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Category: Personal

Personal blog posts, life updates, and stories

  • Why I Keep a Bigger Emergency Fund After Being Laid Off

    By Harold Phillips | June 2026

    The startup folded on a Tuesday in November.

    I remember that detail because November in Toronto has a specific quality of grey that makes everything feel more final than it is. Cold but not yet winter. Dead leaves stuck to wet pavement. The kind of month where you get bad news and it stays with you longer than it deserves to.

    Our CEO called a company-wide meeting at 10 AM, which in a 22-person startup is the kind of meeting everyone recognizes immediately as not being a routine check-in. He was good about it, actually. Straightforward. Funding had dried up. The runway was gone. We had two weeks of pay coming, severance if the lawyers allowed it, references from anyone who wanted them. He thanked us. People cried. I didn't, but I thought about it on the subway home.

    I was 27.

    What I hadn't fully reckoned with (and I'm slightly embarrassed about this in retrospect) was how thin my savings were. I'd been at the startup for about two years by then, long enough to feel settled but not long enough to have built much of a cushion. I was paying rent in a shared apartment east of the Danforth, I had a few hundred bucks in a savings account, and I had my TFSA with maybe $4,000 in it that I'd been meaning to do something intentional with for two years. That was it. That was the whole buffer.

    The advice you always hear is "three to six months of expenses." I'd heard it. I'd nodded at it. I'd never actually run the math on what three months of my expenses actually came to.

    I ran the math that Tuesday afternoon.

    It was more than I had.

    What two months of unemployment actually looks like

    I was unemployed from that November until mid-January. About two months, give or take. On paper, that's a short gap. In practice, job-searching through December in tech is a miserable experience because approximately no one is making hiring decisions between mid-December and the second week of January. You're sending applications into silence. You're having coffee meetings with people who genuinely want to help but are themselves wrapped up in Q4 chaos. You're doing everything right and getting nothing back, and the calendar is the enemy.

    I spent money I didn't have. Not irresponsibly. I wasn't going out or buying things I didn't need. I was just paying rent and eating and taking the TTC to whatever informational interview I'd managed to schedule. Normal life expenses, with no income coming in. My savings account hit zero before the New Year. I put groceries on my credit card more than once. I borrowed $500 from my parents in January and felt genuinely awful about it. Not because they made me feel bad (they didn't), but because I'd been an adult with a career for several years and I'd somehow let myself reach a position where a two-month gap could do this to me.

    It wasn't a catastrophe. I know that. I found a contract role in late January, something to bridge things while I kept looking, and that led eventually to the job I still have now. But the feeling of watching a savings account drain in real time, that specific anxiety of doing the math in your head every time you tap your card, that didn't leave me quickly.

    Honestly, it took a couple of years before I stopped flinching at unexpected expenses.

    So when I rebuilt my finances after 2019, I didn't just follow the standard advice. The three-to-six-month range: I'm genuinely not sure it's wrong for most people. But for me, the experience of that winter made the low end of the range feel like wishful thinking. Three months sounds fine until you're job-searching through December and January and the calendar is eating a month and a half of your "timeline."

    I keep closer to eight months now. That's my actual target, and it's more than most people would say you need.

    Here's the thing: I don't think eight months is the right number for everyone. Maybe it's too conservative. My job is pretty stable, my skills are transferable, and I don't have dependants or a mortgage. Someone in a more precarious industry, or someone supporting a family, might need more. Someone with a genuinely in-demand specialty and a short typical job-search cycle might be fine with four months. I'm not trying to prescribe a number. I'm just telling you that mine is eight, and I sleep significantly better because of it, and that matters to me in a way that's hard to put a dollar value on.

    Where it actually lives

    The fund is in a HISA. Right now I use Wealthsimple's cash account, which has been paying a reasonably competitive rate compared to the big banks (I have a full review here if you want the details). It's not invested. This is a deliberate choice that I've gotten mild pushback on from people who think I'm leaving returns on the table.

    Maybe. Probably, if we're being honest about the math.

    But an emergency fund has one job: it has to be there. Immediately, no-questions-asked, no-market-timing-required, there. If your emergency fund is in an index fund and the market drops 30% the same month your company announces layoffs (and those two events are correlated, as it turns out, because recessions tend to do both at once), you've just discovered that your emergency fund was actually an investment account with a stressful exit clause.

    I'm not anti-investing. My TFSA has actual investments in it. I try to put money away every month toward actual long-term goals. I wrote about how TFSAs work from my perspective over here if you want my take on how I think about the two accounts as different tools. The short version is: my TFSA is where my invested money lives, and my emergency fund is where my "the world is falling apart" money lives, and I deliberately do not mix them.

    Keeping them separate is, for me anyway, a psychological thing as much as a financial one. When I look at my HISA balance and it reads eight months of expenses, something in my nervous system relaxes. That reaction has no rational basis beyond the winter of 2018.

    The number I actually use

    I based my target on my real monthly expenses, not some round number I found on a personal finance website. If you want to see how I calculated what a month of expenses actually looks like, I went through the whole breakdown in my spending post. That's the starting point I'd suggest if you're trying to figure out what your own number should be.

    Once you have an honest monthly number, multiply it by however many months lets you sleep. If you've never been laid off, three to four months might genuinely be enough. If you work in a cyclical industry, or you've been through a gap before, maybe you go higher. If you have a partner with stable income and your household can absorb one income dropping to zero for a few months, the math changes again.

    What I'd push back on is treating the standard advice as a ceiling rather than a floor. "Three to six months" is the starting point of the conversation, not the final answer. The personal finance industry loves presenting these round-number guidelines as though they come from somewhere authoritative, but they're just heuristics. Rough estimates of what's probably fine for most people under average circumstances. Your circumstances aren't average. Mine aren't either.

    There's one more thing I want to say about that winter, something I don't think personal finance writing talks about enough.

    The hardest part wasn't the money. It was the uncertainty. Not knowing how long it would last. Not knowing if the career I'd been building was actually portable, or whether the startup experience would read well on a resume, or whether I'd have to move back to Barrie and figure things out from there. The money was the symptom. The anxiety lived underneath it.

    Having a real cushion now doesn't eliminate that anxiety. But it changes the texture of it. It transforms "I can't afford for this to happen" into "if this happens, I have time to handle it well." That gap matters. It's the difference between reacting in a panic and making a real decision.

    I started building the fund properly in 2019. I've built it up, drawn from it a couple of times for actual emergencies (one car repair that wasn't my car but was absolutely my problem, one medical thing), and refilled it both times. It's the most boring part of my financial picture. It doesn't compound impressively. It doesn't have a referral program.

    But every November when the city turns grey and the leaves come down, I check the balance and I feel better.

    That's worth something.

    Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link — you'll always see a note about it.

  • The RRSP Mistake I Made in My Twenties

    By Harold Phillips | June 2026

    It was a completely unremarkable Tuesday night when I found out I'd been financially sleepwalking for a decade.

    My partner and I were eating dinner (something quick, leftover dal, both of us half-watching something on the laptop propped against the fruit bowl). They mentioned, between bites, what their RRSP was sitting at. Just dropped it into conversation the way you'd mention the weather or something you saw on your lunch break. Matter of fact. Not a flex, not a lesson. Just a number.

    I didn't say anything right away. I remember reaching for my phone, opening the TD app, and spending a long beat staring at a figure that was much smaller than theirs. Much smaller than it should have been for someone who'd been working full-time since 2014.

    I was 29 years old. I had been employed for six years. I had contributed to my RRSP in a technically-yes-that-happened kind of way: some money in when I felt guilty enough about not doing it, and then ignored it until the guilt resurfaced. The balance reflected exactly that strategy.

    The thing is, I knew what an RRSP was. I wasn't operating in total ignorance. I could have explained the concept to you: pre-tax contributions, tax-deferred growth, you get a refund come tax time, you pay tax on withdrawal in retirement when (theoretically) you're in a lower bracket. I understood the outline. What I didn't understand was what the numbers actually meant over time, and more importantly, I hadn't done anything meaningful with the knowledge I did have.

    Knowing and doing are genuinely different problems.

    I spent that weekend with a spreadsheet. Not a fun spreadsheet, not a project-manager-enjoying-a-clean-dataset spreadsheet. The grim kind. I pulled together my contribution history, my current balance, my available room (which turned out to be a number so large I had to check if I was reading it correctly), and started running projections.

    The projections were not encouraging.

    Compound growth is relentless. Everyone knows this in a vague, abstract way. Sitting there on a Saturday, watching the numbers fill in column by column, it stopped being abstract. If I had contributed $300 a month from the time I started working at 23, even assuming modest average returns, the gap between what I'd have had and what I actually had was genuinely uncomfortable to look at. I stared at it for probably twenty minutes. Then I closed the laptop and made coffee, which is my brain's standard way of asking for a brief change of subject.

    So what had I actually been doing with my money instead?

    Honestly, nothing strategic. I was saving (I had a savings account, I wasn't reckless), but I was saving in the way that feels responsible without being particularly purposeful. A bit here, a bit there. The RRSP had a few hundred dollars go into it most Februaries, usually the week before the deadline, usually because I saw a bank ad reminding me the deadline existed. I was treating the "avoid feeling bad about it" minimum as a contribution strategy, which is not a strategy.

    The startup folding in 2018 had scrambled my savings badly. I spent two months unemployed over winter, burned through more than I was comfortable with, and landed at my current job feeling financially drained and a bit gun-shy about locking money away anywhere I couldn't access it quickly. I think some version of that fear had calcified into an excuse. I told myself I needed liquidity. I told myself I'd catch up when things were more stable. Things kept being not-quite-stable enough.

    This is the kind of reasoning that sounds practical until you look at it from a decade later.

    The RRSP vs TFSA question I still don't fully know the answer to

    Here's where I'll be honest about the gap in my thinking, because I think it's a common one: I'm not entirely sure that maxing out my RRSP first was even the right call for my income at the time.

    The standard advice is that TFSAs benefit people in lower tax brackets more, because the RRSP deduction is worth less when your marginal rate is lower. As a junior QA analyst earning $48,000 in 2014, I probably would have gotten more long-term benefit from the TFSA, which has the advantage of flexibility: withdrawals don't reduce your eligibility for income-tested benefits the way RRSP withdrawals in retirement can. The calculus shifts as income rises, and by 2019 my situation had changed enough that RRSP contributions were making real sense. But the years in between? I genuinely don't know whether a 24-year-old me would have been better served by being more aggressive with the TFSA first.

    I've read about this specific question enough to have an opinion now, but I didn't have enough information at the time to make a considered choice. I wasn't choosing TFSA over RRSP deliberately. I was just defaulting to minimal effort across both, which is the worst version of the dilemma. Not a wrong answer so much as no answer at all.

    If you want the full breakdown of why I've come to think of the two accounts as genuinely complementary rather than competitive, I put that together in a separate post on TFSAs specifically, which goes into the contribution room mechanics, the investing-versus-savings distinction, and a few things I wish someone had told me twelve years ago.

    What I actually did about it

    The Monday after that spreadsheet weekend, I called my bank (still TD at that point) and moved my RRSP contribution to pre-authorized monthly, so money went in automatically on the 15th of each month. Not a huge amount. But automatic, which meant it happened before I could find a reason it shouldn't.

    That one decision, moving from "contribute when I feel guilty enough" to "it moves on its own," made more difference than any research I've done since. Not because the amount was significant at first (it wasn't), but because I stopped treating it as optional. The optionality was the problem.

    I switched from TD to Wealthsimple in 2022, and brought my RRSP with me when I did. The process was less painful than I expected. Wealthsimple lets you open an RRSP, buy low-cost ETFs inside it, and actually see what you're holding without navigating a maze of product tiers and branch appointments. My money is in a simple all-equity fund now. I don't touch it. I don't try to time anything. Boring on purpose.

    If you're doing the same switch, the Wealthsimple review I wrote covers what the process actually looked like, including the parts that weren't quite as smooth as the onboarding flow suggested.

    The other thing I did was stop waiting for the "right time" framing to feel true.

    For years I'd been telling myself that I was in a transitional period, that I was still getting established, that I'd catch up later when the numbers were bigger and the picture was clearer. The 2018–2019 unemployment gap had been real. The recovery had been real. But somewhere along the way, genuine circumstance had shaded into a convenient story I was telling myself to avoid an uncomfortable task.

    There's no ideal moment to start. The ideal moment was a few years earlier, and since that's unavailable, the next best option is now. This is one of those things people say that feels clichéd when you read it and turns out to be completely true when you do the math for yourself.

    I don't have a clean ending for this story, because the story isn't over yet.

    I'm still catching up. My RRSP balance is a lot better than it was in 2020, meaningfully better, but I'm not going to pretend I've closed the gap that a decade of minimal contributions opened up. Compound growth works forward. It doesn't work in reverse.

    What I'd tell a 23-year-old me — not as advice, just as an honest observation — is that "I'll deal with this later" is the most expensive sentence in personal finance. Not because later never comes. Because it comes slower than you think it will, and the numbers you meet there are more stubborn than you expected.

    My partner, for their part, had no idea that dinner conversation was going to send me into a weekend of spreadsheet reckoning. I mentioned it to them afterward and they were vaguely sympathetic, the way you are when you can't fix something but you're sorry it happened anyway.

    I've been paying more attention ever since.

    Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link — you'll always see a note about it.

  • I Tried Factor Meals for a Month. My Wallet Has Not Forgiven Me.

    By Harold Phillips | April 25, 2026

    Last verified: June 2026

    It started because I ran out of chicken.

    Not metaphorically. I mean I genuinely opened the fridge on a Tuesday night after a heavy session at Anytime, stared at a container of cooked rice and literally nothing else, and accepted that my Sunday meal prep had failed me. I'd been tired, I'd only done half a prep session, and now I was standing in my kitchen at 8:15 PM in my lifting shoes trying to figure out if cottage cheese on toast counted as dinner for a guy who'd just done a heavy squat session.

    My partner looked over from the couch and said, with the flat affect of someone who has watched me be annoying about food many times: "just order something."

    I didn't want to order something. Ordering something is the expensive version of solving the problem. But I also needed like fifty grams of protein and I wasn't going to eat plain chicken breast from the freezer like some kind of wellness influencer. So I split the difference and signed up for Factor.

    What I Actually Expected

    The thing about being the kind of person who meal preps at No Frills and tracks his lifts in a spreadsheet is that you develop a very specific idea of what food is supposed to cost. I know what a week of meals should run me. I know the price per gram of protein in a kilogram of chicken thighs versus a rotisserie bird. I am, and I say this without pride, the kind of person who has a spreadsheet tab called "protein efficiency."

    So Factor was always going to be a psychological experiment more than a food experiment. The question wasn't whether the meals tasted fine (they would obviously taste fine, they're professionally cooked meals); the question was whether I could tolerate what I was paying per unit of macros.

    I signed up for 10 meals a week for four weeks. I told myself it was research. My partner pointed out that "research" was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

    The Actual Meals

    The food is good. I want to be clear about that before I spend several paragraphs being annoying. The Factor meals I tried were genuinely better than what I make on a rushed Sunday: properly seasoned, interesting combinations, nothing that tasted like it came out of a factory even though, of course, it came out of a factory.

    The protein-forward options are solid for someone who cares about macros. I mostly picked the higher-calorie options because I'm in a slow bulk right now, and Factor's meal page lets you filter by calories and protein, which I appreciated. I ate a lot of the chicken and turkey dishes. The salmon one with the cauliflower mash was genuinely excellent and I ate it three times over the month.

    Here's where I have to be honest, though: the portions run small for a powerlifter. Not embarrassingly small (this is not diet food dressed up), but if you're six weeks into a strength program and you just pulled 220 kilograms off the floor, a 550-calorie meal is not your dinner. It's a preamble. I was supplementing basically every single meal with extra food, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a fully prepped meal delivered to your door. I'd heat up the Factor plate, eat it, then make eggs. Or heat up the Factor plate, eat it, then go find the cottage cheese. I was essentially using these as one component of a two-component meal most nights.

    That's not a knock on Factor specifically. They're not positioning this at 220-pound dudes trying to consume 3,500 calories a day. But if you're in that category, worth knowing. Factor has expanded its higher-calorie options in 2026, but the core portion sizing is still very much built around a mainstream caloric range.

    The Sunday Problem

    My Sunday meal prep has been a constant for three or four years. It's one of those habits I adopted for financial reasons that eventually became genuinely enjoyable, or at least the kind of meditative, low-stakes activity that feels like rest even though it's technically work.

    I thought Factor would replace the Sunday prep. It sort of did. But here's something I didn't expect: I kind of missed it?

    I found myself on the second Sunday of the experiment standing in my kitchen making a batch of dal anyway, because I had lentils, and because cooking something that takes ninety minutes and costs four dollars feels like the honest version of feeding yourself. Factor had handled the weeknight dinners. It had done its job. But there was something slightly off about a Sunday that just… happened, without a cutting board involved.

    My partner found me stress-washing a pot I hadn't even used yet. "You miss your prep," they said. This was accurate and annoying to admit.

    I don't know if this is a healthy relationship with cooking or a dysfunctional one. Probably somewhere in the middle.

    What It Cost

    Ten meals a week from Factor, for four weeks, came to roughly $340 including delivery and the various fees that appear at checkout like old friends you didn't invite. That's $85 a week on meals that covered maybe half my actual food intake, because of the portion issue I mentioned. Factor frequently runs first-order discount codes that can significantly lower that first week — worth hunting one down before you commit.

    My normal grocery week runs $90-$110 depending on what's on sale and whether I stop at Shoppers for anything. That's total food for two people.

    I'm not going to make this math problem more elaborate than it needs to be. Factor was significantly more expensive. Not obscenely more expensive. It's cheaper than eating at restaurants, and for a single person who hates cooking, I could see the value entirely. But for what I was using it as, which was "fancy side dish to my actual dinner," the economics were not working in my favour.

    The first week felt like a treat. The third week felt like an ongoing commitment I was slightly resentful of. By week four I was genuinely counting down to when I could go back to No Frills and a big batch of chicken thighs.

    Would I Go Back?

    Maybe in specific circumstances. If I'm coming off a really demanding period at work and I know Sunday prep isn't happening, I'd rather have Factor in the fridge than eat garbage for a week. There's a version of this where it's a deliberate strategic tool rather than a replacement habit.

    The meals are legitimately good. The protein options work. The app is fine. Delivery arrived cold, no problems. I don't have anything scathing to say — I just have "this is a lot of money for what I actually needed it to do."

    If you're a single person, average appetite, busy schedule, and you want to not think about dinner, Factor makes a lot of sense. I can see it clearly. It's just not particularly well-matched to a guy whose idea of a light snack is two hundred grams of cottage cheese with creatine stirred in.

    Beans seemed interested in the salmon dish. I considered this a strong review from an impartial judge, but she also once tried to eat a charging cable, so I'm not sure how much weight her opinions should carry.

    Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link, and you'll always see a note about it.

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  • How I Accidentally Stopped Paying for Internet

    By Harold Phillips | April 25, 2026

    My partner noticed before I did.

    I was looking at my Oxio account sometime in late 2023 (I think I was troubleshooting a billing question, something boring) and the referral count was sitting there in the corner of the screen. 214. I said it out loud without meaning to, and my partner looked up from across the room and said, "Wait, you have 214 referrals?"

    I did.

    I genuinely did not know.

    Here's the thing about Oxio: I switched to them in 2021 because I was tired of paying $75 a month for internet that occasionally just… stopped. Shaw had been my ISP through my previous apartment, and when I moved to Leslieville and found out Rogers was the main option, I started looking for alternatives out of stubbornness as much as anything else. I'd been hearing about smaller internet providers for a while (the kind that ride on the big carriers' infrastructure but charge a fraction of the price), and Oxio kept coming up. Quebec-based. Good reviews. Cheaper by about $30 a month for comparable speeds.

    I signed up using someone else's referral link, got a credit off my first month, and that was that.

    The referral program was in the back of my mind. Oxio gives you a code, you share it, someone signs up, you both get a bill credit. Fairly standard. I added it to my email signature for a while, just a line at the bottom, nothing aggressive. I mentioned it to coworkers when the topic came up. A few times I posted about it on Reddit when someone in a Toronto sub asked for internet recommendations. I wasn't running a campaign. I was just answering questions I actually knew the answer to.

    The thing I keep trying to explain to people is that I didn't have a goal. There was no moment where I sat down and thought, "I'm going to collect 200 referrals." It would have felt embarrassing to even think in those terms. I'm an IT project manager. I spend enough time tracking KPIs at work. I wasn't going to come home and set referral targets for my internet provider.

    So the credits just… accumulated. Silently. In the background of my actual life.

    I think there were a few reasons the number got as high as it did. Oxio's pricing was genuinely good, especially in 2021 and 2022 when a lot of people were suddenly working from home and realizing their $100-a-month Rogers plan was a rip-off. I happened to be on Reddit a fair amount during that period: remote work, less going out, lots of time online. And I have a very IT-project-manager-brain habit of actually answering people's questions thoroughly when they ask for tech recommendations. I can't help it. Someone asks "is Oxio legit?" and I write four paragraphs.

    My partner calls this a character flaw. They're not entirely wrong.

    I should be honest about the math here because I think people sometimes imagine a more dramatic version than the reality.

    Oxio's referral credits aren't enormous. The amounts have shifted over the years. I'm honestly not certain what the current offer is, and I'd encourage you to check the site directly rather than trust whatever I say here, because it's changed at least twice since I signed up. But even at a modest per-referral credit, 214 referrals adds up to a lot of months of free internet. When I finally sat down and looked at it properly, I'd received more in credits than I'd paid in bills over the same period. My effective internet cost for roughly two years was close to zero.

    I find this kind of hard to believe even now, and I was there for it.

    There's a version of this story that makes me sound like some kind of system-optimizing genius, and I want to be clear that version isn't true. I didn't crack anything. I didn't find a loophole. I just used a good product, was mildly enthusiastic about it online, and the program was generous enough that the math worked out in a way that surprised me.

    The more interesting question — the one I've been turning over ever since — is what exactly I did that other people didn't. Because plenty of people use Oxio and don't end up with 200 referrals. Most people, probably. So what was different?

    Honestly, I think it was just persistence without pressure. I kept the code accessible. I answered questions when people asked. I didn't lead with the referral. I led with the recommendation, and the referral was a footnote. And I did that consistently for a couple of years without ever really thinking about it. No campaign, no strategy, no tracking spreadsheet (shocking, I know, given the spreadsheet I now maintain for this).

    That low-key consistency seems to matter more than any particular technique. I've seen people share referral codes in a way that reads as desperate, and it puts everyone off. The code I shared wasn't a pitch. It was more like: "Here's the thing I use, here's why I like it, and if you want to try it, this gets you a discount." That's it. That's actually it.

    The Beans footnote on this story: I came home one afternoon to find him sitting directly on the laptop keyboard in a way that had somehow, through sheer cat physics, opened three browser tabs and navigated to my Oxio account settings. I don't know if he was checking my credit balance or just trying to cancel my service out of spite. It's genuinely impossible to know.

    My internet bill right now is about $12 a month. I have credits that should last another year or so at the current rate. Eventually they'll run out, and I'll go back to paying full price, which is still cheaper than Rogers. But for now I'm essentially paying a toonie every few days for 500 Mbps internet in Toronto.

    I would have found this unbelievable in 2020. I find it only slightly less unbelievable now.

    If you're curious about Oxio, I've got a referral link, and you'll see the disclosure at the bottom. But honestly, the point of this post isn't really about Oxio specifically. It's more that I've been thinking lately about how the most effective version of any referral strategy is the one where you stop thinking of it as a strategy. You recommend the thing because the thing is good. The credits follow. Not always, not at this scale, but more than you'd expect.

    My partner is still annoyed that I didn't notice for two years.

    Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link, and you'll always see a note about it.

  • Remote Work Isn’t Going Anywhere. Neither Am I.

    By Harold Phillips | March 2026 — Last verified: August 2026

    My LinkedIn feed has been doing this thing lately where every other post is either a CEO explaining why in-office collaboration is "essential to company culture" or someone furiously dunking on that CEO in the comments. It's been going on for months. I've read probably forty of these arguments. I haven't changed my mind once.

    I work hybrid. Three days in the office, two from home, has been that way since late 2022. My company makes project management software, which means, yes, I manage projects on software that's supposed to make managing projects easier. The irony is not lost on me. We're about 200 people, spread across three time zones, and the hybrid model has been largely fine. Not transformative, not a disaster. Fine.

    The commute math nobody wants to do

    I live in Leslieville. My office is downtown, near King and University. Door to desk, the TTC takes about 45 minutes on a good day, longer when the 501 decides to take a personal day. On a bad day, which happens more than the TTC's official service standards would suggest, it's closer to an hour.

    That's two hours of commuting time, three days a week. Six hours a week. Around three hundred hours a year. Roughly twelve and a half full days. Every year. Just getting to the same laptop I could have used at home.

    I'm not saying this to complain. I chose to live where I do, I chose this job, and the TTC is what it is. But when someone tells me remote work isn't "real work," I keep thinking about those twelve days. What would I do with twelve extra days a year? Probably something useless like run further or finish the board games on my shelf. The point is: that time is not free.

    And then there's the money side. When I go into the office, I spend differently. Coffee I didn't make. Lunch somewhere that isn't my kitchen. A replacement pair of chinos when mine wore out from three-days-a-week rotation instead of occasional use. These aren't huge amounts individually (maybe $20-25 on a full office day), but they stack. I haven't tracked the exact number in a few months (my partner would tell you I usually have tracked the exact number, but I actually haven't this time), so I won't pretend to precision. It's not nothing.

    The "culture" argument

    Here's the thing about the culture argument: it assumes that the thing being created in an office is good culture, or at least better culture than what you'd have otherwise.

    I've worked in offices with genuinely miserable cultures. I've been on remote teams I liked talking to every day. I've sat in open-plan offices where no one spoke to each other because there was nowhere quiet to have a real conversation. "In-person collaboration" is not a culture. It's a location.

    My current team works fine hybrid. We over-communicate on Slack, we have weekly syncs, and we use (I say this with no irony) the project management software we sell. Some of my best working relationships are with people I've met in person maybe three times. Some of my worst work experiences happened in buildings I commuted to every day.

    None of this is a universal claim. I know people who genuinely love the office. I know people with apartments too small to work from home, or roommates who make focus impossible, or jobs that require physical presence. Those are real constraints. But "culture" as a justification for mandatory in-office days, when the actual thing being measured is whether butts are visible in seats, doesn't hold up.

    A tangent I feel the need to take

    I had a period, around 2019, where I was fully in-office five days a week. This was at a startup that later folded. Funding dried up, the whole thing unravelled over a miserable winter. Small company, everyone in one room, that startup energy people write thinkpieces about.

    It was fun for about eight months. Then it was just loud. Every conversation was everyone's conversation. Someone's lunch smell filled the kitchen by noon. I once spent forty minutes in a phone booth (they'd installed these little acoustic phone booths to create "quiet zones," which tells you everything you need to know about open-plan offices) trying to finish a document I could have written in fifteen minutes at home.

    The startup folded anyway. In retrospect, proximity wasn't doing the hard work for us.

    What I actually think

    The companies calling people back full-time are mostly making a calculated bet on attrition. They know some percentage of employees will push back, and they're willing to lose some of those people. Maybe because they want to reduce headcount without formal layoffs, maybe because they genuinely believe office presence produces better output, maybe because the people making the decision just miss seeing the building full.

    What they're not willing to do is say any of that out loud. Which is why we get "culture" and "serendipitous collaboration" and "watercooler moments" (I have never once had a career-shifting conversation near a watercooler; I'm not convinced those conversations happen outside of TV dramas).

    But here's what I keep coming back to: the knowledge-work labour market, even a slower, post-2022 version of it, still has plenty of people who will walk for a hybrid or remote role. Not everyone. Not in every field. But enough that flexibility is a real recruiting advantage, and that advantage doesn't disappear because a LinkedIn post says it should.

    Remote work got normalized in two years because circumstances required it. The genie doesn't go back in the bottle just because the bottle is more convenient for executive teams. Arrangements shift, some industries genuinely returned, individual policies changed, but "white-collar knowledge work can be done effectively from home" is established fact now. Facts don't really care what the CEO posts. If anything, the loudest return-to-office mandates from a few years back have quietly softened into hybrid compromises through the first half of 2026, once the attrition numbers came in higher than the memos predicted. By August, a couple of the higher-profile five-day mandates that made headlines this spring have already grown exception carve-outs for senior staff and hard-to-replace specialists — which, in my experience, is usually what happens right before a policy quietly loosens for everyone else too.

    Beans just knocked my water glass off the desk. I'm choosing to read it as editorial commentary, but it's more likely he just wants dinner. Either way, I think that's probably where I'll leave it.

    Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link, and you'll always see a note about it.

  • I Drank My Lunch for a Month

    By Harold Phillips | March 2026 | Last verified: August 2026

    The experiment started because I was bad at lunch.

    Not bad at eating it. Bad at planning it. Every Sunday I'd do my meal prep like a responsible adult: a pot of dal, roasted vegetables, whatever grain was on sale at No Frills. Monday through Wednesday I'd eat it. Thursday I'd be halfway through a $15 sandwich from a place near the office, telling myself it was fine. By Friday I'd stopped caring entirely.

    The waste bothered me more than the money. (Though the money bothered me too.)

    I'd seen Soylent come up online a few years back, the original meal replacement that positioned itself as "food, but optimized." The kind of product that gets written about either by tech bros who think eating is a distraction from productivity or by journalists dunking on those tech bros. Neither group seemed like a reliable narrator. I bookmarked it, forgot about it, found the bookmark again during one of my quarterly subscription audits, and decided the only way to actually know was to try it.

    So I ordered a case. Then I drank it for lunch, every workday, for a month.

    What I Was Actually Testing

    This is the part where I have to be honest about my motivations, because they weren't particularly noble.

    I wasn't trying to eat healthier. I wasn't trying to lose weight. I was trying to stop spending $50–$60 a week on lunches because I couldn't get my act together on Thursdays. The meal replacement pitch (nutritionally complete, fast to prepare, won't make a mess on your keyboard) is genuinely appealing if you work hybrid and eat at your desk more often than you'd like to admit.

    My partner thought this was, in their words, "extremely you." They were eating actual food at the table when they said it.

    I told them I'd report back.

    The First Week

    The Soylent I tried was the Ready-to-Drink bottles, original flavour, which the packaging describes as "neutral" and which I'd describe as "imagine a vanilla protein shake that went to therapy and learned to moderate its emotions." Not bad. Not good. Just present.

    The first few days were fine. You don't really notice you're not eating lunch so much as notice you're not making decisions about lunch. That part I liked. There's a small tax on every meal you choose (figuring out what you want, whether you have it, whether you're going to regret it), and meal replacement removes that entirely. You pick up the bottle, you drink it, you're done.

    By Thursday of the first week, I was still on track. This felt like a personal record.

    A Tangent About the Word "Optimize"

    The thing is, "optimize" comes up constantly in the meal replacement world, and I find it slightly suspicious. Not dishonest — just revealing.

    Calling something optimized implies there's a target function you're maximizing. Optimized for what, exactly? If the goal is "nutrients per calorie," sure. If the goal is "satisfaction per minute spent eating," food wins by a lot. "Optimized" is tech-world language that slips into wellness marketing and sounds rigorous without telling you anything about what's actually being traded off.

    I'm not saying this to be critical of Soylent specifically. I'm saying it because I realized, about eight days in, that I'd been thinking about meal replacement the wrong way. I was trying to solve a logistics problem with a nutrition product. The problem was never that my lunches were nutritionally incomplete. The problem was that I didn't have a system that actually worked on Thursdays.

    Worth keeping in mind if you're considering the same experiment.

    The Part Where I Stopped Feeling Like a Person

    Around week two, something shifted — not physically, just psychologically.

    Lunch is social. Even if you're eating at your desk, there's something about the ritual of food that signals a break. A bottle of beige liquid consumed in fifteen minutes while scrolling Slack does not feel like a break. It feels like you're refuelling a machine. I started looking forward to the end of the workday in a slightly desperate way I don't usually feel.

    I'm not sure whether that's a Soylent problem specifically or a "liquid meals don't satisfy the same part of my brain that food does" problem. Probably the second one. Either way, I noticed it.

    Beans knocked a full bottle off my desk sometime in the third week. I watched it happen in slow motion and felt, briefly, like I'd been given permission to go get a real sandwich. I didn't. But I thought about it for longer than I should have.

    Cost: The Part That Actually Made Sense

    Here's where I have to be fair. The numbers worked.

    A case of twelve Ready-to-Drink bottles ran me about $55 CAD (I ordered from Amazon, though I've seen them at some Shoppers locations). That's roughly $4.60 per lunch. My previous average was somewhere between $12 and $16 a day, depending on how badly I'd failed at meal prep that week. Over the month, I spent around $100 on lunches instead of my usual $250-ish. Grocery and shake prices have both crept up since I ran this experiment, and the RTD shelf at Shoppers has gotten noticeably more crowded with competitors, but the per-lunch math still comes out ahead of what I was spending on sandwiches.

    That's real money. And I stopped throwing out meal prep leftovers I'd optimistically made and then not gotten around to eating, so there were savings there too, though I haven't tried to quantify them exactly.

    If cost and convenience are your only metrics, meal replacement wins. That's an honest conclusion, even if it's a joyless one.

    The Nutrition Question (I Cannot Fully Answer This)

    I'm not a nutritionist and I'm not going to pretend I did a rigorous health analysis here. Soylent markets the Ready-to-Drink as nutritionally complete for a meal: macros, micronutrients, the whole pitch. I have no reason to think they're lying.

    What I can say is that I didn't feel worse. I didn't feel better. I had the same energy I usually have, which is to say: moderate. I wasn't tracking my blood sugar or running labs. I was just a person drinking beige bottles for a month and noticing how I felt, which is about as scientific as most of what I write.

    If you have specific health goals or dietary concerns, talk to someone who actually knows things. I'm just a project manager from Leslieville who thought this might fix his Thursday problem.

    Would I Do It Again

    Probably not full-time.

    But I'm not done with it either. What I do now (and this feels like the actual conclusion to the experiment) is keep a few bottles in the fridge for specific situations. The morning I have back-to-back calls and genuinely won't have time to eat. The week my partner is away and I can feel my habits deteriorating in real time. The day I've been staring at a spreadsheet for four hours and the idea of deciding anything, including what to eat, feels like too much.

    As a patch for specific failure modes, it's actually useful. As a full replacement for food eaten like a human being at a table? It doesn't work. Not for me.

    If what you actually want is real dinners without the cooking, that’s a different product entirely — I tried Factor‘s prepared meals for that during a month I was training harder, and wrote it up on its own. A shake was only ever going to fix my Thursday lunch, not dinner.

    The $150 I saved is in my TFSA now. I'll probably spend it on a very good sandwich eventually.

    Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link, and you'll always see a note about it.

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  • The App That Made Me Actually Look at My Money

    By Harold Phillips | March 2026

    I used to have a system for my banking that was less a system and more an avoidance strategy. Check balance before a big purchase, wince, proceed anyway. TD's app was technically fine. It showed me numbers, let me transfer money, sent me fraud notifications I'd immediately dismiss. I was a loyal customer for eleven years not out of satisfaction, but out of inertia.

    The thing is, that's kind of by design.

    It took my partner asking a casual question to shake me out of it. We were sitting on the couch in 2020, somewhere deep in the pandemic, and they mentioned their RRSP balance offhand, the way you might mention what you had for lunch. I asked what mine looked like. There was a pause while I opened the app.

    It was not a large number.

    I was almost 30. I'd been working full-time for six years. And the figure staring back at me from that TD screen was the kind that makes you do math you don't want to do. I spent the next weekend with a spreadsheet, a lot of coffee, and a growing sense that I'd been asleep at the wheel for most of my twenties. Nobody told me to start contributing early, or if they did, I wasn't listening. Either way, I was playing catch-up.

    That's when I started actually paying attention to where my money was going. The first thing I noticed was the fees.

    Fourteen ninety-five a month. That's what I was paying for my TD chequing account. Not for anything I could point to specifically, just for the plan. The middle-tier one, with some number of free transactions and access to the ATM network. I'd been on it since I opened the account at 18, never questioned it.

    I did the math. That's roughly $180 a year. Over eleven years, assuming the fee had always been around that (it hadn't, it had crept up at least twice), I'd paid somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000 in monthly fees alone. For what, exactly? The branch I visited once to get a void cheque for my landlord? The customer service number I'd called maybe twice in my entire banking relationship?

    Honestly, it made me a bit angry. Not dramatically (I wasn't going to post about it), but that low-grade annoyed feeling that settles in when you realize you've been paying for something on autopilot for a decade and never once stopped to ask why.

    A coworker mentioned Wealthsimple around the same time. Not as a recommendation, just in conversation. She'd been using it for investing and liked how it looked. I looked it up that evening on the TTC, somewhere between Pape and Broadview, and by the time I got home I had about thirty browser tabs open.

    No monthly fees on the basic account. A cash account with an interest rate that wasn't embarrassing. A TFSA and RRSP I could actually manage without calling a branch. The whole thing looked human-sized, like it had been built by people who found banking annoying and tried to do something about it.

    I signed up that week. Beans was on my lap the entire time, which I mention only because he knocked the keyboard mid-registration and I had to redo the email verification. Twice. He seemed pleased with himself.

    Moving my direct deposit over took ten minutes. Closing the TD account (that part required an in-person branch visit, which feels like a deliberate choice) took forty-five minutes on a Thursday morning, including a conversation with someone who seemed genuinely puzzled I was leaving. She walked me through some options. I told her I'd thought about it. I left.

    Here's what actually changed, and it's not what I expected.

    It wasn't the money I saved on fees, though I did save it. It wasn't even the better interest rate. What changed was how it felt to open the app.

    Wealthsimple's interface is clean in a way that makes me want to look at it. My chequing balance, my savings, my investments, everything on one screen, organized so it actually makes sense. When I open it now, I don't feel the low-grade dread I used to feel with the TD app, the one that came from knowing I probably should have checked more recently than I had. I just look at the numbers. Think briefly. Close it.

    That sounds like nothing. For me, it was different.

    There's a tangent here that I think is actually relevant. I worked QA early in my career, testing software, finding what broke before customers did. One thing you learn quickly is that if an interface is annoying to use, people will avoid using it. Not because they're lazy. Because friction accumulates. You delay the annoying thing until you can't.

    Most Canadian bank apps are built by teams who know you don't have a real choice. You'll use it because you have to. They don't need to compete on experience.

    Wealthsimple was built by people competing on experience, because they had no inertia to fall back on. That difference shows in ways that are hard to articulate but easy to feel, and I say that as someone who thinks that kind of language is usually a cop-out. In this case, I mean it. My relationship with my money changed because an app stopped making me dread looking at it.

    I should be honest about the downsides, because there are some real ones.

    Customer support is email-only. If something goes wrong and you need it resolved fast, that's a problem, and I mean that as a genuine criticism, not a hedge. I've contacted them twice in three years, and both times I got a response within a day, which was fine for me. But I work in IT and have a high tolerance for async communication. If you're someone who needs to call a bank at 8 PM on a Friday and talk to an actual person, that will frustrate you.

    I also genuinely don't know if their savings rate is the best available right now. I haven't done a full comparison in a few months. Last time I checked, Wealthsimple was competitive with EQ Bank and Simplii for the accounts I actually use, but rates shift, and I'm not going to pretend I track this week to week. Worth doing your own check before you commit.

    The deeper change — the one I wasn't expecting — is that switching banks forced me to make a bunch of decisions I'd been deferring for years. What am I actually saving for? What's my RRSP contribution room? How much should sit liquid versus in the TFSA?

    The app didn't ask me those questions. But the act of moving institutions made me feel like I was starting fresh, which meant I had to think through the basics instead of inheriting whatever setup I'd stumbled into at 18.

    My partner still calls it my "banking spreadsheet phase." To be fair, there was a spreadsheet. Multiple drafts of the spreadsheet. But I came out the other side with a clearer picture of my money than I'd had at any point in my adult life. I knew what I was saving, what I was investing, and approximately what I was wasting on delivery apps when I really should have just cooked something.

    The app didn't teach me any of that. It just got out of the way. Turns out that's most of the job.

    Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link, and you'll always see a note about it.

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  • I Started a Blog to Stop Answering Text Messages

    By Harold Phillips | March 2026

    It started with a coworker asking me to explain what I meant.

    I'd mentioned, offhand, something about "referral maxxing," the idea that you can stack free months of phone and internet just by recommending services you already use to people who'd actually benefit from them. I said it the way you say anything you've been thinking about for a while: like it was obvious, like everyone was already doing it.

    She looked at me like I'd started speaking French.

    So I explained it. Properly, sitting across from each other near the kitchen coffee machine, me talking and her occasionally saying "wait, really?" By the end of it she'd signed up for three services on her phone before finishing her coffee. I walked back to my desk feeling mildly vindicated.

    That conversation happened maybe eighteen months ago. I've had some version of it roughly forty times since.

    The Spreadsheet Nobody Asked For

    Here's the thing. I didn't start out trying to optimize anything. I just liked Fizz. I'd switched from one of the big three because my bill had crept up to something embarrassing, and a coworker (a different coworker, for what it's worth) mentioned she was paying $29 a month for a plan that covered everything I actually needed. So I switched. I told people about it. Some of them switched too.

    That was the whole strategy.

    At some point in late 2023, I was poking around my Fizz account and noticed the referral total. I'd accumulated over 125 referrals. Not because I was running ads or doing anything I'd describe as a strategy, just because I liked the service and I'm apparently the kind of person who talks about phone plans at parties. (My partner has strong opinions about this tendency. Mostly that I have too many of them.)

    My first reaction was just: huh.

    My second reaction was to check my Oxio account. Over 200. I had years of free phone and internet stacked up, accumulated without any real effort, just from being someone who recommends things when they work.

    That last part felt important.

    The thing about finding out you've been good at something without trying is that it makes you wonder what would happen if you actually tried. I didn't do anything with that thought for a while. Kept recommending things, kept sending the same message ("here, use my referral code when you sign up") in response to the same questions.

    And then I did the math.

    I'm a project manager, so spreadsheets are basically a hobby at this point. One evening I tallied up roughly what I'd earned in referral rewards across the services I use: Fizz, Oxio, Wealthsimple, a couple others. The number wasn't nothing. Several hundred dollars in credits and cash, spread across a few years, just from talking. Not a fortune. Not passive income that was going to change my life. But also not nothing, which is what I'd been treating it as.

    I'd been doing this casually for years without a single intentional decision. It made me curious what a few intentional decisions would look like.

    The "Content Creator" Problem

    I genuinely hate the phrase "content creator." It flattens what's interesting about people writing things on the internet: the accumulated opinions, the specific voice, the actual personality built up over years of paying attention to things. It turns all of that into a grey category of content to be produced and consumed. The whole framing makes me tired.

    So when the idea of a blog surfaced, I spent a while convincing myself I wasn't doing that.

    What I was actually doing was writing down things I was already explaining over text message. Friends who'd just escaped a Rogers contract and wanted to know what to switch to. Coworkers who'd seen a Wealthsimple ad and needed someone they trusted to say whether it was actually worth the hassle. Family members who'd heard about Fizz secondhand and wanted a real opinion before committing to anything new.

    The blog is a long text message I can send as a link (and stop retyping from memory every time someone asks).

    That framing made it feel okay. I'm not producing content — I'm writing down what I'd say if you called and asked. The fact that strangers might find it useful is genuinely a bonus, not the point. I'd probably still be writing this if no one read it, because it would still save me from writing the same paragraph in iMessage for the forty-first time.

    Honestly, I'm not sure this works out the way I'm imagining. I don't know how many people are actually searching "is Fizz worth it in Toronto" and landing here, versus how many read one post and disappear forever. I don't know if the referral income ever adds up to more than a rounding error, or whether I'll still be writing this in two years. These are real uncertainties, and I'd be lying if I said they didn't occasionally cross my mind while I'm sitting here at my desk writing about phone plans on a Tuesday evening.

    What I do know is that the recommendations are real. I've watched people save money using them, not in theory, but in actual text message conversations afterward. "Oh wow, my bill actually dropped." "I can't believe I waited this long."

    That's enough to keep writing.

    What You'll Actually Find Here

    Most posts are recommendations for services I personally use: MVNOs like Fizz and Oxio, banking alternatives like Wealthsimple and Simplii, and a few other things where I've done enough research to have a perspective worth something.

    When I recommend something, there's often a referral link. When you sign up through it, I might get a small credit, and I'm not going to be coy about that. The referral income is part of what makes this worth running. But it only works if I'm actually honest. The second I start softening a review because a service has a referral program attached, the whole thing falls apart. So I don't. If something has real problems, I'll say so. If a competitor without a referral deal is genuinely the better choice for your situation, I'll say that instead. Credibility is the whole point.

    Beans knocked my water glass onto my keyboard while I was writing this last paragraph. The keyboard survived. Beans was completely unrepentant.

    That's the blog. I'm a 34-year-old IT project manager in Toronto (at a company that makes project management software, yes, I've heard the joke) who talks too much about phone plans and finally wrote it down somewhere. If something here saves you money, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.

    Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link — you'll always see a note about it.