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Category: Opinions

Editorial and opinion pieces on Canadian life and finance

  • The Real Cost of Living in Toronto Without a Car (I Ran the Numbers)

    By Harold Phillips | June 2026

    A few months ago I was on the phone with my dad, and he asked me (not for the first time) whether I was ever going to get a car. I live in Toronto. I take the TTC. I have a cat and a one-bedroom apartment and a partner who has also never owned a vehicle. My dad grew up in a town where a car was as basic as having shoes, and to him the absence of one is a choice that requires explanation.

    I gave him the same answer I always give: it's cheaper.

    But this time he pushed back. "Is it actually, though?" And I realized I had a general sense of the math but had never actually sat down and totalled the thing properly. So I did.

    The Numbers I Was Actually Spending

    Let me back up and show what I'm currently spending to get around Toronto without a car.

    TTC monthly passes for both me and my partner run $312 a month together ($156 each at the current adult fare). I've had an occasional back-and-forth about whether the monthly pass is really worth it versus paying per ride, and the answer is yes, easily, if you commute at all.

    Then there's the rideshare line. This is the number that surprised me when I pulled it. Over the last twelve months, I averaged about $85 a month on Uber and Lyft combined. That's not every month: some months are $40, some months are $150 when the weather is bad or the TTC decides to have one of its moments. If you want the breakdown of how I think about Uber versus Lyft, I wrote that up separately, and that comparison lives here.

    The cottage runs are the other variable. The family cottage is in Quebec's Eastern Townships, my parents' place, summer weekends, a stretch in July. The 401-to-10 drive is not something I can do on a TTC pass. We rent a car a few times a year through ZipCar or Enterprise, depending on what's available. I'd estimate we spend roughly $600 to $700 a year on car rentals for those trips. Call it $55 a month averaged out.

    Total monthly transport cost: roughly $450.

    Annualized: about $5,400.

    What a Car Would Actually Cost

    Here's where it gets genuinely uncomfortable for the pro-car argument.

    A used car in Toronto right now (nothing exciting, a 2019 Civic or equivalent) is running $18,000 to $22,000 on the used market, which has never fully recovered its pre-pandemic price sanity. If you finance that over five years, you're looking at payments in the neighbourhood of $350 to $450 a month depending on your rate.

    Then there's insurance. Ontario car insurance is its own special frustration. A 34-year-old male in Toronto, especially someone without years of continuous driving history, is looking at $200 to $280 a month minimum. Some quotes I've seen were higher. The insurers treat Toronto addresses as evidence of something terrible.

    Gas. The average Canadian drives about 20,000 kilometres a year. At Toronto-ish gas prices and a reasonably efficient car, that's around $200 a month, probably more if you're doing regular 400-series highway runs.

    Parking. A monthly parking spot in or near downtown Toronto runs $200 to $350 depending on the neighbourhood. If you're parking at your apartment in Leslieville, add that to the bill. If you're parking on the street and counting on luck, add the cost of the occasional ticket.

    The 407 gets its own line. If you're commuting by car anywhere across the top of the city, you're on the 407 regularly, and those tolls add up to a number that feels like it should be a joke but isn't. I've heard people cite $200 a month in 407 tolls as not unusual for regular users.

    Oil changes, tire rotations, tires themselves (you need winters in Ontario), licensing, and the periodic repair you didn't plan for. Budget $150 to $200 a month for maintenance and you're probably being optimistic.

    Add all of that up for a baseline Toronto car ownership scenario: payments plus insurance plus gas plus parking plus the 407 plus maintenance. You're looking at $1,100 to $1,500 a month.

    Annualized: $13,200 to $18,000. Minimum.

    The Comparison

    My transport spending: about $5,400 a year.
    Entry-level car ownership in Toronto: $13,200 to $18,000 a year.

    The gap is somewhere between $7,800 and $12,600 a year in favour of being car-free. That's not nothing. Over five years, that's $40,000 to $63,000, and that math doesn't even account for the depreciation baked into a financed vehicle losing value while you pay it off.

    I mentioned in my monthly spend breakdown that my personal spending runs around $30,000 a year after shared costs. A car payment and insurance alone would push that number up by $6,000 to $9,000. That's not a rounding error. That's real money going somewhere other than my RRSP.

    The Part Where I'm Honest About the Tradeoffs

    Here's the thing: I'm not a car-free evangelist. The math works for me because of specific conditions that don't apply to everyone.

    Leslieville is a walkable neighbourhood. I can walk to a grocery store, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, the gym. The Queen streetcar stops three blocks from my apartment. The Don Valley Trail is close enough that I run it without needing transit first. If I lived in Scarborough or Etobicoke — further from the core, less served by frequent transit — the calculus would shift. Taking an hour-long bus to reach a subway is a different life from my commute.

    The cottage run is a genuine inconvenience. Every summer I'm doing the rental car shuffle: making the booking, arranging pickup, returning the vehicle, dealing with limited weekend availability during peak July when everyone else apparently also rented a car. It works, but it adds friction that actual car owners don't have. If the cottage were mine, or if I went up every single weekend instead of three or four times a summer, I might do the math differently.

    Groceries without a car are a logistical puzzle. My No Frills haul depends on either carrying bags on the TTC (which caps how much I can carry at once) or the occasional Uber for a big run. It's fine, but I won't pretend it's as easy as driving a car to a parking lot and loading the trunk.

    Kids or a suburb change everything. If you have school runs, extracurriculars, and a detached house in Mississauga or Brampton, car-free is not a choice; it's a genuine hardship. I don't have kids, I live in the inner city, and my partner also takes the TTC. That combination is the whole reason this works.

    Winter TTC is a specific category of Toronto suffering. When the line is delayed in January and you're standing on a Broadview platform at minus fifteen, every person pulling out of a warm underground parking garage looks like they made the correct life choice. I've had months where the rideshare tab was $200 because of weather-related transit failures. That's factored into my average, but barely.

    My Actual Take

    I'm not going to pretend the car-free life is obviously correct for everyone. It isn't. The suburbs don't work without a car. Families, mostly, don't work without a car. If your job requires vehicle access or your medical situation makes transit hard, this is all irrelevant to you.

    But for me, living in Leslieville, working hybrid, taking the TTC to everything within reasonable transit distance, the car-free math is not close. I'm saving somewhere between $650 and $1,000 a month compared to what owning a car would cost in Toronto right now. Over five years of ownership, I could theoretically have funded most of a down payment with that difference, if this city's market were sane enough for that to mean anything.

    The pressure to own a car in a city like Toronto is partly cultural, partly the assumption baked into how Canada's suburbs were designed, and partly genuine. The transit isn't always good. The weather is real. The city keeps growing in directions that make transit access worse, not better.

    But the numbers are the numbers. Honest.

    • This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different, so do your own research.

  • The Subscription Renewal Traps I Almost Missed This Year

    By Harold Phillips | June 2026

    Every quarter I sit down with a coffee and go through every recurring charge I'm paying. I've written about that process before — the quarterly audit, the $97 I found last time, the Neon situation I'm still mildly embarrassed about. The system works. But this round, the audit almost wasn't enough, because the things that nearly got me weren't the monthly charges at all.

    They were the annual ones.

    The Dangerous Ones Bill Once a Year

    Here's the thing: monthly subscriptions have a built-in detection mechanism. They show up every four weeks. You see them enough times that eventually one catches your eye when you're scrolling through your statement. The $16.99 from an app you forgot about pings your brain at least occasionally.

    Annual renewals don't do that. They land once, you're briefly aware of them, and then they disappear for eleven months. By the time they renew, you might not even remember signing up. The charge looks unfamiliar. You Google it. You think, "oh right," and move on without asking whether you actually used it enough to justify another year.

    I found three of these this quarter. Three annual renewals I had mentally filed under "handled" that were about to auto-renew, or already had.

    The first one: a cloud storage tier I'd bumped up during a project last year when I needed more space temporarily. Project finished. Storage need gone. I'd been intending to downgrade for months. The annual renewal date hit while I was travelling in March, and I missed it by four days. Full year charged.

    The second: a password manager family plan I had convinced my partner to try. They tried it, didn't like the interface, went back to their old app. I kept using it but didn't need the family tier. That annual renewal was coming up in two weeks when I caught it. Downgraded in time, saved about $40.

    The third was a software subscription for a tool I use maybe four times a year for a specific work task. Not useless, but $89 CAD/year for four uses works out to over $22 per use. I could just expense it per-use when I need it, but the subscription pricing felt cheaper when I signed up. The annual renewal is what forced me to do that math.

    Free Trials Are a Whole Other Category

    I want to separate these out because they operate differently. A free trial that converts to a paid subscription is a classic trap, and I've been caught by it before. But this year I ran into something more specific: trials that converted at a discounted rate, then raised the price six months later.

    One streaming service I signed up for last fall had a promotional first year. Fine. The follow-up email telling me the regular rate was kicking in arrived during a busy week, and I almost auto-dismissed it. The jump was from $7.99/month (introductory) to $14.99/month. That's not a "welcome to the standard price" situation. That's nearly doubling.

    I cancelled and re-signed up using a different payment method. Same account, new promotional rate. I know that's a pain. The fact that it's worth doing is the problem.

    The "Cancel by Phone" One Is Still Out There

    Look, I thought this was dying out. It's not.

    One of the services on my list (a home security monitoring add-on my partner and I set up a couple years ago) requires a phone call to cancel. Not chat. Not an online portal. A phone call, during business hours, to a retention team whose entire job is to talk you out of leaving.

    I genuinely considered just letting it renew because I didn't want to deal with the call. That's the point. That's the design. A service I was paying $18.99/month for nearly got another year out of me because the cancellation process is friction by intention.

    I made the call. It took twenty-three minutes. They offered me three different discounts and a "pause" option before they'd process the cancellation. I said no to all of them. The representative was perfectly pleasant. The architecture of the situation was not.

    If a company needs to make cancellation that hard to keep customers, they know their product doesn't justify its price at full rate. I don't know what else to conclude.

    The One I'm Keeping Anyway (Even Though It's Probably Bad Value)

    Not everything I flagged this round, I cancelled.

    There's a premium tier for a read-later app I've been paying for annually. I've done the math: the free tier would cover 90% of what I use it for. The premium features I actually use come out to maybe one or two things. The price is $45 CAD/year.

    I kept it anyway.

    Partly because I've been using the app for four years and I want them to stay in business. Partly because it genuinely is part of how I work, and the value of something that's woven into your habits is hard to quantify. Partly because $45/year is, as my partner helpfully pointed out, not worth the forty minutes I spent agonizing over it.

    I'm not anti-subscription. I'm anti-autopilot. There's a difference. A subscription you've thought about and actively chosen to keep is fine. A subscription that's still billing you because the cancellation process is designed to wear you down is a different thing entirely.

    How I Track Renewal Dates Now

    The quarterly audit catches a lot. But annual renewals only appear once, so a quarterly sweep can still miss the window for some of them. This year I added one extra step.

    For every annual subscription I keep, I create a calendar reminder seven days before the renewal date. Just a simple event: "[Service name] renews on [date]: $XX. Keep or cancel?" Seven days is enough time to decide and, if needed, to make the phone call without rushing.

    Setting these up took about twenty minutes when I added them to my system. I'll save more than that in the time I won't spend disputing charges or doing the "wait, what is this?" search on my statement.

    The seven-day window matters. Most cancellations need a few days to process. If you wait until the actual renewal date, you may already be charged for the next period. I learned this the hard way with the cloud storage situation.

    The Pattern Across All of These

    Annual timing. Introductory rates that step up after a year. Cancellation flows designed to create friction. All of these are different tactics doing the same thing: counting on the gap between when you made the decision and when the consequences hit.

    You signed up in a moment of enthusiasm or need. The renewal comes back around when that memory has faded and the mental cost of cancelling feels higher than just going along with it.

    I'm not saying companies are evil for doing this. I'm saying it's worth understanding the dynamic, because once you see it you can build systems to counter it. Calendar reminders. Annual billing in your spreadsheet, flagged separately from monthly. A twenty-minute check every time a free trial ends to ask yourself: was that actually good enough to pay for?

    The quarterly audit is still the core of my system. But the annual renewal traps needed their own layer. Now they have one.

    • This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different — do your own research.

  • What Five Years of TD Bank Fees Actually Cost Me

    By Harold Phillips | June 2026

    I didn't leave TD dramatically. There was no single moment, no letter from the branch manager, no particularly egregious fee that pushed me over. I just sat down one afternoon in early 2022 with a spreadsheet and a bank statement and started adding things up. By the time I was done, I had a number on the screen that made me feel genuinely stupid for not having done this exercise four years earlier.

    That number, roughly speaking, was somewhere north of $600. For nothing. Five years of monthly service charges, out-of-network ATM fees, the occasional overdraft, and a brief stretch where I was paying for e-Transfer sends because I hadn't bothered to find out which account tier let you do them free. Six hundred dollars to TD — in exchange for a chequing account I could have had elsewhere for zero.

    That's this article.

    The Fees, Itemized

    The main one was the monthly account fee. I was on the TD Everyday Chequing account for most of my time there, which at various points over those five years cost me between $10.95 and $16.95 a month. There's a waiver if you keep a minimum balance ($2,000 for the lower tier, more for the premium ones), which I sometimes had and sometimes didn't. During the two months I was unemployed in 2019, I definitely didn't. During stretches when I was putting money toward the RRSP I'd neglected for a decade, the balance dipped below the threshold more than once.

    The math on that is annoying. You pay a fee to avoid a fee. Keep $2,000 sitting in your chequing account doing essentially nothing, or pay $15 a month for the right to have less than $2,000 in your chequing account. It's a false choice, and it's one that mostly catches people who actually need the money. Not people with comfortable six-figure household incomes who can effortlessly park two grand and forget about it.

    I was paying the fee more months than I wasn't. Call it an average of $10 a month across the five years. That's $600 right there from the monthly fee alone.

    Then there were the ATM charges. TD has a big network and I tried to use it, but there were enough times I was somewhere without a green machine visible (a late night in a neighbourhood I didn't know, a road trip stop off the 400) where I used whatever was around. Non-TD ATMs charged me $3 to $5 per use, and TD charged me another $2 on top of that. I estimate I did this maybe twice a month on average, though it was probably higher before I got smarter about it. At $5 a pop, twenty-four times a year: $120 over five years, give or take.

    E-Transfer fees I didn't pay for long. I think I sent maybe ten paid ones before I figured out the tier situation, but it was still irritating to realize I'd been charged $1.50 per transfer to move money to a friend or pay a landlord, which is a completely normal thing Canadians do constantly. The fact that e-Transfers are now free on most plans everywhere is the minimum standard, not a feature.

    The overdraft was a one-time thing and I'm slightly embarrassed about it. A payment processed a day earlier than I expected, my account went negative by $40 for about eighteen hours, and TD charged me $5. Not the end of the world, but it's the kind of fee that exists purely to extract money from people who made a small timing mistake. The banks call it "overdraft protection." I'd call it a fee for being briefly wrong about when your rent goes through.

    The Minimum Balance Gymnastics

    Honestly, this is the part I find most indefensible when I think back on it.

    There's a whole mental game that comes with having a "free if you maintain a balance" account. You have to monitor your balance continuously. You leave money sitting idle that could theoretically be somewhere more useful, even in a basic HISA, because you're scared of triggering the monthly fee. It's not a huge cognitive load, but it's a consistent low-grade annoyance that has a real opportunity cost if you think about it carefully.

    I did the rough math once: if I'd kept that $2,000 balance in a Wealthsimple account earning even 3% in those years instead of in my TD chequing account earning 0.00%, the interest would have been meaningful. Not retirement-changing, but $120-ish over five years on that balance alone. The bank was getting the float on my money in exchange for waiving a fee on an account that shouldn't have had a fee in the first place.

    That's the part of big-bank fee structures I find genuinely hard to defend. The business model asks you to pay for the privilege of banking with them, or to give them free access to your idle cash as the cost of avoiding the fee. Either way, they win.

    The Switch

    I moved to Simplii and Wealthsimple in early 2022, and I've written more fully about both over on the blog. My Simplii review has the details on the day-to-day banking setup, and my Wealthsimple review covers the investing and cash side of that picture.

    The short version: Simplii gives me a free chequing account with unlimited transactions, free Interac e-Transfers, and no minimum balance requirement. Wealthsimple holds my TFSA and RRSP and also has a spending account I use for some purchases. Between the two of them I have everything TD gave me plus actual interest on my savings, and the annual cost is zero dollars in account fees.

    The switch was not complicated. I moved my direct deposit, updated my pre-authorized payments one by one over about two weeks, and closed the TD account. My partner, who has been watching my "optimization phases" since at least 2019, said it was the least annoying one I'd done, which I'm choosing to take as a compliment.

    The Other Side of This

    Here's the thing: I don't think TD is useless for everyone. I don't, actually.

    Big banks have physical branches, and that matters for certain people. If you're new to Canada and trying to establish credit and banking relationships, walking into a branch and talking to a human being is sometimes worth paying for. If you're a small business owner who handles cash regularly, you need somewhere to deposit it, and the online-only banks don't do that. If you're applying for a mortgage and you've had a twenty-year relationship with your bank, that relationship can have real value in ways that are harder to put in a spreadsheet.

    There are also people for whom having everything under one roof (chequing, savings, RRSP, mortgage, credit card) is genuinely worth the monthly fee because the convenience and simplicity matters to them. I'm not going to tell those people they're wrong.

    But that's a pretty specific group of people. For someone like me in 2017 (renting an apartment, TTC commuter, no complex banking needs, doing occasional e-Transfers to split bills), there was nothing TD offered that justified what I was paying. I was paying premium prices for the default option I'd chosen because I walked into a branch near campus when I was nineteen.

    That's not a reasonable basis for a financial relationship — and it's one I think a lot of Canadians are in.

    What I Think About Now When I Think About This

    The five-year total I came up with, somewhere around $600, isn't a life-altering number. I want to be honest about that. Six hundred dollars over five years is $10 a month, and there are bigger financial leaks in most people's lives than a $10 monthly bank fee.

    But it's the principle that bothers me more than the dollar amount. The big banks in this country earn billions of dollars a year in profit. They charge fees that are, in a lot of cases, not justified by any particular service you're receiving. They're just the cost of the default, the thing you pay because you haven't gotten around to looking at alternatives. And the alternatives, in 2026, are genuinely good. Simplii has been around for years. Wealthsimple has a full suite of products now. A comparison like Simplii vs Tangerine shows you the actual differences if you want to read the fine print.

    The banks count on inertia. Most people don't switch because switching feels complicated, and because no one wants to spend an afternoon updating direct deposit and pre-authorized payments. I understand that. I was that person for five years.

    But the switching cost is a few hours, one time. The fee savings are every month, indefinitely.

    Look, I don't think you're an idiot if you still bank at TD or RBC or any of the Big Five. These are genuinely easy defaults to fall into, especially if you've been with them since student banking. I'm not here to tell you that you're a fool for not having done this analysis already.

    I'm here to tell you what I found when I actually did it, and what I did about it.

    • This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Banking fees, account structures, and available alternatives change over time, so do your own research before switching providers.

  • Eating at Home in Toronto Saves Money — But Not as Much as It Used To

    By Harold Phillips | April 25, 2026

    Last verified: June 2026

    Last November I spent $87 at No Frills for what I'd have spent $55 on two years earlier. Same items, roughly. Chicken thighs, eggs, Greek yogurt, some vegetables, lentils. I stood at the self-checkout doing the math in my head, and the math wasn't comforting.

    Here's my position: home cooking is still the right call in Toronto. The gap between cooking at home and eating out is real and it's significant. But I'm tired of hearing "just cook at home" delivered like it's a revelation, like groceries haven't gone up 25% in three years, and like most people aren't already trying.

    The Numbers Have Shifted

    Let me be specific. In 2023, my partner and I averaged about $95 a week on groceries. We shop at No Frills, sometimes Freshco if there's a better deal on protein. We're not buying organic everything, we're not buying pre-cut vegetables or fancy snacks. High protein, whole foods, Sunday meal prep. We eat well but we eat deliberately.

    By late 2025, the same shopping pattern was running closer to $130. That's a 37% increase over roughly two years on what I'd describe as a fairly optimized grocery cart. I wasn't buying more. I wasn't shopping differently.

    Chicken thighs went from about $7/kg to over $11. Eggs went from $3.99 to $5.49 on a normal week, higher during the avian flu periods. Greek yogurt (the big tub at Kirkland from Costco) is up almost a dollar. I'm not saying anything here that any Canadian with a grocery receipt doesn't already know. But I want to put actual numbers to it because "just cook at home" gets thrown around like it's still 2018. As of mid-2026, the tariff uncertainty affecting imported produce and some packaged goods has added another layer of unpredictability to the weekly shop — prices that seemed to stabilize earlier this year have started creeping again at the shelf level.

    Here's the Thing

    The advice is still correct. Cooking at home in Toronto is still significantly cheaper than eating out. A restaurant lunch in this city is $18-22 now if you're eating somewhere that isn't a food court. Dinner for two at a casual sit-down place (not fine dining, just a normal Tuesday dinner) is $80-100 after tip and drinks. That's a week of groceries for my partner and me. The math still works.

    But "it's cheaper to cook at home" has started to function as a conversation-stopper. Someone says grocery prices are brutal and someone else says "well, eating out is even worse." That's technically true. It also flattens the real question, which is: how do you actually eat affordably at home in 2026 Toronto — not in theory, but in practice?

    My answer is that you have to be specific. Not just "cook more" but which meals, which proteins, which stores. The generic advice doesn't hold up anymore. The margin used to be wide enough to absorb casual grocery shopping. It isn't now.

    What I Actually Do

    I meal prep on Sundays. Not because I read a fitness article about it, but because without it I make bad decisions on Tuesday night when I'm tired and every instinct says to order something.

    My weekly shop hits No Frills and occasionally Costco for things that make sense in bulk: olive oil, canned tomatoes, Greek yogurt, oats. Protein is the biggest cost lever in my cart. I train four times a week and I've done the actual math on hitting ~180g protein daily through food. At current Toronto prices, that's roughly $9-11 a day in protein alone: chicken, eggs, cottage cheese, legumes. If I were leaning on protein powder, it'd be significantly more. Protein powder is just expensive food. Eggs are cheaper per gram. I've run this comparison many times and the conclusion hasn't changed.

    My total food spend, including the Costco trip, runs about $500-550/month for two people. That's roughly $8-9/person/day.

    A lunch at a Queen Street restaurant is $20 before tax.

    What I've Noticed at No Frills

    The discount grocery model has held up better than I expected. Loblaws (No Frills' parent company, which I still have feelings about after the pricing scrutiny in 2023) charges noticeably more for identical items. I've done spot comparisons. The difference on a full cart is not trivial: usually $15-25 less at No Frills on an equivalent shop. I haven't re-run this comparison recently, so I can't say whether their commitments on pricing have changed things, but historically, consistently, No Frills wins.

    The trade-offs are real. Produce quality is inconsistent. You're going to hit a week where they're out of the thing you specifically needed. The hours aren't always convenient. I accept all of that.

    One thing that actually helped, for a stretch: Goodfood. My family (through the cottage in the Eastern Townships) had been using it for years before I tried it. The value case isn't what I expected. It's not cheaper than groceries. But the waste reduction matters. When I was buying full bunches of cilantro for one recipe and throwing out three-quarters, I was losing money I wasn't counting. The portioned ingredients fixed that. I used it for about four months, found it genuinely useful for breaking out of my rotation ruts, then drifted back to straight grocery shopping because the volume didn't work for my training diet. I don't think it's a ripoff. I think the framing matters a lot.

    The Other Side

    I've heard the argument that cooking at home is only "cheap" if you don't value your time. The prep, the grocery run, the dishes: if you're billing out at some professional hourly rate, spending that time cooking is supposedly irrational.

    Honestly, I think this argument mostly exists to justify expensive habits. Most people are not actually billing out their Tuesday evenings. And even if time has real value, the alternative isn't "order something efficient and nutritious." The alternative is usually a $22 bowl of pasta from an app, plus a $6 delivery fee, plus a 20% tip, for something that took someone ten minutes to prepare. The time math doesn't close.

    The stronger version of the argument is about mental load: planning meals, tracking what's in the fridge, making decisions about food when you're already depleted. That's real. My Sunday prep habit exists specifically to reduce how many decisions I have to make during the week. If you're in a season where bandwidth is genuinely scarce, I'm not going to tell you to cook from scratch every night.

    But the solution to decision fatigue isn't "just order everything." It's reducing the number of decisions. A short rotation of reliable meals, a consistent grocery list, batch cooking on a day you have the energy. That's how you get the cost benefit without the daily overhead.

    Where This Leaves Us

    I eat out. My partner and I have two or three places in Leslieville we rotate through, and we go when we want to without guilt-tripping ourselves. Beans has no opinion on this.

    What I push back on is the idea that home cooking is automatically the smart financial move, that you can just "start cooking more" and watch your grocery bill settle under $200 a month. In Toronto in 2026, it doesn't work that way. You have to know where to shop. You have to have a rough plan. You have to be willing to eat the same lunch three days running.

    The $500-550/month my partner and I spend is something I think about and track. I've run the comparison against what we'd spend eating out even some of the time. The savings over a year are in the thousands of dollars.

    But it takes something to achieve. I'd rather be honest about that than pretend meal prep is effortless and groceries are cheap.

    They're cheaper. Not cheap.

    This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different, so do your own research.

  • I Cut $97/Month in Subscriptions Last Week. Here’s How They Got In.

    By Harold Phillips | June 2026

    Last verified: June 2026

    It started with a $16.99 charge I didn't recognize.

    I was looking at my Wealthsimple statement (I do this monthly, which I know makes me sound insufferable) and there it was. Neon, I thought. But I cancelled Neon. I was pretty sure I cancelled Neon. I checked my email. There was a cancellation confirmation from… November 2024. And then a re-subscription confirmation from three weeks later. I had signed up again because they had a "come back" offer. I had forgotten about it completely. Seventeen months of $16.99.

    That's $288.83 I paid for a service I used maybe four times.

    This happens. This is the thing I keep trying to explain to people who think subscription audits are obsessive or weird. It's not about the individual subscription. It's about the accumulation — the slow drift of monthly charges that each feel too small to bother cancelling, until suddenly you're $97/month lighter than you should be.

    The Problem with "Just $X a Month"

    The pricing is the manipulation. Not in some sinister, intentional way (well, maybe a little intentional), but $16.99/month sounds like nothing. $8.99 sounds like nothing. $4.99 sounds like a rounding error. Your brain doesn't add these up automatically. Mine doesn't. And companies know this.

    There's actual research on this. One study found people underestimate their monthly subscription spending by an average of 200%. I believe it, because I underestimate mine every quarter, and I run a literal spreadsheet. Imagine what happens if you're not tracking at all.

    The Canadian context makes this worse, not better. Prices here frequently differ from US prices, and not in our favour. Services that cost $10 USD quietly charge $14-16 CAD, using some exchange rate that was set during the Harper government and hasn't been revisited since. You sign up during a promotional period, the rate bumps after three months, and unless you're watching your statements closely, you just absorb it. In 2026, a wave of popular streaming and productivity services has rolled out another round of price increases, making the gap between what Canadians pay and what Americans pay even wider than it was a year ago — which makes the audit habit more important, not less.

    What I Cut This Time

    Quarterly audit, Q1 2026. I go through every recurring charge in my accounts: Wealthsimple chequing, my credit card, and the joint account I have with my partner for shared expenses. I flag anything that's renewed in the last 90 days and ask myself: did I actively use this?

    The Neon thing was the most embarrassing find, but not the only one.

    There was a backup storage subscription at $9.99/month I set up two laptops ago. The files it was backing up no longer exist. There was a meditation app my partner and I both downloaded during a stressful week in January, $12.99/month, neither of us had opened it in six weeks. There was a newsletter subscription that had bundled in some "bonus archive access" for $4/month extra that I definitely did not intend to enable. And there was a VPN service I use maybe twice a year for travel that I'd switched from annual billing to monthly at some point, which tripled the effective cost.

    Total: $97.96/month. Call it $1,175/year.

    That's not nothing. That's a chunk of an RRSP contribution. That's a cheap flight somewhere. That's a lot of No Frills hauls.

    My Take: The Opt-Out Model Is Working Exactly As Intended

    I want to be clear that I'm not blaming myself for this. I mean, a little. I did re-subscribe to Neon. But the architecture of subscription services is specifically designed to reduce friction on sign-up and maximize friction on cancellation. Free trials that require a credit card. Cancellation flows that are seven screens deep. Re-engagement emails with "we want you back" deals. Annual plan upsells that feel cheaper per month until you do the math.

    The meditation app cancellation took me through a flow that asked me three separate times whether I was sure, showed me data about how many days I'd used it, and offered me a three-month discount before it would actually let me leave. Honest question: what does that tell you about how they feel about their product? If it was genuinely valuable, they wouldn't need to hold the door shut.

    The VPN situation is on me — I switched to monthly intentionally and forgot to switch back. But the Neon re-subscription? That "come back" offer email was timed to catch me on a Saturday morning when I was half-awake and vaguely remembered liking the service. It worked perfectly. I am not smarter than their retention team. I've accepted this.

    The Other Side

    The counterargument is that subscriptions are still a good deal compared to what they replaced. And that's true. Netflix at $20-something a month beats renting DVDs. Spotify beats buying albums. Whatever productivity app you're paying for is probably cheaper than the software licence it replaced. I'm not saying subscription pricing is inherently evil.

    But that argument applies to subscriptions you use. It doesn't apply to seventeen months of Neon you forgot you had.

    The other thing people say is: "I'd rather just be flexible and pay monthly than commit to a year." I get it. But the math almost never works out. Annual pricing on something you use is better. Monthly pricing on something you're "just trying" is a leak waiting to happen. The question is whether you're honest with yourself about which category you're in.

    My partner thinks I'm too rigid about this. They're probably right that I've cancelled a couple of things I ended up re-subscribing to later, which did cost me more. The Neon situation being Exhibit A. But I'd rather audit too aggressively and occasionally re-subscribe than let things drift unchecked. That's just my read on the tradeoff.

    What Actually Works

    I keep a spreadsheet. I know. But it's not complicated. It's a list of service, monthly cost, last used date, and billing date. I update it when I add something new. Four times a year I go through it and ask the "last used date" question honestly.

    The other thing I do: I use a separate credit card for subscriptions. Not for any sophisticated reason, just because it makes the monthly statement easier to audit. Everything on that card is recurring. If I see something I don't recognize, it's new or I forgot.

    A few people have asked me about virtual credit cards for trials, which is a real technique. The idea is you use a card number that expires or caps at a certain amount, so you can't be charged after the trial ends. Honest answer: I haven't needed to go that far. The spreadsheet catches it. But I understand the appeal, especially if you sign up for a lot of things.

    The most important habit is the pause before subscribing. Not a long one, just enough to ask: will I actually use this, and what's the cancellation process? If the answer to the second question is "unclear," that's information.

    Where This Leaves Me

    Ninety-seven dollars a month is back in my pocket. That's not a win, exactly. It's a recovery. I let those charges accumulate over the quarter, and the audit found them. The system worked. But the system only works because I run it.

    I think most people know, vaguely, that they're overpaying for subscriptions. It's one of those things that sits in the back of your head alongside "I should check my RRSP" and "I should probably call my dentist." It doesn't feel urgent until you actually sit down and look.

    Here's the thing: the audit takes about 45 minutes. Once a quarter. I do it with a coffee on a Sunday morning, same day I do my quarterly savings check. The first time I did it, I cut almost $200/month. That number has gotten smaller as I've gotten better at catching things early. But it's never been zero.

    It's never been zero.

    This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different, so do your own research.

  • You’re Already Doing the Work. You’re Just Not Getting Paid for It.

    By Harold Phillips | April 25, 2026

    There's a company making money off you right now that you've never heard of. You haven't bought anything from them, you've never seen their ad, and you're not on their payroll. But you've sent them customers. Multiple times, probably. And they haven't paid you a cent.

    The company is whatever you recommended to a friend last week. The phone plan you told your coworker about. The meal kit you mentioned to your sister. The bank you suggested when they said they were sick of fees. Every time you said "honestly, I've been really happy with it" — that's a referral. That's marketing. That's work the company's ad budget didn't have to cover. And you did it for free.

    This is the thing that bothered me when I finally saw it clearly. Not in a conspiracy-theory way (companies are allowed to have customers who recommend them). But there's a version of this where you get something for it, and most people don't bother. That's the gap referral links close. That's what I mean when I say "referral maxxing." It's not a scheme. It's not a side hustle. It's just… closing the loop on a transaction that was already happening.

    The Problem / The Situation

    Word of mouth is the most valuable marketing in existence. It always has been. You trust a recommendation from a friend more than you trust an ad, more than you trust a review on a company's own website, more than you trust the influencer they paid. Companies know this. They have entire departments dedicated to measuring "net promoter scores," a metric that basically asks: how likely are you to tell your friends about us?

    They are not measuring this because they find it interesting. They are measuring it because it moves product.

    And the good ones (the ones who figured this out a while back) built referral programs to reward the people doing the recommending. Sign up through this link and your friend gets $25, you get $25. It's a fractional share of what they'd otherwise spend on acquiring that customer. It's cheaper for them than a Facebook ad. It's more effective, too.

    So the programs exist. They're just weirdly underused. If anything, that gap has only gotten more visible heading into 2026, as more Canadian telecoms, banks, and subscription services have rolled out referral perks of their own — yet most people still don't bother attaching a code to a recommendation they were making anyway.

    Part of that is embarrassment, I think. Sharing a referral link feels transactional in a way that just recommending something doesn't. Like you're admitting you have a financial interest, which, sure, you do. But so does the company when they run an ad. The difference is that your friend also gets a discount. Everyone actually benefits.

    The other part is that most people just… don't think about it. They recommend the thing and move on. The referral link is an extra step that requires some minimal amount of setup. And minimal friction, it turns out, is enough to stop most people.

    My Take

    Here's the thing. I've been recommending things my entire adult life. You probably have too. And for most of that time, I got nothing for it, not that I was expecting anything. That's not why you tell a friend about a good phone plan.

    But I started paying attention around 2023. I'd been using Fizz for my mobile plan and Oxio for internet for a couple of years at that point, and I mentioned both of them regularly to people who complained about their Rogers or Bell bills. At some point I checked my accounts. Over 125 referrals on Fizz, over 200 on Oxio. Years of free phone and internet, accumulated almost entirely by accident, just by genuinely liking services that happened to have referral programs.

    I hadn't run a campaign. I hadn't built a following. I just talked about what I was using, the same way I always had, but with a code attached.

    That's when I started thinking of referral links differently. Not as a hustle. As a closing mechanism. Something that converts a recommendation — which was going to happen anyway — into something tangible.

    What I've Seen / What I Did

    The clearest proof I have is a service called WeCook.

    A few years back, I signed up for WeCook, a Canadian meal kit company. They had a referral program, and I found creative ways to get my code in front of people who might genuinely want it. Not aggressively. Not deceptively. Just thoughtfully, and consistently, over a long period of time.

    The credits stacked. Then they stacked more. Eventually my referral value crossed $2,000.

    Then one week the credits stopped coming. In my next delivery box (printed on actual paper, tucked in with the meal kits) there was a notice. WeCook had redesigned their referral program. Effective immediately, there was a $1,000 lifetime cap.

    I am fairly certain I am the reason that cap exists.

    I want to be clear about something: I didn't exploit anything. I didn't run bots. I didn't do anything I'd be embarrassed to describe. I just got the code in front of people who were looking for exactly what WeCook was offering, and the math went further than they had anticipated. The lesson isn't "go break referral programs." The lesson is that creative distribution of a referral link, done consistently, over time, produces real value. Two thousand dollars in meal kit credits is real. That happened.

    It's the same mechanism, just further along the curve. You recommend something once: you get a small reward, if you get anything. You make it a habit: it adds up. You get strategic about the habit: it becomes something else entirely.

    The Other Side

    I understand the objections. The biggest one is: "you only recommend things because you get paid, so your recommendations aren't trustworthy."

    Fair. That's a real risk. If I started recommending services I didn't use, or worse, ones I thought were actually bad, for the sake of a referral payout, yes, that would undermine everything. No one should take that version of this seriously.

    But that's a false binary. The alternative being proposed is that I keep recommending things for free, which somehow makes the recommendations more trustworthy? I'm not sure that follows. I recommended Fizz and Oxio long before I understood their referral programs. My opinion of them hasn't changed since. The code didn't purchase my enthusiasm. It just gave me a reason to be deliberate about how I shared it.

    The other objection I hear is that it's tacky. Like mentioning a referral link is crude in a way that just recommending something isn't.

    Honestly, I don't find this compelling. If the person I'm recommending the service to gets a discount, and I get a small credit, and the company acquires a customer they wanted, where's the harm? The only party with a reason to object is the company, and they built the program on purpose.

    The "tacky" objection, when I trace it back, usually comes from discomfort with being transparent about a financial interest. But opacity isn't honesty. Disclosure is. There's more integrity in saying "I use this, I like it, and yes, I get a small reward if you sign up" than in pretending the recommendation is purely altruistic.

    Where This Leaves Us

    I'm not telling you to start a blog. I'm not telling you to obsess over referral codes or track your lifetime totals in a spreadsheet. (I do track mine in a spreadsheet. That's a me problem.)

    What I'm saying is simpler than that: if you already recommend things to people (and you do, because everyone does), there is a version of that where the recommendation converts into something. A month of free internet. Groceries for a week. A few dollars into your TFSA. Real money, for a transaction that was going to happen anyway.

    The recommendation was happening either way. The only question is whether you attach a code to it.

    You were already doing the work. You were just doing it for free.

    This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different, so do your own research. Last verified: August 2026.

  • Why Is Canadian Internet This Expensive? (Spoiler: It’s Not Because of Geography)

    By Harold Phillips | March 2026

    Last verified: August 2026.

    Last November, I was helping my cousin set up internet at her new apartment in Mississauga. She'd just moved from Berlin, where she'd been paying €25 a month for symmetrical gigabit fibre. We pulled up Rogers and Bell together. I watched her face cycle through confusion, then disbelief, then that flat look people get when they've decided to just accept something terrible. We found her a TekSavvy plan at $75 a month for 500 Mbps. She called it "not terrible." I tried to explain that, for Canada, it actually wasn't.

    Canadian internet is expensive. Not "slightly more than ideal" expensive. Genuinely, embarrassingly, internationally-documented expensive. We pay more per megabit than most of the developed world, we get less infrastructure investment than comparable countries, and every few years there's a regulatory hearing that generates press releases and changes almost nothing. This has been going on for decades. At some point, "the market will fix it" stops being optimism and starts being a punchline.

    The Problem

    We have three big providers — Rogers, Bell, and Telus — who collectively control the vast majority of the country's internet infrastructure. They built those networks decades ago, often with public subsidies and spectrum licences that cost a fraction of what they'd cost today. That infrastructure is now the moat. If you want to offer internet to Canadians, you either own a piece of that infrastructure or you lease it from someone who does.

    The CRTC is supposed to regulate that lease process. The theory is that smaller independent ISPs can buy wholesale access to the Big Three's networks and offer competitive prices. TekSavvy, Distributel, Vmedia. That's the model. And it works, sort of, in the sense that you can pay less by using an indie ISP than by going direct to Rogers or Bell. But the wholesale rates are set by the CRTC, and the CRTC has spent years flip-flopping on what those rates should actually be.

    In 2019, the CRTC issued lower wholesale rates that would have made independent ISPs meaningfully cheaper. Then, in 2021, they reversed course. The big providers appealed, the government sent it back for review, and the whole thing dragged on. The indie ISPs that had expanded based on the 2019 rates had to walk back pricing. Some didn't survive.

    That's the problem in a sentence: the people who set the rules keep changing the rules in ways that favour the people who own the infrastructure.

    My Take

    Here's the thing. I don't actually buy the "Canada is big and cold and infrastructure is expensive" argument. Not fully.

    Yes, geographic density matters. Stringing fibre to 50 farms spread across 200 kilometres of northern Ontario is harder than wiring a European city. I get that. But when you look at countries like Australia, which has similar density challenges and a similar history of privatised telecoms, they managed to build a national broadband network with mandatory wholesale access. It wasn't perfect (the NBN rollout had real problems) but the political will existed to treat internet as infrastructure. Here, it doesn't.

    The density argument also falls apart when you look at Canadian cities. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. These are dense, urban markets. Rogers and Bell have no geography excuse in the 416. And yet here we are, paying $115 a month for 1 Gbps when you can get that for a fraction of the cost in comparable US cities, let alone European ones.

    I'll be real with you: I think this is a regulatory capture story dressed up as a geography story. The Big Three have spent decades and considerable money making sure the rules favour their position. That's not a conspiracy. It's just how large incumbents work. They hire the same people who used to work at the CRTC. They fund the think tanks. They commission the economic reports that say wholesale access would "reduce network investment." The independent research mostly says the opposite. But that research doesn't have a lobbying budget.

    What I've Seen

    I was paying $89 a month to Rogers for 500 Mbps until late 2022. I'd been on that plan for three years. Hadn't checked prices in a while. Hadn't thought about it.

    Then one Sunday I got one of those "your bill is increasing by $5 next month" emails. I opened it, looked at my bill, and realized I'd been on autopilot so long I'd just assumed this was what internet cost. I spent about an hour comparing plans and switched to TekSavvy at $60 a month for the same speed. My partner thought I was overreacting when I was visibly annoyed about it ("it's $29 a month, Harold") but that's $348 a year. And I'd already been overpaying for three years. Do that math and it's over a thousand dollars in fees for what, exactly. The right to pay Rogers directly.

    The switch itself was completely uneventful. The speeds are identical. TekSavvy uses Rogers infrastructure in Toronto anyway. I'm literally on the same physical network. The only thing that changed is I'm not paying Rogers' margin on top of the wholesale cost.

    That's the part that actually gets to me. There's nothing special about Rogers internet. They didn't build a better network for residential customers — they built the network and then charged whatever they wanted because there wasn't meaningful competition. When a regulated wholesale option forced prices down, they appealed the decision. And they mostly won.

    The Other Side

    The counterargument you'll hear from the Big Three (and from some economists who study telecoms) is that capping wholesale rates reduces the incentive to invest in new infrastructure. If Rogers knows that any fibre it builds can immediately be resold by TekSavvy at regulated rates, why build more?

    It's a real tension. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.

    But I'd push back on a few things. First, the Big Three haven't historically underinvested in infrastructure when required to provide wholesale access. They've continued to expand networks because they need to remain competitive in the business and enterprise markets regardless of what happens in residential. Second, in countries with strong wholesale access mandates, you tend to see more infrastructure investment over the long run, not less, because competition forces everyone to keep up.

    And third, honestly, these are not companies that need our sympathy. Rogers posted billions in profit in 2024. Bell has returned enormous value to shareholders while cutting thousands of jobs. Telus keeps raising residential prices while expanding into agriculture tech and home security. These aren't scrappy startups looking for capital to build out their networks. They're entrenched incumbents protecting margin.

    I'm not saying the solution is simple. I'm saying "but what about their investment incentives" is not a persuasive reason to keep paying $115 a month for internet that costs half that in comparable markets.

    Where This Leaves Us

    My cousin is still on TekSavvy. She's stopped complaining about the price. Or rather, she's moved on to asking me about the Rogers-Shaw merger and what it means for competition in Ontario long-term, which is a longer conversation than I want to have on a weeknight.

    Practically speaking: if you're on a plan from one of the Big Three, check what the indie ISPs in your area are charging. TekSavvy, Vmedia, Distributel: availability depends on where you live, but in most Ontario and Quebec markets there's something. You'll often get the same speeds on the same physical infrastructure for meaningfully less. The savings aren't dramatic in every case, but $29 a month adds up, and you're not getting anything extra by paying it to Rogers.

    The systemic problem isn't going anywhere fast. The CRTC will keep being a battleground. The Big Three will keep funding the argument that they need protection to invest in Canada's future. The government will keep announcing broadband strategies that take longer to ship than promised. That's still true heading into the back half of 2026 — the latest wholesale rate proceeding remains open, and nothing new has taken effect for the independent ISPs competing against Rogers, Bell, and Telus. One shift worth flagging as of this update: fixed wireless and satellite options are becoming a more credible fallback in areas where the Big Three have historically faced zero competition, which quietly raises the stakes for wholesale reform even if it hasn't moved pricing yet.

    I don't have a policy prescription here. I'm an IT project manager, not a regulator. But I do know that "this is just how things are in Canada" gets said about a lot of things that used to be different and could be different again. The internet is infrastructure. Most of us treat it that way in practice. We'd sooner give up cable TV than our home connection. It's past time the policy caught up.

    It just hasn't yet.

    This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience and observations. Telecom pricing, ISP availability, and regulatory decisions change frequently, so do your own research before switching providers.

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  • My Actual Monthly Budget Living in Toronto in 2026 (It’s Not What You’ve Read)

    By Harold Phillips | March 2026

    Every few months, a journalist or a Reddit thread publishes a "can you afford to live in Toronto?" piece and the number is always either terrifying or suspiciously manageable depending on what the author is trying to prove. My partner reads them and shows me the ones that make me look either irresponsible or delusional. Either way I lose. So I stopped reading them and started writing my own.

    Here's what I actually spend in a month. Real numbers from a spreadsheet I've been keeping since 2021. Not a theoretical budget, not a lifestyle blog approximation. The number is higher than I expected when I first added it up, and it's higher now than it was three years ago. But it's not the apocalyptic figure the hot-take articles keep citing. It's just money going somewhere.

    The Problem With Toronto Affordability Takes

    There's a specific kind of content I've come to hate. It usually goes one of two ways.

    The first version is the "I live in Toronto on $27,000 a year and here's how I do it" story, which always involves eating rice six days a week, two roommates in a Scarborough apartment, and framing financial precarity as a charming personality quirk.

    The second version is the "$200,000 salary and I still can't afford a house" piece. Technically true, but doing a lot of work to make a six-figure income sound like victimhood.

    Neither of these is where most people actually are. I'm somewhere in the middle: comfortably renting, taking the TTC, shopping at No Frills, not suffering, and I never see my life reflected in those pieces. So I started writing it down myself.

    My Take

    The thesis I've landed on after years of tracking this: Toronto is genuinely expensive, but the discourse around it is almost useless for people who aren't at either extreme. The real cost of living here depends almost entirely on whether you're splitting expenses with someone, and most of the hot takes conveniently skip that part.

    I'll be real with you: I would not be living in Leslieville on my income alone. Not comfortably. A one-bedroom in this neighbourhood would run close to $2,500 in rent by myself, and that's before I've bought a single bag of lentils. Single renters in Toronto — especially under 35 — are dealing with a genuinely rough situation that couples and multi-person households don't fully experience. My numbers look manageable because there are two incomes in this apartment.

    That's not a budgeting tip. It's a structural reality most Toronto affordability content glosses over.

    The Actual Numbers

    My partner and I rent a one-bedroom in Leslieville. We've been here since 2022. Our rent is $2,350 a month. Not a steal for this neighbourhood in 2026, but our landlord hasn't gone full AGI on us yet, which apparently counts as luck these days.

    Here's what a typical month looks like for our household:

    Category Monthly
    Rent $2,350
    Groceries (No Frills, mostly) $460
    TTC (monthly passes, both of us) $312
    Internet (Oxio) $54
    Phone plans (both, Fizz MVNOs) $62
    Utilities (hydro + water) $95
    Subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify, misc.) $58
    Eating out / coffee $280
    Household / cleaning / random $120
    Total $3,791

    My share of shared expenses comes to roughly $1,900 a month. Add personal spending (clothes, whatever I'm researching for three weeks before I buy, the occasional Uber when the TTC has one of its moments) and I'm usually between $2,400 and $2,700 for the month.

    Annualized, my personal spend is around $30,000 to $32,000. That's before RRSP contributions and TFSA deposits. After all of that, it's tight, but it works.

    What I've Actually Done About It

    The non-rent stuff is where I've put most of my energy, because it's the only category I can actually control.

    Switching to Fizz saved me around $50 a month compared to Freedom Mobile, and Freedom was already cheaper than Rogers, Bell, or Telus by a significant margin. Switching to Oxio for home internet saved another $30 from whatever Bell was extracting previously. That's $80 a month, nearly $1,000 a year, from refusing to pay for a logo on a bill.

    Groceries are No Frills and mostly meal-prepped. Dal, roasted vegetables, rice, a curry on Sundays. My partner is the better cook. Beans mostly eats better than we do, which is probably a comment on our priorities.

    The eating-out line is where things slip. $280 a month sounds like a lot for someone who lectures himself about telecom fees, and it is. But I'm not cutting it. That's birthday dinners and bad weeks and the coffee I pick up on the way to the TTC because I left the house too late to make one. That number is real and it's staying.

    The subscriptions audit I do every few months genuinely helps. I found $23 worth of monthly charges last autumn that I couldn't immediately identify. Cancelled two of them. The third turned out to be something my partner was actively using, which I heard about for a while.

    The Other Side

    The counterargument to "here's what I spend" pieces is that they're useless. Everyone's situation is different, rent can double overnight with an AGI application, one medical emergency or job loss and the whole thing unravels.

    That's fair. These numbers only work under specific conditions: two stable incomes, good health, stable rent, no car, no kids. Change any of those variables and the math shifts fast. I'm not presenting my spreadsheet as a blueprint for anyone.

    The other thing people say is "well, you should be buying, not renting." My partner and I have done that math more than once. I'm genuinely not sure we've modelled it correctly (real estate involves a lot of assumptions about appreciation rates and interest rates that I can't predict) but based on what I've worked out, buying in Toronto right now is not obviously better than renting at our income level. You have to gut the TFSA for a down payment, carry costs at current rates aren't trivial, and the opportunity cost of not investing the difference is real. Maybe I'm wrong. The "renting is throwing money away" crowd never seems to account for what you're throwing away to own.

    I'll revisit that math every year. Haven't changed my mind yet.

    Where This Leaves Us

    I don't have a fix for Toronto's housing market. Nobody does, and I'm suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.

    What I can say is that $30,000 a year in personal spending is my actual number. The cost of being a renter with a partner and a cat in this city in 2026. It's not a triumph of frugality. It's not a cautionary tale. It's just what comfortable looks like here. And comfortable, for me, means No Frills groceries, an MVNO phone plan, and not auditing every coffee.

    The part that still gets me is rent. Not because $2,350 is objectively ruinous (it's not) but because it went up $175 last year and the year before that, and there's no reason to believe that stops. Every other line item in that budget I can chip away at. Rent is the variable I can't touch, and every year it takes a bigger percentage of the total.

    That's the actual Toronto affordability story. Not the $200,000 victim narrative. Not the ramen-and-roommates hustle piece. Just: the rent is too high, the rest is manageable if you're not doing it alone, and most of what you read about this city is designed to make you feel either panicked or impressed.

    Neither of those feelings is useful.

    This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different, so do your own research.