December 2017- The Losses Continue
On top of the lower than anticipated income for 2017, someone hitting my car, my windshield being damaged, my unexpected dental and legal bills, and my client reducing my pay rates, etc. – now I am hit with a sudden special assessment of $11,880 for my condo. My fortunes only continue to worsen.
The special assessment is for fixing the cracking underground parkade roof. At first I questioned why the condo board isn’t suing the developer; story has been that it closed its doors after the warranty period expired and re-opened as another entity under a new company name. Attempting to sue apparently to the condo board is too difficult and expensive. The parking lot is cramped, has a poorly designed ramp that you cannot descend without scraping the bumper unless you’re going at a very particular angle, and the door timer allocates too little time for you to get out. I’ve never liked the parking lot to begin with; it has never been designed well in the first place. The furnace of the unit above me continues to make loud banging noises throughout the nights, disrupting my sleep. With the builder and its cheap engineering approach, it’s not a surprise that this has occurred. The total funds the board is trying to collect from all the units together is approximately $330,000 for the roof repair.
Work has been dreadfully slow, though expected due to the unusually warm winter and being December, when business usually slows and wraps up before Christmas time and as the yearly budgets run dry at year end. Sometimes I work as much as 16.5 hours a day; sometimes I work 0. For December I expect to earn around $5,000 from this client as I am taking 8-10 business days off to visit my family in BC, plus $2,218 other income. I also received two more trucking job offers- one highway and pipe hauling semi work paying by truck income percentage, another a flat $350/day rate for vacuum truck work. The former is tempting, but I’ve decided school and my sanity is more important at this time.
When work is slow, I allocate my mental and physical energy to my fitness- increasing my strength and sanity. Since my auto accident last spring, I’ve gained back a significant portion of my strength, along with increases in muscle. I mainly perform the 5×5 workout where my entire body is exercised within one workout, and I lift semi-daily.
Each workout consists of only 3 exercises: squats/bench presses or flys/bent-over rows, or squats/overhead press/deadlifts. Theweight is adjusted so that I can successfully perform 5 sets of 5 reps of each exercise, then proceeding to add 2.5kg next time the same exercise is performed. Sometimes when I am too tired from work, I will lift at reduced weight and higher reps.
Even if the financial picture has suffered immensely, on the bright side my physique, performance, and health has improved again.
The mileage is adding up quickly on the new //M. Last May I had only 3,086km on the odometer; at the time of writing I’ve just passed 16,000km. I’m considering in the future to get around my real estate financing problems due to stiffening mortgage lending rules, I’ll sell whatever vehicle I have on my credit file in order to clear the mortgage transaction(s). Then, I’ll finance/lease another with minimal downpayment, saving more investment funds for my growth. When time comes to finance more real estate and the vehicles are partway or almost through their warranty period, I’ll repeat the same process. The dilemma, however, now is whether this increased vehicle enjoyment cost is exceeded by the investment income the new real estate brings to make this strategy worthwhile – especially selling/turning in the vehicles within such short time periods (likely around 2 years).
