquaintances, the response was mostly “WTF does that mean?” Heh. It’s getting better, though: while I still can’t follow other people’s conversations at parties (just smile and nod!), I can mostly figure out what I’m reading by recognizing the key words.

It turns out the local government pays a $200/week stipend to encourage newcomers (other Canadians, or immigrants like myself, or refugees) to learn Quebec-French and Quebecois culture. It’s an intensive program – five days a week, up to six hours a day, for twelve weeks – but it sounds like an amazing deal. There’s a distinct lack of good apps that teach Quebecois French, and I will have to become fluent anyway… Might as well. Just need to send off some documents on Monday, and then they’ll slot me into the next available class, whenever that might be. Quebec’s government isn’t perfect, but this “bribe to learn” program they’ve set up to preserve and promote their culture and their language is downright brilliant. Kudos, at least on that front.

My PR (permanent resident) card is finally here, after spending seven weeks bouncing between Toronto and Quebec. (My neighbour in Toronto means well, but for some reason he didn’t write his return address on the envelope when he sent it to me.) It’s incredibly shiny and going to make my everyday life a whole lot easier. I celebrated with a meal at my favourite local diner, La Cuisine. Check it out if you ever visit Quebec City: friendly staff, great decor, delicious food, low prices. What more can one ask?

…you know how some movies have that cliché where the main character travels to a strange foreign land and just happens to bump into a local guide that speaks fluent English, has a ton of badass qualities, and is an overall improbably awesome and helpful human being? Turns out that actually happens! My new Quebecois girlfriend is a certified badass that does krav maga, knows how to ride any non-motor thingy that has wheels (roller skates, longboard, etc), loves simple and healthy living, etc. What’s even better is that she’s also open to the idea of becoming a professional nomad, doing her graphic design work on her laptop while vegging out in some cheap tropical country. My life is highly improbable, I know, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

It’s been six months and twelve days since I left Amazon for good. (Unless, of course, they decide to pay me back the 47 shares that they owe me; then I might – might – consider entertaining the preliminary notion of possibly going back.) The time flew by, and I feel so much more relaxed and healthier… This whole “early retirement” thing is great, really. Five stars, would try again, highly recommended. I could stay in the rat race another five or 10 years, become a multimillionaire, get more shiny toys, but I’d never get those years back. You can double your net worth – you can’t double your life expectancy.

To give you some idea of how sweet this life is, the only things on my calendar are:

  1. the final expanse book coming out in 3 days;
  2. liquidating all my stocks in late December because I’m quite convinced there’ll be a major correction by April. (Student loan payments will start up again. People will owe taxes on their huge 2021 gains. None of that is good news. Keep in mind that the dot-com bubble burst in March, when the 1999 taxes were due…)
  3. a cool date at the opera with gf in January;
  4. an equally cool long weekend getaway with gf and her friends at a rented cottage somewhere in rural Quebec in February;
  5. possibly a family reunion in March-April-ish?

In September 2022, I will have lived in Quebec for 12 months, which will make me eligible to join the local Freemason chamber. They’re an odd group, but I like what I’ve learned about them so far. When the world begins to fall apart (sort of like in Vancouver, which is currently inaccessible by road thanks to the flooding and mudslides), it’ll be vital to have a gigantic support network on your side. Prepping and stashing food and guns and medicine is only the first step. The second step is getting to know your neighbours (are they medics? cooks? people with no particular skills but with great vibes?). The third step is acquiring an army: a giant social network you can rely on, no matter where in the world you are. I considered other options, like Scientologists, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, etc, and decided against them – and Freemasons actually seems like a fun and non-judgmental bunch, and a great way to learn new stuff, and make new local friends, and liven up ye olde social calendar. Too bad they have a strict anti-nomad policy in Quebec, thus the 12-month waiting period first.

At some point, most likely May 2023, I’ll be eligible to apply for my Canadian citizenship, and once I get that, I’ll finally start my life as a snowbird, thus completing my weird, weird metamorphosis. Until then, though, I’ll spend a couple of winters here in Quebec. It’s pretty ironic that the goal of my early-retirement journey was to live someplace cheap and tropical, yet I’ll have to live through the coldest winters of my life (since leaving Siberia in 2003, anyhow) as the last rite of passage. Heh.

And now, after a walk through the snow and a bit of exercise, I’m off to do some more gaming (gf is in Montreal this weekend) – Sunless Skies is both amazing and cheap – while listening to the excellent Ologies podcast (amazing pop science in 90-minute-long increments!), followed by a homecooked meal with a glass of red wine, and maybe another Werner Herzog movie. (It is my new quest to watch everything he’s ever written and/or directed. Two movies down, dozens to go!)

Life is good.

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