Tag: personal

By Harold Phillips | June 9, 2026

The Sunday prep either happens or it doesn't. There's no middle ground.

When it happens, my week clicks into place. I know what I'm eating on Tuesday night without having to think about it. I come home from the gym, grab a container from the fridge, and that's dinner. Ninety minutes of prep on Sunday buys me fifteen minutes every weeknight, and for someone who trains four times a week and has approximately zero desire to make food decisions after a hard session, that trade is completely worth it.

When it doesn't happen, the week quietly falls apart. I start making bad calls. I order something on Wednesday. I eat plain eggs for the third meal in a row because it's the fastest protein I can find. By Friday I'm mildly irritated at myself and trying to remember why I skipped prep in the first place.

Some Sundays I'm tired, or we've got plans, or I just don't feel like standing at a stove for two hours on my day off. That's real and I want to say it plainly before I spend the rest of this going on about how great my system is. The system only works when I actually do it.

The No Frills Run

I shop at the No Frills on Queen East, usually Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning before I start anything. My partner comes maybe half the time. When they don't, I have a voice note habit I developed after arriving home with $70 worth of groceries and no eggs three separate times.

The produce section is the part I've had to figure out over time. Quality fluctuates and that's just what it is. Some weeks the spinach looks great; some weeks the bell peppers look off and you put them back. I've stopped trying to fight this and started building my prep around whatever looks good instead of showing up with a rigid list. If the broccoli is excellent, broccoli goes in this week. If it looks sad, I grab cauliflower and adjust. The flexibility matters more than the plan.

Protein is the big cost lever. I train three to four times a week and I eat high protein, not as a philosophy but just what my body needs to actually recover. Chicken thighs are almost always the right answer: cheaper than breast, more forgiving to cook, they don't dry out if you leave them in the oven an extra eight minutes. A kilogram runs about $11 most weeks, and I'm usually buying two. Eggs always go in the cart. A big tub of cottage cheese. Canned lentils, or dry red lentils depending on what I'm making.

I've written more about what the full weekly grocery bill actually looks like in my grocery editorial, so I won't retread the cost breakdown here. This is about the prep session itself.

What Gets Made

The prep takes between ninety minutes and two hours, start to finish. I'm not running five burners. Usually two things at most: one in the oven, one on the stove, while I do dishes or listen to something in between.

The oven gets the chicken. Big tray of thighs, garlic powder, smoked paprika, salt, whatever else I feel like. 400°F for about forty minutes. That's three or four dinners worth of protein handled.

On the stove: the dal. Red lentils, diced onion, a few cloves of garlic, canned tomatoes, cumin, turmeric, garam masala, coconut milk if I have it. One pot, about forty-five minutes, most of it unattended. A full batch costs somewhere around five or six dollars and covers three lunches. I'm genuinely proud of this dal. I know that's a strange thing to be proud of. I'm not a chef, I don't have real technique, I couldn't describe my knife skills without being embarrassed. But the dal is good and I've got it dialled in over about two years of making it.

The rest is easy: hard-boiled eggs, a batch of rice, whatever vegetable looked best at the store. Roasted or steamed depending on my energy level and whether I can be bothered to wash and chop things.

By early afternoon the fridge has containers in it. There's something quietly satisfying about that. The week already has a shape.

The Dal, More Specifically

I want to spend a moment on this because it's the one thing in my rotation I'd actually recommend someone try.

The dal gets better the next day. That's the thing. Day-one dal is good. Day-two dal, after it's had time to sit and the spices have done whatever they do overnight, is excellent. It reheats well in a microwave without going gluey, which you cannot say about everything. Packed with rice in a container, it's a complete lunch that costs maybe two dollars and takes thirty seconds to reheat at work.

I have no idea how I landed on making dal. Somewhere in my mid-twenties I searched "cheap high-protein meals" and started from a recipe, adjusted it over maybe a dozen batches, and ended up where I am now. It's become a habit in the same way the Sunday prep is a habit: something I do so regularly I barely notice it anymore.

If you want the actual proportions, I'll say: about a cup of dry red lentils, one large onion, four cloves of garlic, a can of diced tomatoes, a can of coconut milk, a teaspoon each of cumin and coriander and turmeric, half a teaspoon of chili powder, salt to taste. Sauté the onion and garlic first, add everything else, simmer covered for thirty-five to forty minutes. That's it.

Containers: A Brief Rant

I have four glass containers and a rotating cast of plastic ones, and I've stopped trying to achieve any kind of matching set. Two of the glass lids no longer pair with their containers because one cracked, which means I have an orphan container I use as a bowl when everything else is in the dishwasher.

The only thing that actually matters in a container is that the lid seals properly.

Anything you're going to microwave: glass is better. It doesn't absorb smells, it doesn't warp, and food heats more evenly. The trade-off is that glass containers are heavier and will crack if you drop them on a tile floor, which I learned the hard way. Plastic is fine for cold food: snacks, salads assembled day-of, that kind of thing.

Roasted vegetables are the big loser in any prep scheme. The texture degrades within twelve hours. I still roast them and eat them over a couple of days, but I've stopped expecting the day-four serving to be crispy. It won't be.

Protein First

I've done the actual math on hitting my protein targets through food. The short answer: eggs, chicken, cottage cheese, legumes, every day. That determines my shopping list more than anything else. The produce, the carbs, the flavour additions are secondary. The protein gets bought first.

I don't rely on protein powder. Per gram of protein, it's more expensive than real food and I'd rather eat chicken than drink a shake. The exception is creatine, which is inexpensive and has actual evidence behind it. The rest of the supplement industry is mostly noise. I've said this before and I'll keep saying it because I spent money on that noise in my early twenties and I'd like to save someone else the trouble.

Cottage cheese is probably the thing I eat most consistently outside of chicken. It's cheap, high in protein, and genuinely useful across a dozen different eating situations. I eat it plain. I eat it with fruit. I put it in things. It doesn't photograph well and I've never claimed otherwise, but it's functional food and it earns its place in the fridge every week.

When It Falls Apart

About one Sunday in four, the prep doesn't happen. I'm tired, we have plans, or I just sit down and the momentum never arrives. Those weeks follow a predictable pattern.

Monday is fine because there's always something left from the week before. Tuesday I can manage by improvising. Wednesday I'm eating rice and eggs at 9 PM because I didn't plan anything. Thursday I give up and order food.

Ordering food in Toronto is expensive now. A bowl from a decent takeout spot is $20-25 before fees. Meal kits are cheaper than delivery and better quality than takeout, but meaningfully more expensive than prep. I've tried a few of the main ones when I've needed a fallback. I wrote up the ones I've actually tested in my Factor vs. Goodfood comparison if you want that breakdown.

The week without prep costs me somewhere around $60-80 extra. I've accepted that as the cost of being a person who sometimes doesn't do the thing. The goal isn't perfect execution forever. The goal is most Sundays. I hit that.

What I Spend

The No Frills haul for a full prep week runs $60-80 in ingredients specifically for cooking. Some weeks I stop at Costco for bulk pantry items (olive oil, canned tomatoes, oats, Greek yogurt in the big tub), and those cost more upfront but average out over time.

The thing I've noticed is that having a rough plan before I walk in the door keeps the spend down. Not a detailed recipe list, just: I need two proteins, three or four vegetables, and something starchy. When I go in without that, I come out with random things that don't form actual meals and spend more in the process.

Produce is the most variable line. I've learned to work with what looks good rather than what I planned. I can adapt almost anything to whatever's on sale that week. The flexibility is what keeps the cost manageable.

Honestly, I'm not going to pretend this routine is glamorous. There's no beautiful mise en place, no aesthetically arranged containers. There's a sheet pan of chicken, a pot of dal, a dozen boiled eggs, and six mismatched containers on a shelf in the fridge. Most weeks, that's enough.

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.

By Harold Phillips | June 2026

My partner makes the same case every June, right around the time we're confirming dates for July at the cottage. The argument is always reasonable. Compelling, even. Via Rail to Sherbrooke is roughly five hours, about the same as driving, depending on the 401. You can sit. You can read. Someone else is in charge of not falling asleep on the highway. No construction near Kingston that stretches a ninety-minute stretch into two hours because someone decided late May was an excellent time to repave every lane simultaneously.

I listen. I genuinely consider it. Then I say something like "but the car is already paid for" and we book the drive.

We've had this conversation three summers in a row now.

The Case My Partner Actually Makes

Here's what makes it hard to dismiss: they're not wrong about most of the individual points.

Via Rail on that route is a genuinely comfortable way to travel. The trains that run toward the Eastern Townships corridor are modern enough, the seats are real seats, and you arrive in a town rather than white-knuckling through suburban Longueuil traffic trying to remember whether you turned left or right off the autoroute. My partner would read a novel, maybe nap, and arrive not completely wrung out from three hours of Quebec highway driving with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the fuel gauge.

The environmental math is also not nothing. I'm driving a nine-year-old Civic. It's fine. It gets reasonable mileage. But two people on a train are two fewer people burning gas on the 401, and I'm not going to pretend that math doesn't exist. I notice it, I just haven't acted on it.

So why do I still drive?

Honestly, Part of It Is the Drive Itself

The 401 to the 10 is not a beautiful highway. Let me be honest about that upfront. It's the 401. It's a construction zone approximately thirty percent of the time between Toronto and Montreal, and the stretch through Kingston always smells faintly of truck exhaust and institutional optimism. None of that is in dispute.

But there's a specific rhythm to that drive that I've had for as long as I can remember. My family has had the cottage in the Eastern Townships for decades. I've been making this trip since I was in the back seat falling asleep on a pile of duffel bags somewhere near Belleville. I know exactly where the terrain shifts from Southern Ontario flat to the start of the Appalachian foothills. I know the rest stop past Gananoque that always has parking. I know the point on the 10, east of Magog, where you can see the profile of the hills and the whole drive starts to feel worth it.

My partner doesn't have this. They didn't grow up making this drive. To them, it's five hours in a car. To me, it's the specific five hours that mean summer is actually starting.

That's hard to put a dollar value on, and I'm not going to try.

The IGA stop happens around the three-and-a-half hour mark, at a grocery store just off the highway near the Quebec border. It's become its own ritual. We get there stiff from the car, slightly over-caffeinated from the Tim's somewhere around Brockville, and we spend forty-five minutes walking through a francophone grocery store deciding what we actually want to eat for a week. Bread from the bakery section. Quebec cheese. A tray of sausages. Corn if it's already in season.

You can't do that on a train.

Or rather, you can stop at a Marché in town when you arrive. But you've just gotten off a train and you're tired in a different way, and someone has to come pick you up, and the whole arrival is compressed and transactional instead of gradual. The IGA stop is part of how I ease into cottage time. I'm not rushing anywhere. I'm standing in a grocery store in Quebec reading the French labels on things I would normally just reach for automatically, and the shift is already happening before I've even seen the dock.

The Real Reason Is the Car at the Other End

The practical argument I actually win with: once you're there, you need a car.

The cottage is not in a town with a transit system. There's no Uber or Lyft coverage worth trusting. The nearest grocery store isn't walking distance and the nearest LCBO might as well be a day trip. My parents have one car between them, and during our July stretch they're usually there too, which means borrowing it isn't a simple thing. If my partner and I take the train, we've now got four people, one vehicle, and two weeks of scheduling around pickup times and grocery runs that become a minor logistical negotiation every other day.

Driving up means we arrive with our own transportation, our own timeline, and no one has to figure out who's picking us up at the Sherbrooke station at 7 PM after the train runs late. Which it does, sometimes. Via Rail is better than it was, but "on time" is a relative term for Canadian passenger rail, and I say that without much malice. The infrastructure is genuinely difficult.

The car cost on the drive, when I've worked it out, is somewhere between $90 and $110 in gas for a round trip in the Civic. Two Via Rail tickets on that route (flexible class, nothing fancy) tend to run $160 to $220 depending on when you book. If you factor in that we'd also need to arrange transport at the other end, the math starts looking worse for the train than the original sticker price suggests.

I keep meaning to do a proper comparison. I've started it twice and gotten distracted by other tabs. My partner would find this unsurprising.

The Cottage Itself Is Not the Point, Except It Is

I should explain what we're actually going to, because I think people's mental image of "Quebec cottage" can run toward something grander than reality.

This is a modest place. The dock needs repainting every few years and my dad keeps putting it off. The WiFi is genuinely terrible — not in a charming "digital detox" way, just in a "the router is from 2014 and the connection drops if two people try to stream at once" way. The cottage itself is comfortable but small. There's a canoe that hasn't been fully patched in years but still technically floats.

I love it. I'd take bad WiFi and a dock that needs work over a hotel with amenities any summer.

But it also means the two weeks in July are the one stretch of the year where I'm not optimizing anything. I'm not tracking my lifts. I'm not reading about TFSA contribution room. I'm not researching whether there's a better phone plan that just launched. I'm sitting on a dock with a coffee in the morning doing absolutely nothing that I could report back on.

The drive is part of that transition. Five hours with my partner, music on, stopping when we want to stop, gradually leaving the city and the habits it comes with. A train gets you there efficiently. The drive gets you there in a way that feels earned.

The Honest Concession

My partner is right that there would be something genuinely nice about showing up not tired.

By the time we pull into the cottage driveway, I've been focused on driving for the better part of five hours. I'm not depleted (I actually enjoy long drives), but I'm also not the relaxed, present version of myself that I'm supposedly going to the cottage to become. My partner, who has been reading in the passenger seat since Belleville, arrives in a noticeably better state than I do. This is a consistent pattern that I've decided not to examine too closely.

If we did the train, I'd arrive rested. I'd have finished a chapter or two. We'd have talked more, probably, instead of me asking them to check whether this lane goes straight through or merges right in two kilometres.

The thing is: I know this. I'm not unaware of the tradeoff. I just keep making the same call every June.

Maybe it changes eventually. Maybe I wake up one summer, look at the cost per trip, think about the emissions, think about arriving to the cottage actually ready to be there, and book two seats on the train.

My partner would like that very much. They've mentioned 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.

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.

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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.

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.