Tag Archive: Quebec City


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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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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Farewell, Toronto

Filed under: wanderlust — 2 Comments
August 30, 2021

Twelve hours from now, I’ll be in the process of loading a Uhaul truck, getting ready to drive away from Toronto toward the improbably beautiful Quebec City. Aside from Seattle (where I spent 3.5 years), this is the longest I’ve stayed in one place since 2009: 2.5 years in this strange, strange city. I will not miss it.

Toronto tries too hard to be like New York City. It definitely succeeded in attracting all the money, driving up the housing and rental prices, building a little subway and transit train system, and setting up one helluva zoo, but as for the rest… Perhaps it’s just the pandemic. Perhaps in some other, baseline timeline where that didn’t happen, the city would’ve been tolerable. As it is, all the annual summer festivals got cancelled for the second year in a row – and they won’t have enough money to come back in 2022. The subway system is a bit impressive, but it shuts down at 11pm more often than not. (Which makes Toronto “the city that never stays up” rather than “the city that never sleeps.” Heh.) God-awful drivers are enabled even further by the cops that don’t give a damn about enforcing any rules. (One time, I saw a cop – with his sirens off – blatantly run a red light. Leading by example, eh?) Last week, a woman almost hit me while taking a right turn smack into a bunch of right-of-way pedestrians. When I gave her ye olde stink eye, she yelled, “I didn’t hit you, did I?!” Fun times.

This city is the ground zero of the new Canadian housing bubble – or maybe it’s Vancouver, or both. The mechanism won’t be the same as when I lived in Nevada (these foreign buyers can definitely afford their mortgages), but eventually it will implode – and when it does, things will get for the Canadian economy. Let’s just say that when a) your Lyft driver starts giving you real estate advice, and b) local news shows have recurring segments on increasing your property’s value, and c) the local authorities don’t give a damn about their constituents renting out fire-trap basement apartments (one exit and a tiny window) for $1,300… Well, that’ll make one very bad cocktail. For what it’s worth, the Centre Island is beautiful, and so is Lake Ontario, and so is all the beautiful Art Deco architecture in the financial district. That’s not enough to make up for the negatives, though.

There is, of course, the emotional baggage. Toronto was the city where Amazon did their damnedest to make life difficult over the course of two years and two months. It’s also where my old flame killed herself… She came to me in a dream on the two-year anniversary. We had a long conversation I can’t recall. I’m not sure if that’s a giant red flag from my subconscious, or proof of the noosphere of some sort, or perhaps all of the above. Regardless, there’s a little too much baggage here to stay.

I still talk to xgf: she said a lot of her Toronto friends are leaving too – all at once, and almost all of a sudden. I think I get it: after about 18 months of this pandemic and the assorted lockdowns (which lasted longer here than anywhere else in North America), people got a lot of time to think. Think about what they want to do with their lives, what they’re missing out on, what their true priorities might be. It’s somewhat comforting to think that there are others like me, that I’m part of the grand Millennial covid migration.

I’m fairly certain I’ve written other “goodbye” posts for Vegas/Fort Worth/Tampa/Seattle on this blog before, but I can’t be bothered to look for them. I do recall that I left each of those cities with a sense of relief. Is there something in my personality that makes me squeeze every bit of value from a city before I abandon it and run off someplace else? Or maybe it’s objectively true that each city had, say, a better dating scene or some such. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ve spent the last week slowly packing up all my stuff: when I made the long drive from Seattle to Toronto in March 2019, I’d managed to fit everything in my little 2013 Kia Rio. I’ve got slightly more stuff now, though I’m pretty sure if I tossed out all the giant pretty rocks, the bookshelf, and the mattress, I could still make it work. Maybe. As it is, tomorrow morning I’ll pick up the smallest Uhaul truck, load it up solo and in record time, and then hit the road. (Renting a Uhaul at the very end of the month is pricey, but still, I’ll save a fortune on the rent differential…) My Quebec City apartment complex (an 8-hour drive from Toronto) won’t meet me outside the business hours, so my brilliant plan consists of loading the truck, driving it for seven-ish hours to a rest stop just outside Quebec City, stopping there for the night (yay Kindle! yay snacks!), waking up hella early the following day, picking up the keys at 8am, and then unloading the truck, returning it, finally taking the much-needed shower, and going into a minor hibernation. Still less complex than my luggage logistics in Las Vegas, eh.

So here I am… Almost everything is packed up. All that’s needed now is to take out the trash, place the free stuff on the lawn for urban scavengers (the free stuff includes a juicer, a full-size shovel, and six cans of beans, among other items), and do some cursory cleaning as I pack up all the rest. I’ve just celebrated my last night in this city with a small $10 bottle of Prosecco, tiny store-bought and pre-packaged slices of toasted garlic bread, and six slices of that triangular Laughing Cow cheese. (Hey, I never claimed to be classy.) Aside from a short trip back in March to take care of some formalities for Project 2039 (more on that someday later), this will be it.

…it’s tempting, ever so tempting to just pour some gas on the sum total of all my material goods, throw a match, and just start over with a sleeping bag and a cellphone. Almost done packing, though. Just two days of discomfort, and I’ll be in my permanent home base. The only way out is up, right?

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Still traveling, eh

Filed under: wanderlust — Leave a comment
August 24, 2021

Well, that was fun. I am, indeed, still alive and well, though the multitasking Russian Lyft driver in Huntington Beach almost killed me when he decided to take a left turn into the oncoming traffic. Ahh, California…

It’s a strange and wild idea, but I might have temporarily overdosed on the whole travel thing. Thirty-seven days and seven cities, with new people, experiences, places, or just plain old airports, every single day. Even though I’ve been back for 23 days, it feels like my brain is still processing all those inputs. Every so often, I get a random flash of something I did or something I saw during my gigantic revenge vacation, and all the pleasant memories flood back: all the old friends I hung out with, the bars I hopped, the museums I saw, the old haunts revisited once more. (Rest in peace, Harrah’s casino.)

In no particular order…

I found a town that was filled with nothing but touristy souvenir stores, one of which attempted to print out every single motivational Instagram slogan on pillows and hanging signs. That proud town of Snohomish, WA also featured a huge antique store that was definitely bigger on the inside than it had appeared on the outside. I may have gone overboard and bought six antique cameras that I then lugged in my backpack all over the continent for the following month. Heh. I confirmed that cider doesn’t exist outside of the Pacific Northwest: Nevada’s casinos didn’t have any in stock (on tap or in bottles), and a cornered bartender finally told me that’s because the entire beer supply chain is severely disrupted. Oof. Just… oof.

Reno’s casinos got mostly consolidated after Eldorado took over just about everything. One of their few remaining competitors, Sands, was so understaffed that they had to shut down all their table games at 1am. (If that’s not horrifying, I don’t know what is.) The week in Nevada, split between Reno and Vegas, was a strange blast from the past, an opportunity to over-indulge (I mean, way over-indulge) in all my vices. How strange to think that I’m still very much the same person who left the state in 2013. The Strip was as full as ever, though the roaming showgirl duos replaced the water peddlers and the “massage” card distributors. I did the most cliché tourist thing imaginable and paid $100 to go to a gun range that offers multiple types of firearms. (You know, like in the “Big Short” movie.) I can definitely see why people get so addicted to their shotguns and semi-auto rifles: addictive, and powerful, and dangerous.

Portland was filled with beautiful wacky-haired tattooed people. That city, unlike any other I’ve ever been to, may as well be the setting of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. (Sorry, Toronto, but you’re just not hip enough.) In some other world, I might have visited Portland and fallen in love with it and maybe even moved – but meh.

I spent several nights wondering through Vancouver’s tourist-trap district, following random noises, but never did manage to find any live music. All the karaoke bars listed on Google Maps were shut down. I did go on a whale-watching trip, though: deep inside, I’ll always be a broke 19-year-old college student, and that was more expensive than I was comfortable with, but damn, that was worth every penny. Seeing those giant beautiful creatures in real life, just 100 or so yards away, was majestic. Not unlike the time I rode an elephant at a Tampa Renaissance fair: the experience turns the animal from something you’re theoretically familiar with (like anteaters, or ostriches, or Wisconsin) and turns it into something far more real and tangible.

I stayed in a Vegas hotel (Treasure Island, to be precise) for two nights after cashing in some of my M-Life app reward points, and now I can sort of understand why people pay the top dollar to stay at those resorts – as opposed to, say, finding dirt-cheap AirBnB accommodations. Next time, whenever that may be, I just might stay at one of the low-key casinos in the Fremont district. I’m quite impressed that my elaborate plan of checking out of the hotel, dropping off my giant heavy backpack at a 24/7 bail bonds agency, checking into a seedy AirBnB (the check-in instructions explicitly asked not to bleed or jizz on the carpet because the cleaning fee wasn’t high enough to cover that), partying it up the whole next day, and packing up my backpack 36 hours later, at 1am, actually worked. There were a lot of moving pieces there, and while that worked out perfectly, I definitely won’t do that again. Great proof of concept, but for the price of all the running around, I may as well have bought that third hotel night with my own cash. The 4am flight to New York went splendidly, though I ended up sleeping 14 hours the following night. Good times, good times.

The evening train from Seattle to Portland remains an amazing experience that everyone should try.

Some of the groupies from the Seattle-based finance email list that I frequent ended up dining and wining me (cidering me?) in exchange for my sage advice. It was so weird to give out money wisdom to a guy who makes almost my entire net worth in just one year. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up inspiring an annual pilgrimage of my fans into Canada, the way Buffett’s fans visit him in Omaha.

New York was as beautiful as ever: I ended up munching on more bagels than I can recall, as well as enjoying some amazing pizza. I also might have run out of museums to visit.

On my final day, I lived a futurist’s dream: traveling by bus (New York City to Buffalo), car (a Lyft to the border station), my own two feet (crossing the eerily empty bridge in Niagara Falls), train to Toronto, and finally a subway ride back home.

And then… I spent five days scouting Quebec City and checking out several rental apartments. I’m moving in a week: a small U-Haul truck filled with a few plastic crates, an eight-hour drive (far better than the 10-hour train ride!), et voila – I’ll become a Quebecois! It’s the only Canadian province with rent control, which would explain how I managed to find a 1-bedroom apartment with plenty of windows, with all the utilities and high-speed internet included, for only $523 USD. (Aka $660 CAD.) That is not a typo – that really is that good of a deal. Of course, it helps that the city is beautiful, everyone speaks a fun new language that I’ll be learning, and that there’s live music on every corner. The jury is still out on their karaoke and cider scene, of course.

All in all, this will be 10 weeks of intermittent travel. I cannot wait to leave this A/C-less studio refuge with its $1,000 penalties for setting off smoke detectors (aka, you know, cooking) and finally settling down someplace new. Someplace permanent.

That should be fun, eh.

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