Europe dreams

Dear Anne,

I hadn't looked at the blog in a while and then I realized you had posted - so exciting!  I do love reading about all your different ideas for the future.

My current daydream is about taking a three month trip to Europe.  We have been dreaming about a one-year leave and going on a big round the world trip but that would take a lot more work to get ready for (work wise, house wise).  I also realized that Andrew does better easing in to an idea.  I think going on a three month trip with the kids would be really informative as far figuring out if we would ever want to go on a longer trip.  As you say, it also allows us to balance the community here and the girls going to Sage's, if we did the trip in the summertime.

We are currently looking in to Europe, even though Europe in the summer would definitely be pricey.

Tonight I was looking at the car seats and trying to get an idea of whether you would travel by public transit or car rental.  A lot of people seem to caution against renting car seats, especially for older children.  We tried the RideSafer vest and it didn't work for Alexandria last year but I think I would be willing to give their new model a try.  But I am not sure if the new one is approved in Europe.  Even if it is, it seems that you need to use it with a booster seat in Europe and the booster seats only work once they are 40 pounds.  I am not sure how much Layla weighs now but it isn't 40 pounds - I wonder how close she is?!?

Some info by country:
- Germany: A child under 12 years of age and measuring less than 1.5m travelling in any type of vehicle, must be seated in a child seat or use a child restraint. It is prohibited to use a child seat in the front seat of a vehicle if the airbag has not been deactivated. All child restraints/seats used, must conform to ECE 44/03 or ECE 44/04.
- France: children up to the age of 10 must travel in an approved child seat or restraint, adapted to their age and size.
- Spain: Children up to the age of 12, measuring less than 135 cm must be seated in a child restraint system adapted to their size and weight, except when travelling in a taxi in an urban area. 

I wonder what counts as a child restraint in Europe.

On a related note it looks like traveling by RV isn't safe for children :(  This post has some suggestions of what you can instead.  I had been daydream about an Australian road trip as part of a RTW trip.  That said do you know how big Australia is, oh my goodness, I plotted a route and it turned out to be something like 13,000 km!  Starting to think they should maybe be literate for something like that.

Yeah for dreaming :)

Hugs, Jen

Car rental in Mexico

I realised your draft post on car rental in Mexico was for your trip last year which was cancelled. Here is the research I compiled.

Personal liability insurance. Many rental car agencies (including the one we have booked with, Sixt), include the required by law liability insurance. Sixt includes coverage for $350,000 MXN, which is about $25,000 Canadian. You can buy additional coverage from Sixt for $11 per day USD. I think we will pay this additional insurance, but I may do a little research about whether it is required.
http://www.sfgate.com/mexico/mexicomix/article/Renting-a-car-in-Mexico-What-you-need-to-know-3787891.php
http://www.mexperience.com/lifestyle/transport/car-rental-in-mexico/

Loss damage waiver (LDW). This is the one covered by credit cards. I looked at the terms of the credit card we will be using. The only issue is that the principal driver has to be the one renting, and I currently have rented a manual car that only Murray knows how to drive. I was planning to get him that card anyway through the referral program, so we just have to do that by January.  OR we would have to see how much to pay for another driver, who would be covered as long as the cardmember is the principal driver.
For Amex: All claims must be reported within 48 hours of the theft, loss and damage occurring by calling 1-800-243-0198 (in Canada or the United States) or by calling collect (905) 475-4822 (elsewhere in the world).
If refusing the car company's insurance, they will usually put a large deductible on the credit card for the duration of the rental.

Personal Accident Insurance. This would be covered through our health insurance.

To do when rent car:

• decide if going to decline or take liability insurance.
• call credit card company before travel, tell them there will be large charge for deductible.
• take pictures of car, including close-ups of any dents, scratches, etc. Also look at underside (somehow?)
• decline LDW

anne's life plan ideas

I know you enjoy hearing about our crazy life plan ideas, and it will be fun in the future to look back and see what I was thinking about, so I thought I would compile our options. I have done spreadsheets for most of the options to see which are best financially (although finances are not the only consideration). They pretty much all involve Murr working until June 2018 and then taking 5 years leave (and then quitting for good if we're doing okay financially), and us making about $20,000 per year doing freelance stuff, or making money online somehow, or taking short term contracts, etc. until 2029. If we're not enjoying "retirement", or are not on track financially, then there is always the option for one or both of us to return to work when our leave is over.  So here are the grand ideas:

(1) Build a backyard carriage house and rent out the main house. This is the option we are most dreamy about at the moment.  These are not allowed yet in Ottawa but are in the process of being passed, so we have seen the proposed bylaws and such. The proposed laws would allow us to build a one story house in the backyard with a 50 square meter footprint (540 square feet), which could have a basement. This idea is similar to our previous side house idea, but the backyard house would be slightly bigger. I really enjoy imagining the floor plans for this house. This option varies financially based on how much it would cost, but if we could build if for less than $150K, it would be feasible. We imagine we would do most of the labour on it after Murray "retires."

(2) Sell our house in spring 2018 or spring 2019 and go travel, possibly indefinitely. I assume our costs during travel would be about the same as they would be if we stayed in Ottawa, which definitely means travelling slow and on a budget and mostly in cheap countries. Rent an apartment or house when we return. This option varies financially based on whether we can stick to our budget and what and where we rent when we return. We love the idea of travel, but also love our community and being near family, so I don't think we'll actually do this. Rather, we'll probably up our travel time to one month in the winter and 4-6 weeks in the summer and be home and stable the rest of the year.

(3) sell our house and rent. we also talk about this one a lot. I regularly look at available rentals and we could get a two or three bedroom apartment near us for less than $2000 per month. It would be attached though (i.e. in a building or row house). We like the idea of not spending time on house maintenance and having a smaller space, but worry about the lack of permanence and possible noisy neighbours.

(4) Buy a smallish condo, near Murray's parents' new condo and possibly in their building. We are uncertain about condo living though, because we don't think many other families do it, and we might feel weird being the only family in the building. We are also concerned about lack of outdoor space with this option. We like the idea of a ground level unit where we would have direct access to outside.

Everything is the same until Spring 2018, so we have lots of time to ponder!

love,
anne

Hawaii

Hi Anneabelle,

We just booked a trip to Hawaii :)  Andrew is SO excited.  It is so nice to see him so excited about something and I am excited too.  Alexandria has a two week break at the beginning of April so that is when we are going.  In the end we ended up booking the tickets with cash, but not before I did a ton of points research.  I want to summarize that research here for my own benefit.  There was no amazing answer with points given the current amount of points we own.  And we ended up finding flights from Denver to Kona (Big Island) for $465 each on Alaska, which was about half the other cheapest tickets.  I think they might have been having a sale.  It means leaving and returning mid-week instead of the weekend but we can make that work.  It also means we will have a 12 hour layover in Seattle on the way back, after a short redeye (urg!), but we plan to make the most of it and tour Seattle for the day.

I used the Travel is Free chart of Cheapest Ways to Get to Hawaii Using Miles as a guide.

• The first one on the list is Virgin Elevate at 20K, which would be amazing since it is cheaper than going to Ottawa.  This one had me so confused since I hadn't looked in to Virgin before.  The key is that this value is only when going through a partner airline (like Hawaiian). Million Mile Secrets explained it very well: "While Virgin America’s frequent flyer program uses a revenue-based system on their own flights, they have mileage-based charts for their partner
  airlines." And then in terms of booking on Hawaiian as a partner airline: "When booking award tickets, you can only book flights on Hawaiian Airlines (the price for a ticket does not include any connecting flights on Virgin America). So if you aren’t located in a city served by Hawaiian Airlines, you’ll have to use more points to book a separate Virgin America flight to 1st get to a Hawaiian Airlines city."  This meant that I would search on Virgin and could see DEN because it is served by Virgin but then the point values were way more than 20K.  Then I would search for the 20K return trips and DEN wouldn't be on the list, because Hawaiian doesn't fly to DEN.  Based on the other points below it meant we would have had to buy a separate ticket RT to one of the cities Hawaiian flies to (e.g. PHX, or SJC and join it with a work trip) and then also pay in cash/points for the trip within the islands.
• Virgin Elevate is 2:1 with AMEX points so it makes it worth more like 40K return if you are comparing to other AMEX transfers.  But is is 1:1 with the 20K becomes 25K bonus for SPG.  
• Supposedly Hawaiian has seasonal service direct to KOA from LAX but I couldn't find it.
• It should be an additional 6K RT with Virgin Elevate to fly inter-island with Hawaiian.
• 20K that do exist:
• Only to HNL: PHX, SAN, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Oakland
• SJC can go to HNL or OGG
• SFO can go to HNL or OGG
• Singapore got me so excited because as a transfer partner with AMEX, SPG, and Chase we would have had the 35K*4 that we needed.  But what I read (I don't know where the link is now) is that you have to find availability on United metal and on the United search engine you have to see both the first column with a 22.5K fare (their lowest) as well as a value in the second column.  This corresponds to having a line and the dots in the calendar view.  And we couldn't be signed in, because then we see the XN fares that are only available because of the credit card we have.  I could find this for the Tuesday before (we ideally wanted Sat-Sat) but I couldn't find anything on the way back.  Also, with the transfers from SPG that may take a few days and then needing to phone Singapore it felt a bit daunting to hope that this one available flight would still be there.  And I didn't know if you could do one-way awards with Singapore.
• Some of them like Alaska and AA are only transfers from SPG.  We would have about 87K with the transfer bonus but this wasn't enough to look in to these programs.  We also didn't have enough AMEX and SPG to make Hawaiian work, although it was much closer.  That said I am not sure the Hawaiian points needed were as cheap as he has in the table.  
• It was the same booking with United Miles, we just didn't have enough (not even close) with our Chase and United points.  Which was too bad because United has a direct from DEN to KOA.  That said we started to wonder if it was actually the best use of the points.  At 45K is it better to go to Hawaii or is it better value to buy the 25K Ottawa tickets that can actually be quite expensive.  At $465 a ticket the answer was simple but it wasn't so clear at some of the other ticket costs.  
• I looked at Delta but it was super pricey point requirements.
• From DEN, British Airways would have been 40K, assuming with could find a flight from here to the West Coast and then direct to KOA (7500+12500 each).  As a transfer partner of everything we could have made this work, and pretty much used up all our points.  I used this post to guide me in looking up the flights on American's website since as others have mentioned the BA website tried to route me through Heathrow!  Sadly the available flights were horrible, especially on the return.  They were midweek, which in the end we ended up booking anyways, but they had really bad routings on the way home.  Kona to Portland, to Dalla, to Denver - yuck and more expensive with a distance based program.  
• Aeroplan was the most interesting.  I hadn't been looking at it because it was 45K but then I got the idea of whether I could combine it with Ottawa trips.  It turns out it is possible.  YOW to KOA then KOA to DEN (with a 3 month stopover) and then DEN to YOW was also 45K.  This means that if I had booked a RT from DEN to YOW for 25K that got us there a week or so before going to Hawaii and then came back after the later summer trip I could have two Ottawa trips plus the Hawaii trip for 75K.  I think we only had enough points (and vacation time) that it would have just been the girls and me doing that, and a 11 hour flight from Newark to HNL with the girls by myself did not really excite me.  I also didn't know enough about when I want to come back in the summer.  But neat to think of for the future.  I had read about the whole nested trip thing but never really fully grasped its use before.

So there we go.  So far we seem to be going every 3 years so maybe this will be useful in another 3 years time :)

Hugs, 

Jen

University Education for Kids

Hi Annabelle,

Do you have money saved for your kids university education?  Do you plan to contribute to it?  How does it factor in to your thoughts around money saving and frugality?

I was looking to get a general idea of how much university might cost.

		Tuition and Fees		Room and Board	Books and Supplies	Other Expenses	Total	Notes on Total
		In-state/CDN	Out-of-state/ International
CU-Boulder	USD	11,091	34,125	13,194	1,800	2,294	28,379	In state
Cornell	USD	34,209	50,953	13900			64,853	Out of state
Univsity of Ottawa	CDN	5,014
UBC	CDN	6081	31352
McGill	CDN	8780		14656	1000		24436	CDN rate
University of Toronto	CDN	7225		11493	1000	1000	20718	CDN rate

We were saying that we would like to help the kids be able to go to either a school in Canada or a state school without having much debt.  It means about 100K per kid in today's dollars though!  Back of the envelope Andrew was saying that is about 15K in today's dollars that we need to save every year.  Not cheap!

What are you guys thinking?

Hugs, Jen

Waldorf Schools Around the World

Hi Annabelle,

I should really be headed to bed, but our summer schedule of sleeping in has let me get quite nocturnal (my natural state).  The girls and I didn't come down for breakfast until 10 AM this morning.  Our big trees are being cut down next week and we need to be out of the house by 7:30 AM; it will feel very early!

I was just looking at the availability of Waldorf Schools in these various locations.  I really enjoy the Waldorf philosophy and Sage does say that she finds a lot of the kids are ready for a more formal education setting by the time they are 9 or so.  And I wouldn't want to leave the US before becoming a citizen anyways (even if Trump does get elected...urg).  So I think that would be about 2 years from now before I get my citizenship.  I don't want to ever go through all the immigration stuff again and you loose your green card if you don't live here.

Europe:

• Germany (Munich office): Looks like there are at least three (here, here, and here).  All German of course.  I like the idea of getting fluent in French and Spanish; I am not sure about learning German.  Mind you if Kate actually stayed there that would be a factor; but she doesn't enjoy living in Nuremberg and would like to move somewhere else (it is only 2 hours from Munich).
• Switzerland (Zurich office): One Waldorf school in Zurich.  It actually looks like it was one of the first in the world.  The tuition seems to be quite high, as a percentage of income.  School seems to be in German; Steiner did teach in German.  They do teach two foreign languages but I am not sure what they are.
• Ireland (Dublin office): There are a five Waldorf schools in Ireland and some of them are even funded by the education system.  Only one of them is anywhere near Dublin: the Kildare Steiner School (not funded by the government).  There are towns (Newbridge, Naas) that would be about a 20 min drive to the school and 40 min into Dublin so that could be feasible.  Some of Ber's family actually lives in this area as Kildare is the county where she grew up.
• UK (London office): there are a few (e.g. here, but others come up in Google search); the London Ontario one also came up for me which confused me at first
• France (Paris office, not sure how much Eng): talking to Andrew it doesn't seem like this office would actually work for a transfer
• Belgium (Brussels office, not sure there is very much Eng in this office): talking to Andrew it doesn't seem like this office would actually work for a transfer

 Asia/Australia:

• Japan (Tokyo office): I tried to look up Waldorf schools in Tokyo but it was pretty overwhelming; at the moment I am not that keen on living in Japan anyways so that is fine.  I definitely didn't see an obvious English speaking one!
• India (Hyderabad office, not sure how much opportunity to go here): There are actually a few English speaking Waldorf schools here (who knew!).  They are here, here, here.
• Singapore: there is a small group in Singapore which is trying to establish a primary level Waldorf School (they have a pre-school), it looks really cute.  Here is a description of different preschool options in Singapore that lays out who funds what.
• Australia (Sydney office): has "oldest Steiner school in Australia" (I think they said) called Glenaeon.  It is about a 20 min drive from the Google office.  Looks like a snazzy private school that happens to be Waldorf.  There is another one that is 45 min - 1 hour away in the hills that also looks neat.  There is even a Rudolf Steiner College in Sydney for adult education and teacher training (I sometimes wonder if I would get enough into Waldorf that I would like to teach).  Another one is only about 30 minutes away from the office in Belrose and is called Kamaroi.  It looks a little bit more homey (which I like) and it seems to only go to Grade 6 (but it definitely has a waiting list).  It seems that their terms are completely different than ours, and I guess start the year at the end of Jan/beginning of Feb.  For 2017 at one school it is: Term 1 Feb 1 - Apr 5, (3 week break), Term 2 Apr 26 - June 28, (3 week break), Term 3 July 19 - Sept 20, (3 week break), Term 4 Oct 11 - Dec 13 (more like 6 weeks here over Christmas and I suppose summer holidays).  I wonder if the public schools work on the same term system?  
• Notes to self: Sydney is warm; the low in winter is about 9 C.  Sydney is a 15.5 hour flight from Vancouver - direct!  That means at the very best it is a 22 hour travel time to Ottawa.  It would be a great place to access SEA, NZ, etc. IF we had the vacation time.

Americas:

• Argentina (Buenos Aires office, not much Eng here): Andrew says this probably wouldn't work for a transfer as the main Eng office is in San Paulo.
• Canada (Waterloo office): only an hour from YYZ and a 5-6 hour drive home.  It looks like there are not Waldorf schools in Kitchener-Waterloo.  You have to go to Burlington (1 h drive), London (1.25 hr drive), or Guelph (30 min drive; this could work).  The London one has a one day a week program for homeschoolers (I originally thought it was in London, UK and that this boded well for homeschooling being prevalent there!).

Well it has been a few days since I wrote the intro.  Turns out they just cancelled our tree cutting for Wed, so now it will be in August.  It was really interesting to see all the different schools; does highlight for me how much I like the look of Waldorf schools.

Hugs, Jen

Home Schooling Around The World

Hi Annabelle,

I am musing tonight about where we might live in the future.  The prospect of Trump winning the election has us thinking about other places with Google offices around the world that might make a good home.  Not that we are super serious but we do talk about wanting to travel and see more of the world.  We often talk about either 1) taking a year or two and traveling, kind of like a sabbatical, or 2) transferring to another office and then traveling in the "nearby" area.

I was looking tonight a bit at the sunshine hours in various cities (I like the website WeatherSpark).  It is sure hard to beat Colorado on sunshine and it has been amazingly lovely for Andrew to not have SAD.

Then I remembered that homeschooling is illegal in some countries and that I am not sure I want to enroll my kids in school.  I know if we were just traveling through this wouldn't be an issue, but if we are living and working there I think this is a factor to consider.  That said we might feel that being abroad is a great time for them to be in school since they could learn another language.  I guess it would depend on how old they were and what path we follow as homeschoolers.

So info is below.  It is from an Advocates for Homeschooling website, so I am curious if they are a bit biased.  But I figure it gives a general picture of where could work.  More research would have to be done if we were actually getting serious.

• Europe:
• Germany (Munich office): illegal
• Switzerland (Zurich office): legal but varies by canton; Zurich now requires teaching credential; wonder if not being fluent in one of their official languages (German, French, Italian) would be an issue as well
• Ireland (Dublin office): legal but seems to have onerous registration and legal actions taken when not followed
• UK (London office): legal and do not have registration requirements unless have been in school
• France (Paris office, not sure how much Eng): legal, need to notify annually, doesn't seem to be always positive with the evaluators
• Belgium (Brussels office, not sure there is very much Eng in this office): legal, likely need to have testing (varies by region of country)
•  Asia/Australia:
• Japan (Tokyo office): this site I am reading says "The law is vague and the business community is supporting home schooling, so home schoolers are largely left alone."
• India (Hyderabad office, not sure how much opportunity to go here): law is to go to mandatory school, but it seems that the state has said it is not going to worry about some families who choose to homeschool
• Singapore: legal (do you know they only have 6 years of mandatory schooling, even if you aren't homeschooled!)
• Australia (Sydney office): homeschooling is legal but varies by state in how many hoops there are to go through, other people go through distance learning programs that are discussed in the same category in that you are learning at home, it appears that NSW (where Sydney is located) has the most restrictive guidelines and you have to teach the curriculum.  Here is a comparison between home education and distance learning in NSW.
• Americas:
• Argentina (Buenos Aires office, not much Eng here): no legislation that prohibits
• Canada (Waterloo office): Ontario law is quite supportive of homeschooling, with no testing requirements (although one must notify), unless they become suspicious of you for some reason

It is kind of funny to think about living somewhere else and homeschooling but part of the concern is that once you are in the school system you have all the truancy and attendance issues.  And if we want to be traveling around the area, or back home, this seems restrictive.

Hugs, 

Jen