051: Northwest Territories FI | Scott

Disclaimer: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. That means we may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking through our links.

Money Mechanic
Hello, listeners. Welcome to Explore FI Canada, where we sit at the roundtable with Canadians, and share their thoughts, ideas and personal journeys to financial independence.

Chrissy
Thanks to Matt McKeever for sponsoring Explore FI Canada. Matt is a Canadian investor, CPA, entrepreneur, and real estate expert who achieved FIRE at age 31. Do us a favour and check out his YouTube channel by searching Matt McKeever or using the link in our show notes.

Money Mechanic
Chrissy, it’s TGIF again here we are recording on Fridays, this is becoming a thing.

Chrissy
Yes, it is. Welcome home.

Money Mechanic
It is nice to be home. I did experience some serious some real Canadian winter I was in Alberta for part of my time at work. And it was into the minus double digits. And it’s a little frosty here at home right now. It’s mid-February. And we’re recording this. And I don’t know about you over in the mainland there. But it’s deep freeze over here in Vancouver Island which our guest is probably he’s laughing a little bit.

Chrissy
Wimps!

Money Mechanic
How is it over in north where you are?

Scott
It’s actually really quite warm right now. It’s only minus 25 minus 35 with the windchill. So it warmed up…

Chrissy
Only?

Scott
Well, it warmed up 15 degrees since last week.

Money Mechanic
That’s awesome. Well, exciting show here today, because we have our first guest from the Territories of Canada. Chrissy, I’ve been hunting around trying to find a way because we want to Explore FI Canada, as the name says. So we’re finding people to chat with, and we have Scott joining us from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Welcome to the show, Scott.

Scott
Thanks for inviting me.

Money Mechanic
We’re excited to learn about your pursuit of financial independence up there, in the less cold than last week North.

Chrissy
We don’t have any bloggers that I know of in the FIRE community in Canada in the territories. So it’s nice that we at least get to interview someone from the Northwest Territories.

Scott
That’s wonderful. Um, yeah, maybe I’ll blog some time. But I’m at this present moment, I’m just I’m enjoying all of the different blogs and podcasts are out there and, and consuming that information rather than saying anything out loud, in this manner.

Money Mechanic
For sure. Maybe just give us a little bit of a brief overview of what your FI journey looks like right now. And then we’ll dig into a little bit of how you got there.

Scott
Yeah, so I am, I had a back spasm a year and a few months ago, and that put me out of commission. So I couldn’t really, I couldn’t sit, and I couldn’t stand, I could walk and I could lie down. So a year ago, Christmas, I started doing a lot reading on financial stuff. Before that I was with a financial sales man, I would like to call them dealing with my financials, and not really learning a lot about things. And so I started learning little bits and pieces from reading a couple books. And that brought me down to a big huge rabbit hole that brought me quickly to FI and FIRE and, and the community. And because I’m already I’m exploring this journey later in life, I’m 49 right now, a lot of the elements of FIRE and a lot of the elements of financial independence, I’ve been aware of them for for years, frugality and all those different things. If you come into it, and have no start, then you start way behind. But so I started quite far quite advanced in that process, in terms of mentality and assets, and all those types of things. And so it’s been a whirlwind year where I’ve just consumed, oh, I would estimate around 40 different books around the area of finance and the psychology around around things. And it’s just been a wonderful experience to sort of get a framework behind my thoughts of how I want to live my life.

Chrissy
So it’s only been a year since you’ve gotten into this whole journey. That correct?

Scott
Yeah, it’s been a year since I’ve been formally introduced…

Chrissy
Yeah, but you were already on the path without really knowing that you were on the path.

Scott
For sure. I started my life being living financial independence on and off, because I was I was self-employed when I was when I was younger, I was a circus artist. And I was and I was touring and living the dream slow traveling at points and times. I spent a few months in Europe a number of times in my in my younger life. And the only thing I didn’t ever have was money. But that was okay. And that creates the base for FI working out well because if you never have money then you never spend money, and therefore you don’t need money and, and you can be happy with less. And now that I make money, we’re still not spending that much money. And and we’re able to save a lot of it.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, I think that’s pretty interesting that having that living a frugal and intentional lifestyle before, kind of gears you set you up really well to when you do find financial independence and that habit becomes sort of a target for your life because you can look at it and go, Well, we don’t we didn’t have to worry about lifestyle inflation. And that’s what happens to so many people. And it’s interesting to hear you say that, you know, I think there’s other people on this journey too, that realize once they can put once they can frame it around this community, whether it’s FIRE or FI, I’ve been doing this before you and now I’ve got some purpose. Now there’s some books now with some framework. I like the way you said that. So you mentioned the circus. This is interesting.

Scott
Yeah.

Money Mechanic
Tell me. Tell me about this.

Scott
I can’t just throw it in there and have it slide in the conversation?

Money Mechanic
No, you can’t! I want to know.

Scott
This is gonna be a whole topic on its own. And it takes us out of out of FI in the Northwest Territories, but…

Money Mechanic
Okay, well keep it brief.

Scott
So I am I spent four years at National Circus School in Montreal. I’ve been doing juggling and unicycle and performing and fire eating and everything since I was 15. Or, 12 years old. And I spent 10 years touring Canada. One of my fun stories is up in Port Hardy on the island. We went by when we were touring there, there was a tree that had 200 bald eagles on it, and and everybody called them dump chickens, and they were the most impressive site. And so we’re all across Canada, seeing all kinds of wonderful things. Even your dump chickens.

Money Mechanic
Dump chickens of Vancouver Island. Yeah, there you go.

Chrissy
I’ve never heard that before.

Scott
You haven’t? Okay. Up in the north of the island. There. They’re a fairly common creature and they get into the garbage and everything, so.

Money Mechanic
They’re beautiful, but they are just scavengers. They are just scavengers.

Scott
Yes, they are.

Money Mechanic
Now, this experience you had in the circus 10 years traveling around? I mean, it sounds like you must have had just amazing experiences. Did that lifestyle, I don’t know anything about the circus, was it a free, frugal existence through that period? I can’t imagine you make a ton of money as a circus performer.

Scott
Well, our my path was a frugal existence. When I say circus, I worked with one other business partner, and we are both circus artists. And so there’s just the two of us. And so we toured in the back of a station wagon, all of our stuff in the station wagon. Or we would, we would found ways to get all of our equipment into four bags, which we could then fly with. And keep every bag underneath the 50 pound limit and go places. And yeah, so at the end of the day, we weren’t making huge amounts of money when I started. As a student there in Montreal, I was making $10,000 a year, and we were living on that. And, and well, I already told I’m 49 so I can date myself perfectly fine. That was 20 years ago, but but even 20 years ago, living on $10,000 was probably a stretch. But that that was where things were. And then at the end of it, we were we went up quadruple that amount. And, and that was great. And then I moved up to the Northwest Territories. And that’s one of the things we’ll we’ll talk about here is money changes the whole scope of things when you’re in the Northwest Territories, because because wages are better. And there’s a lot of things in the north that that make things… you get paid more. But then on the other side of things, things cost a lot more depending on how you want to how you want to live your life up here.

Chrissy
So tell us when you made the move. And when you also pivoted your career because you made quite a drastic change in your career as well.

Scott
Yeah, I guess it should be important to say that I’m not a circus artist in the Northwest Territories. There’s not a lot of places to perform, although it is a is a side hustle. As well, though, we, for the last nine years, we’ve been doing a circus camp up here, and living circus vicariously through our children, other kids that are interested in circus. So 10 years ago, I transitioned from being a circus artist to being a web developer, which can seem like a wide stretch of things. But if you look at at circus, there’s a lot of elements to it, you have to promote yourself, you have performing as a very small part of the job of any small business. And so I was doing a lot of those of those tasks. And I was also doing them for other other people as well as a side hustle when I was a circus artist. So I went from my side hustle being web development to my main job being web development.

Chrissy
And how did you learn web development? Was that just something you’re naturally interested in and you taught yourself? Or did you go back to school to learn that?

Scott
No. web development is a field that can the information is all there and you just have to have the interest and the time and and consume And so I’ve was doing that constantly. Just ever since I was a kid, I programmed and when, while computers were just being brought to the Primetime when I was in school. And, and but I would program basic applications for my dad who was a teacher at the time to, for his grade to class to do spelling and math and different things like that on Vic 20s. And then it’s always been an interest of mine, I’ve always been in the arts and the performing arts, as well as in the math and sciences and logic side of things. So it’s not a huge stretch for me to switch from one to the other. And I actually think that I’m doing better in my current role as a logical web developer than I was as a performer. I was a good performer, not saying I wasn’t, but um, but it fits my my, fits everything better. And I’m really enjoying my my transition. So I’m not sad at all, but I’m really happy. I had all those years of of that lifestyle, because I can’t do that now. My body can’t physically I even started late. I started at the National Circus School at 26 when everybody else was 17. And that nine years on your body doesn’t doesn’t make falling very easy.

Money Mechanic
I can imagine. So did you decide to take up web development full-time before you moved to the Northwest Territories? Or did it sort of come together as a package? And what was that decision to move up there?

Scott
Yeah, we were at a pivotal time with our circus company. And we either had to create a new show, probably probably hire other people to be performers and move into a director role, or transition. So we talked about it because we’re, again, we’re friends and business partners. And so we both figured, we both found transitional paths. And so I had a job up in the Northwest Territories, and he found a job in Montreal, and we both switched at the exact same time within within three months of broaching the conversation.

Money Mechanic
So did you move to Northwest Territories for the job offer? Or did you have a desire to move up there in the first place? and What did it look like, sort of getting up there? You’re from Montreal? That’s a fairly drastic shift going up to Yellowknife?

Scott
Yeah, there’s a lot of holes in the story here. I had a friend from university that had moved up here a few years before me and I actually was up here visiting a couple years before I moved up. I spent half my life in small communities. I actually was born when my parents lived in Baker Lake, Northwest Territories, which is now Baker Lake Nunavut. And so I’ve lived in small communities for half my life. And I’ve lived in big cities for half my life, both Toronto and Montreal. And so Yellowknife is, is a wonderful balance between those two, those two extremities, it’s about 20,000 people, and it’s fully contained. So it has all of the all of the things you need all the amenities, and it also has nature within a few minutes. Aurora watching 15 minutes away, we would wake up with my with my son, wake up at one o’clock in the morning, make a thermos of hot chocolate and drive out and could watch Aurora, right and eat marshmallows, so…

Chrissy
That is crazy. It does I that boggles my mind because people pay 1,000s of dollars. They when we used to host homestay students before COVID. A lot of them would pay $600 for one person just to go for a couple of nights and see the Aurora and it was just by chance, if you happen to see it, it wasn’t guaranteed that you would see it. So it’s amazing. It’s right in your backyard, you can just go see it.

Scott
Yeah, and not only can you see it is if you’re here all the time, you can monitor it and go out the times where it’s amazing. And I’ve seen it been out a few times where where things are spiraling around and it’s not just green, it’s dancing lights and color and there’s greens are is the common color but there’s also purples and pinks and spirals and all kinds of things happen up there that that you can’t imagine and and you can’t you can’t get it as a tourist because you’re well you might but the odds are slim.

Money Mechanic
Definitely on my bucket list of all the places I’ve traveled. That’s one thing I’ve never really witnessed is the Aurora Borealis. Very very cool so it sounds like Yellowknife offers a lot of opportunities to get outside. Get into nature do trips that don’t cost a lot of money. Do you take advantage of that? Is that a highlight for you up there?

Scott
Yeah, I I did a trip a couple couple summers ago where where we just we went out and canoe we carried the canoe to the lake. Great Slave Lake. That’s how close it is to our house. And and then paddled for four days and was at a campsite that was 60 kilometers away when we were at the end of our trip and then got a ride home. And during that four days we didn’t see a single soul. We saw a moose couple moose and some birds and different animals and things like that. But um, but it was it was a wonderful experience and and people pay big money. To have those experiences, and those are the things that if you want to have those experiences for cheap, then the Northwest Territories is a wonderful place because you get paid well, and you get those experiences for cheap. If you want to have other experiences, like going to a mall or West Edmonton Mall, and, and, and other things like that, those are the things that cost us money because you’d have to travel to a city, and then stay at a city and do all those things. So so it’s a big balance of why you’d… so my choice of being here works really well for for FI because I can I get a lot of pleasure out of the things that are economical here. Some people move up here. And it’s the opposite. They have to spend a lot of money to get their pleasure because they always have to be traveling to the south or traveling to this place or that place. And if you’re doing that, if you’re trying to do that regularly, then that costs a lot of money. And you don’t actually save any money when you’re in the Northwest Territories.

Chrissy
Yeah, exactly. So I’m curious, did you move up there as a single person? And then did you meet your wife there? Or did you meet previously? And you decided together to move up there? And did you have kids yet? At what point in your story does family come in?

Scott
Yeah, we had two kids already. And I moved up here, I actually moved up here on on July 5, and my family didn’t get here until the 15th of September. So there was a two and a half month period, where I came up here had to find a house, purchase it and then figure out how to get everybody up here. And so I ended up flying back to Montreal and hopping in a U-Haul. And the kids and the wife flew up and I drove drove up here with my dad. And so we’d have two people. And it took five days of driving and got all our stuff up here. And and that’s been our home ever since.

Chrissy
Wow. How many years is that now?

Scott
It’s 10 years now.

Chrissy
10 years? Okay. That’s amazing. What an adventure for your whole family.

Scott
Yeah, I should. 10 years is actually it almost gets me to a point now where I get some some street cred in Yellowknife. Because there’s a couple groups of people in Yellowknife there. There are the people that there’s a transient group. And statistics are made up on the spot all the time. And this one might be but I’ve actually heard it 40% of our population is is transient within two years. So 40% of the population in Yellowknife comes and goes within a two year period. And then there’s another part that’s been here all their life. They’re lifers. And that’s a separate section of the community. And, and so it’s really interesting and as a community, because it’s a very open community, because there’s so many people that come and go. And so lots of new people, and you can make connections really quickly. And at the same time, there are some closeness because there are some people that have to protect themselves because they’re constantly having people come and go and and never creating any consistency. So it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting place to to raise a family and all those things as well.

Money Mechanic
Would you say that because of that 40% transient is that because of industry and job availability that people sort of come in, make some money and then leave?

Scott
I think you missed the first part of this conversation. It was minus 55 with the Windchill minus 46, minus 46 by the temperature three days ago.

Money Mechanic
I would have left I would have left. I admit.

Scott
There are people that leave the plane, and then try to get another plane immediately after that to get back on to leave.

Chrissy
I can’t even imagine what temperatures like that feel like I think in Vancouver, the coldest I’ve ever experienced in my life is minus 15. That’s nothing right?

Scott
Yeah, well, so when I say that it, it’s 15 degrees warmer. You know, when it’s zero degrees, and all of a sudden it becomes 15 degrees. It feels like this is amazing. Well, when it’s minus 45, and then it becomes minus 30. It becomes amazing. You all of a sudden, don’t wear your Canada Goose. You go outside without a hat on. I literally saw it. I think it was crazy still because it’s still really cold. Somebody was walking with T in T shirts and a short outside today at minus 30.

Chrissy
You’re joking that that must hurt your skin somehow.

Scott
Yeah, he wasn’t outside for long. I kept on looking back and he went into a building fairly quickly. But But he went from one building to another in shorts and a T-shirt. But it’s compared to the temperature it was earlier this week. It is warm.

Money Mechanic
Chrissy, it’s a dry cold.

Scott
That’s why people Sorry, I… it’s a dry cold. It’s still cold.

Chrissy
Yeah.

Scott
That’s one aspect of the reason why people are transient. And the other aspect is that that there’s an expectation Oh, I’ll come up here and make a lot of money. And, and they don’t know, not everybody does. Some people spend more money than they make because things cost more here. Housing as it’s comparable to, I would say it’s comparable to the suburbs of Vancouver.

Chrissy
Really? Okay.

Scott
Yeah. So.

Chrissy
So give us an idea. Okay, maybe let’s say a 2,000 square foot house. How much would that cost?

Scott
So a 2,000 square foot house would in a nice location of town, or most in most locations a town would be between between 700 and 900,000.

Chrissy
Okay, no, that’s not a Vancouver suburb.

Scott
Sorry, I guess I’m completely off.

Chrissy
That ism it is expensive. But

Money Mechanic
That’s for basic for a normal family home.

Chrissy
How does that compare to Victoria?

Money Mechanic
That’s, that’s pretty ballpark. Yeah, it’s pretty similar, actually.

Chrissy
Okay.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, that’s a lot. So

Scott
Yeah, so so maybe it’s not Toronto and Vancouver. But um, but a lot of the other cities in Canada would be fairly comparable.

---

Chrissy
Hey, Money Mechanic, you use Passiv, right? How do you like it?

Money Mechanic
It’s great. It’s like my own personalized robo advisor. I set it up one time, then Passiv helps keep my portfolio balanced by securely connecting to Questrade.

Chrissy
Wow, sounds like Passiv saves you a lot of time.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, no more spreadsheets! And Passiv even has one-click purchasing, which makes life so much easier.

Chrissy
That sounds amazing. I also heard that Passiv added a new goal feature to help DIY investors reach their investment targets.

Money Mechanic
That’s right. The goal feature is built right in and helps you stay on track with your investments. Chrissy, did you know that Passiv is free for Questrade clients?

Chrissy
Free is good, especially when it normally costs $99! How can our listeners get in on this offer?

Money Mechanic
Just go to Passiv.com/EFIC.

---

Chrissy
So what is it that would make real estate prices there relatively high? Is it that scarcity of materials that all needs to be brought in? Labor? What is it that makes it expensive?

Scott
It’s probably, that’s a tough question. Because at the end of the day, I think it was manufactured that way, at one point in time, where were real estate agents were doing their, their good job to make sure lots of things were sold, and lots of people transitioned in houses and the real estate market went up about 15 years ago, it climbed fairly quickly. But because of the expenses, labor is expensive. And there’s a lot of other expenses there. So that’s, that makes it the big difference, right? Buying a car, maybe is a couple $1,000 more than buying a car down south. But housing is is definitely is more expensive. And at the same time, rent is, is it’s difficult to get something reasonable to stay in for less than than $1,600. That’s for a single person. For a family, you’d be looking at $2,000 to $3,000, for something to some place to stay in. And so it’s expensive in all aspects of real estate.

Money Mechanic
Now, those additional expenses, I want to ask you some more questions about housing as well. But just out of curiosity, since we’re kind of talking about that those additional expenses for a vehicle and for housing, because they’re your two biggest costs. We can talk a little bit about groceries here in a minute. Do the wages reflect that across the board that people are earning the 10, 15, 20% more that sort of equals it out?

Scott
I think it depends on what you’re doing. And there’s a lot of areas where, where people definitely get paid the amount to compensate for that. But there are some areas where where people are getting paid minimum wage as well. And I think it’s around $15 here. And it’s tough to to make ends meet when you’re getting paid minimum wage. So it’s kind of there are some places we have mining, and mining was a big… in Yellowknife, there were gold mines. And mining was a really big industry for a good number of years. And now we have diamond mines that are they’re flying but they’re a lot of the services are based out of Yellowknife. And so some of that money gets put into into the town and raises the prices of things. So it’s tough to say why everything is expensive, and whether people get paid enough to to compensate for that. But in most cases, yeah, we’re… wages are more than than they are for the equivalent wage down south.

Chrissy
And what about for you? Did you… I assume that you can work pretty much anywhere? You can work remotely. So did that have any effect on your wages to move up to Yellowknife?

Scott
It’s not actually as easiest to work remotely for the Yellowknife for Yellowknife as as one would think.

Chrissy
Ah, internet, right?

Scott
No, no. The main reason is is that the the territory is a lot of the money. I think $35 to $40,000 is given to the government and Northwest Territories as transfer payments from the federal government, for every person that lives here. So there’s a big push to make sure that people that are working here are living here. And there are incentive policies for within the government to make sure that that, like they give an advantage to people that are local, on government contracts and things like that. And because the local economy is one of the driving forces of the Northwest Territories, having people here is important in order to be able to have services, and in order to be able to have all the things that that we have. And the more people you have, the more that can be developed.

Money Mechanic
So let’s dig into some of your costs on your financial independence journey up there, we’ve talked a little bit about housing sounds somewhat comparable. I’ve noticed on my taxes, there’s do you get a north of 60 allowance, or is there any tax breaks on that?

Scott
Yeah, I think we have two different. So there’s two special regions in Canada. I’m not sure in the names, I think there’s like the Zone A and Zone B or whatever. And whichever zone is the most isolated, is the zone we’re in but I believe part of BC, the northern part of BC is the same zone as us. And, and depends on your isolation. So that’s a subset.. or I don’t think a subsidy… it’s a it’s a tax benefit for that. And we also get a housing benefit as well, on the taxes of if you rent or own the Northwest Territories, you also get get a benefit for that as well.

Money Mechanic
So in general, then, while we haven’t touched on groceries, yet, what do you find when you go shopping in the store, I mean, they’ve gone up across the board everywhere for that’s for sure. Obviously, you were in a big enough community that supplies an issue, but because of a little bit more of a remote location are those prices passed on sort of across the board,

Scott
I have. I have a 10 year time up here, where I haven’t seen how things changed down south. But I know that things are somewhat more expensive in certain areas. Unfortunately, you can buy a two-liter of pop for the same price as you can buy a two-liter of pop in anywhere and in the south as well. But I was joking with my brother, who lives in Ottawa, about during the fall or the end of the summer, but cauliflower, and he was able to get cauliflower for 99 cents, and and we were able to get cauliflower for $4. So those are some of the areas that we would go to the market in Montreal and get a bushel of basil for $15. This is 12 years ago, but I’m sure it’s not that much more now. And now if we want any basil at all, we either grow it ourselves or we pay $5 for a little tiny package. And the little tiny package is probably $5 in grocery stores down south as well. But we don’t have the option to shop around. We don’t have we only have three grocery stores. We don’t have the the Asian grocery store that has cheap vegetables and meats there we don’t have all of those choices that allow you to get things really cheap.

Chrissy
Now do you have big box stores? For instance Superstore, Costco, Walmart for groceries?

Scott
Yeah, we have we have two Independents, which is Loblaw’s chain. We have a Walmart but it’s not a grocery store Walmart, it’s just, it’s got dry goods and canned goods and things like that, but not the not the fresh fruit. And we have a Co-Op, which is Saskatchewan and Alberta, have all the communities have the Co-Op we have a we have a Co-Op as well for food here. And so that’s our main our main shopping sources. So…

Chrissy
Yeah, I’ve heard that produce is a lot more expensive and harder to get up north. Have you found that that’s the case?

Scott
We have a road and so you’d want to talk to people without a road.

Money Mechanic
The fly-in communities, yeah.

Scott
Okay, so so if you are looking at at the small or remote communities up in the up in the north, like that are that are just fly-in, and I’ll go to Nunavut because Inuvik is the center of the capital of Nunavut and it’s, it’s fairly big, but it’s fly-in. So, prices are way more expensive for vegetables and meats and perishables. In the fly-in communities. We have a bridge now, it came in while I was here, so in the last 10 years, and before we had a bridge, there were times where you had to stock up cuz there’s a six week period of fall or freeze up that could last it could last up to six weeks before people could get things here. So the options were ferry or or ice road and ice road might seem strange to people. But we have in the wintertime we have a lot more a much bigger road network because we have ice roads all around, and you can drive for great distances across lakes. It makes things more efficient that way.

Chrissy
So are these natural roads that form because of the water? Are they do they make them the same every year? Do people follow the same routes? And do they appear on a map?

Money Mechanic
Do they go up there and make ice?

Chrissy
No, I know. But but a lake is like an organic shape. Right? A road is straight.

Money Mechanic
Do they plow the roads?

Chrissy
Do they make the same routes? Well, I don’t know! Like how does this happen? Is it different every year, or the same every year?

Scott
They plow they plow roads. And they actually do more work than that. Because they have to. In some areas they’re they’re making, they’re making ice roads up to the diamond mines. And the ice roads to go up to the diamond mines are taking tanker trucks of fuel up to the diamond mines. And I don’t know the weights of these things, but they’re heavy. And so they actually do systems where they’re where they’re putting taking water from below and putting it above. So the ice gets thicker, quicker. So they can sustain the weight of the vehicles that are going on these roads up north. And there’s hundreds of kilometers of ice roads heading to to the diamond mines. Locally, there’s a few roads that go to the to the communities that are that make it a lot quicker or given access road access during the wintertime that they don’t have during the summertime. But there’s they spend a lot of energy building these roads, because it’s still cheaper than then having a road that’s all season road.

Money Mechanic
That’s pretty cool.

Chrissy
And that they’re free for just residents to drive as long as I assume you need chains to drive on them.

Scott
No, no, no, no. There’s there’s packed snow on it. It’s interesting, snow…

Chrissy
I’m sorry! I don’t know anything about these roads!

Money Mechanic
Stay home if it snows tomorrow, I don’t want you driving around.

Chrissy
I can handle a bit of snow!

Scott
When it’s zero when it’s around zero. Water. Snow is slippery. Yes, you walk anywhere snow is slippery. Because it’s you put your foot on or your car on it. And, and it melts it and it becomes water in it and it becomes a slippery surface. When snow is below minus 30 or 20, even. It doesn’t even it’s not even slippery anymore. It’s actually quite tacky. Cross country skiing in the wintertime is almost like shuffling along without wax is there’s no glide. Because the snow is not that slippery when it’s really cold. So there’s snow covering on these these roads. And also, they’re really wide. They’re like a four-lane highway wide. And there’s only two cars that every 10 minutes that drive on it. Right. It’s not. There’s not a large population of people that are driving on it. So it changes the paradigm that… it has to be experienced, I think.

Chrissy
Yeah, yeah.

Scott
It’s definitely part of the experience of coming up here is seeing these roads that and getting out and looking and there’s there’s ice below you and you’re standing and there’s a big crack in it and and you can see this crack, but it’s not really a crack because you’ve got up to… I’m jumping between metric and imperial but up to five feet of ice below you when you’re standing on it. And that’s a lot of ice. You can you can drive a, I think drive a snowmobile on ice at six inches thick. You can walk on a couple of inches…

Chrissy
So five feet is more than enough.

Scott
So when it’s five feet, yeah, it’s it’s more than enough.

Chrissy
Very cool. Well, thank thank you for educating me on these ice roads. They sound really cool.

Money Mechanic
Alright, that’s enough about ice Road Truckers. Let’s get back to this FI journey.

Scott
Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. It’s a really I have to do a talk about about the Northwest Territories first so that everybody can get an idea of what it’s like, because it’s its own education, right?

Money Mechanic
Yeah.

Chrissy
It’s a whole other world.

Money Mechanic
Okay, so financial independence. What do you use up there? Anything specific that helps you optimize, save money. And this can be anything when it comes to you? I’m thinking I’m sitting here my heat’s running more because it’s colder right now at home, you must have costs for energy efficiency, things like that. Vehicles probably get abused a little bit more with the harsh winters. What do you do think of a couple things off the top of your head that help you optimize and save you money on those big costs.

Scott
So we talked a little bit about housing, I want to go back to housing, because we made a conscious choice. Well, I don’t know if it was a conscious choice. It was probably a financial choice to buy. We could call it a modular home but everybody would call it a mobile home. When we moved here, and so we spent $300,000 on a large rectangle, 70 feet by 16 feet, that gets hauled up here by a, by a tractor trailer by a transport truck. And so it’s an expensive outlay, but not when you’re looking at that we call them stick builds, right. So we have our own terminology for things because we have different types of houses. So we have stick built houses, and then we have modular mobile homes, houses. And so by choosing that house, the house that we have, the two things that are yearly, that happen are taxes and heat. And I’ve done rough estimates: for every 1,000 square feet, so our place is just under just over 1,000 square feet. So if you’re comparing this place to a 2,000 square foot, for every 1,000 square feet, it costs $2,000 a year for taxes, and $2,000 a year for heat. And so that’s $4,000 a year that we pay for those two things a little bit more, actually, taxes have gone up over the number of years, but but someone who has a place twice as big, it costs $8,000 a year to heat and taxes. And there’s a large place that we’ve we’ve gone a couple of times to and it’s $15,000 to heat for the year. And this is a probably a 4,000 square foot house or whatever. But that just having just choosing small, saves a lot of money. Every year, we make enough money that we could have a house that is more, but we’re happy in our space, and the experiences that we can have, because of that are greatly increased. And so that’s one of the places where people talk all the time about when you buy a house, you’re buying the house that you might need in the future, and you’re buying too much house. And, and that’s an easy, easy place to go to here. Because you have a, there’s a stigma. And I knew I had it when I came here that mobile homes are trailer parks and things like that… and but here, they’re houses. They’re homes, and they’re homes that are more economically viable. So you can not put, not be house-poor. So that’s one of the big places that we’re we’re saving a lot of money per year by just having a smaller home.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Chrissy
Well, that’s the trend, you know, people are into Tiny Homes now. Right? You’re You’re not a tiny home, but it’s smaller than the norm.

Scott
And, and I’m on the one side of things. There’s also house boaters, where the people actually build houses on floating devices and live on the lake, and they don’t pay taxes at all. And they’re all feeling very small and and so that that’s a whole other side of things that we’ve never never gone into. But people are able to save live really cheap here if they want to.

Money Mechanic
That just totally reminded me This is totally off-topic, but I’m throwing it in here. Chrissy, you’re gonna have to put this in the show notes. There’s…

Chrissy
That video?

Money Mechanic
The YouTube one? Did I tell you about it? The guy?

Chrissy
I think I yeah, I think we were talking about on Twitter a while back, right?

Money Mechanic
Yeah, he’s built, Scott. Scott, we’ll have to send it to you. He’s built his whole house out of debris that floats down the river. He lives over here on the Lower Mainland, like probably 45 minutes from Chrissy’s house and he lives completely off-grid in a river estuary, and has been collecting, you know, debris from the river and building up. He’s got chickens and veggie gardens and garden.

Chrissy
Yeah.

Money Mechanic
It’s fantastic. There’ll be a YouTube video in the shownotes to check out.

Chrissy
Well, the funny thing. The funny thing is, as we were talking about it on Twitter, everyone’s like, I know that guy. And it was three different people all over the world. Collect stuff that comes along and they’re like, Oh, I just built my own house.

Money Mechanic
I be I’m all over a float home.

Scott
It’s interesting. But there’s also there’s, again, freeze up and thaw. And those times are challenging for people that live on the ice. Because they’re they have one foot inside a canoe and they’re kind of pushing themselves along. But they could break through at any point in time. And so there’s a lot of challenges in in that lifestyle as well. And it’s a choice that a lot of people when they have family say they don’t they don’t choose that lifestyle anymore.

Money Mechanic
If it was easy, everybody would do it.

Scott
They would Yeah. Yeah. So another thing that that happens in the Northwest Territories is because we have extra money that comes in a lot of people don’t save money because we have this money and they go oh well I can afford this I can afford this. And when we bought our place It was a lot of places are sold with enough space to park all your toys. That is a major selling point for houses in the Northwest Territories. Because people have boats and Ski-Doos and four-wheelers and, and all these other toys. And they’re useful up here because you can use them fairly extensively. We borrowed a canoe from a friend for the first eight years and then we got another free canoe. And we’ve been able to do all our exploring by canoe, which makes it a lot cheaper. But if you buy a boat and a Ski-Doo and a four-wheeler, and have a truck and a car and all these things to experience, quote, unquote, experience the area, it can end up taking all of your money. And that that seems to be a lot of a lot of where extra money would go to is, is buying toys. And toys aren’t any more expensive up here than they are down south. You can just get more of them.

Money Mechanic
Of course, yeah, I like the one now where you can actually put a track and a ski on your dirt bike and go snow biking. It actually, it actually looks really fun. But I bet I think you’re right there. One of the things is it, I always, I always kind of scratched my head a little bit because you know, being a mechanic, I love going fast. I like all those things. But I recognize the direct relationship between owning a toy that costs you money, and having to work more to be able to afford that, which then means you have less time to go and enjoy it. So it’s really one of those things. I don’t think people really weigh that, kind of offset that, consequence, that like, of course, we’re getting new sleds for this winter. But I’m gonna have to work some overtime to be able to afford them. And they don’t have any time to go out in them. So they sit idle the majority of the time and it’s like, is that the trade-off that you want? Are you working for that toy that you don’t get to use?

Scott
Overtime? Just finance it!

Just finance it! You can finance so much!

Money Mechanic
It’s scary, isn’t it? Because now like I was I was totally blown away. You can get like 10 year financing on boats. 10 years! It’s ridiculous!

Chrissy
Wow, it’s dangerous. That’s dangerous.

Scott
Six year financing on a Ski-Doo and the life of a Ski-Doo could be only a year if you hit a stone. Like there’s there’s, there are there are ways that that won’t survive those six years, so…

Money Mechanic
Yeah, what you’re Ski-Dooing on five inches of ice, not six inches of ice.

Chrissy
Yeah, fall through. So tell me a little bit more about this extra income you’re talking about? Is it the transfer payments that you’ve mentioned? That is it $35 to $40,000 per person that is that? Does that mean it’s cash to you? Or is that cash to your local government? How does that work?

Scott
No, it’s cash to the government. And wages are it’s a supply and demand case for a lot of a lot of things. Where where private industry, it’s the supply and demand if they can get someone up here cheap. When I came up here, I didn’t have a great clue of the prices and the cost and everything. And I came up here making. I started at $55,000 a year, my first year here, which most people would say wouldn’t be enough to live on. But because of my growing up, and my frugality, and everything that we still paid extra payments on our mortgage, when we when we got here, and it was all it was all doable. But the government is a good thing to look out because governments have similar jobs across the board, right. And so if you’re looking at a policy person in the Northwest Territories, they’re paid 20, 30, 40%, more than a policy worker in a government in the south. So so you have that, that extra pay as well. And then, depending on where you live in the Northwest Territories, they add on to that with a Northern Living Allowance. That is, depending on on the community can be anywhere between $4,000 and $15 or $20,000. But if you’re paying if you’re if you’re getting $20,000, it’s because you’re… in order to get a green pepper, you’re paying $8 for it in the winter time. So…

Chrissy
So it’s to cover that extra cost of living.

Scott
Yeah, so there’s that there’s a number of different ways that that people are compensated for that. And again, the trades to get a plumber into my house is going to cost me $150 to $300 an hour to get someone to do work. And so those things are very expensive as well.

Chrissy
So would you say then that you have these extra benefits that you get? But there are some higher costs? Would you say it pretty much evens out? Or would you say someone like you who’s very frugal is able to kind of game the system a little and make it work to your advantage that you have more than you would have in in the southern areas.

Scott
I think I think you can work it to your advantage. I think that that you have some choices. And you might be able to have a nicer house if you’re down south, but we can have a nicer car because we’re up here or whatever. Like there’s there’s some balances that are going to be back and forth because depending on what’s expensive and what’s not expensive, but overall when you have more money coming in, you can make more choices. And and I think that that making smart choices with that can make a big difference. I know of a couple that came up here. This is pre pre FI but for me for pre understanding of FI. But they worked up here for two years, they both made small wages around $40 or $50,000. So that’s small for around here, and ended up being able to save $80,000, buy a house on the East Coast, and then work a lot less. Right. So there are ways of doing it. But you have to make sacrifices.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, this isn’t an easy journey to financial independence, you have to be intentional. And sometimes there’s a little bit of sacrifice along the way. And I like how you’re saying that, you know, once you’ve optimized everything earning more money is really going to move the needle more than anything else.

Scott
And the other aspect of it is, is opportunity, right. And so I always say, Tell the expression, if there’s a job that you want in Northwest Territories, wait two years, and if you’re qualified for it, it’ll be yours. Because there’s, it is a transient nature. And so jobs come up much more often. And it allows you to, to move around and to have opportunities that you wouldn’t be able to, you wouldn’t even be qualified for in other areas of the country. Because there is a demand. Right? Not, not a lot of people come up here. And so they have to work hard to get good talent. So so people that have the skill sets can have their choice of what they want to what they want to do.

Chrissy
I want to get into the education side of things, as you mentioned that there are some there’s some funding that kids might get. And also, after that I want to go into what your kids’ futures look like up in the Northwest Territories, is that the plan for them to stay and raise their own families there, or, or do they plan to get their education and then fly but fly the coop and go to warmer pastures. But let’s just start with the education though. Tell, tell me more about this local funding that you might get?

Scott
Yeah. So for every, every year that you that you are in school in Northwest Territories, you get a half year of financing paid for for school. So if you’re here for the 12 years of education, you have six years of post-secondary education that gets funded. And I’m my my son is 15 right now. So he’s in grade 10. So I don’t know all the ins and outs of all the details. I just know from the information I I know some information. So they pay for tuition and travel to and from the school that you’re going to. So I guess I should I say that there are no universities in north in the Northwest Territories, there is a nursing program here now that you can you can get do nursing here. And they’re working in the next five years to have a have a post-secondary education school. But it’s going to be small, and it’s not going to be it’s probably going to be a lot of things that that makes sense to do in the north. So if you want to go and get a bachelor degree, then what they do is they’ll find the closest location to Yellowknife to be able to get that and they will pay for the expenses of that place. So if Edmonton has a lot of different programs, and it’s our closest, large community, so so if you’re getting an arts degree, they will pay for two trips back and forth per year to Edmonton so that you can get there and get back for Christmas and go out again. And they’ll pay for the tuition of the program there.

Chrissy
Wow, that sounds amazing.

Scott
Yeah, and then they have grant or loans. And so they’ll give a large chunk of money for loans. And at the end of the time, if you come back, and you’re working in the Northwest Territories, for every, if you’re working in, in one of the larger communities for every year that you’re working here, they forgive $4,000 with those loans. If you’re working in a smaller community in one of the more isolated communities, then it’s $8,000 worth of those loans per year. So you can get your education and then within a few years of working up here, have it completely free.

Money Mechanic
That’s amazing. Wow.

Scott
So that opportunity is an amazing, yeah, it’s an amazing opportunity for for people. So the RESPs that we started when we because we’re living in Montreal, at the time, we were like, we’re not have putting more money into this. We just have to stay here. So because the the opportunity to get a good education is available to you. I don’t think it’s keeping us here. But if we were thinking of leaving, that would be a question of, well, should we because of this element of things. Absolutely. So and then to answer some of more of your questions, Chrissy. I don’t know about your kids, but my kids are going to, like, right now they’re they’re making their own decisions and they don’t want me to make any of the decisions. So whether they stay here or don’t stay here or or fly the coop. I have no clue.

Chrissy
Okay.

Scott
But but if they, if they want to find a way to to get those those loans paid off, then they have that opportunity to stay here. And it’s surprising how some people just don’t do that because they really don’t want to be here anymore. But I don’t think I think my kids are enjoying, they’re enjoying here. There’s a lot of I haven’t touched on this, but because it’s a smaller community, and it has a lot of things, there’s a lot of experiences here, my son is in gymnastics, and he’s in the competitive gymnastics. And he might never be in a competitive program in a big city, because of skill levels and things like that. But you have those opportunities, you have the opportunity to pretty much do anything you want. And at a level, like where you can travel around and, and go to go to the Western Games, as a gymnast, even though the odds of you being the top gymnast is not, is not there, because you don’t have the all of the support says you do down south, but you have those opportunities that that exist. And for families, I think that’s a, that’s a great aspect here is those ability to be able to do for kids to be able to do things that they they want and get deep into those those different sports, it’s a really fun part of things too.

Chrissy
Well, it’s definitely a unique place to grow up. It sounds like you’re really making the best of it, where you are really enjoying nature and getting outside and taking advantage of all that that’s just incredible some of the experiences that you’ve shared with us.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, I think that goes along with one of the things that you said to us here in the pre-show notes was that you like to explore FI with a mindset that is about experiences, and generating and making memories and things like that, that it’s really more important than money at the end of the day. And you mentioned a book that I haven’t heard of before that I’ll have to look up it was called Die With Zero. Maybe as we’re wrapping up the show here, just give us a little bit of insight on that. And your thought process there.

Scott
Yeah, it’s um, I really enjoy reading different books and, and Die With Zero was one that I really enjoyed. And it’s when when I read it, I go, Oh, yeah, that’s what I’m doing. Somebody is somebody is, is putting in words, some of my thought processes. And that happens a lot with these books, because it’s not that I haven’t thought of these things before is I just, it hasn’t been contextualized or written down and read. And Die With Zero is all about the philosophy of of experiences. And there are certain things you can do at certain times in your life that you can’t do at other times in your life, like there’s no way that I could work really hard for the first 20 years of my life, and then quit and become an acrobat. Your body needs to learn those things when it’s young. And those are things that just aren’t physically, you’re not capable of doing those, with the older learning them with their older body. I try to say that because I know there are people that can still do amazing things when they’re older. But learning those things when you’re older is is is one of the hard parts is because you get injured when you learn things, because it takes practice and work in those. So that’s why I specify that to learn new things when you’re older is that our physical is sometimes harder. So back to Die With Zero, those experiences. That’s what you talk about when you’re when you’re old. You don’t talk about the money you made and things that you talk about what you did and the things that you did. And so the concept of Die With Zero is to figure out how much you need to spend when you’re young how much you need to spend during the middle of your life and how much you need to spend when you’re old. And I’m seeing it firsthand, my parents who are nearing 80, they don’t enjoy traveling as much. They don’t want to spend a lot of time away from their home. And they’re spending less money because of that. But we’re the traditional retirement process is keep on making money until you’re 65. And then you have lots of money to be able to spend after that. But that’s when you start the first maybe 10 years, you’ll like travel and do all great all kinds of great things. But it’s not the same as traveling when you’re younger. And there’s different experiences that you can have at different ages. And so figuring out where money fits into that, and so that you’re not just having a whole lot of money when you’re dead. And it’s all intentional. So the book talks a lot about inheritance and things like that. And you can still be intentional and give inheritance, but plan it. And sometimes it might make sense to give an inheritance to someone when they’re 25 or 30. Because that’s when they need money. And if you wait until you’re dead, then they’re in their 50s or 60s. And they might not need money at that point in time. They needed money before in order to be able to have experiences. So it’s a great book and just makes you think about all of them. All of your intentionality it comes down we talked about this already in this this episode about intentionality. And it’s all about that.

Chrissy
Well, it sounds like it encapsulates the term that you want us to coin, Reverse FI and it’s true and it also, you’re mentioning in emails, just previously, that you listened to our episode with our editor, Max, and how there are a lot of parallels there. With your circus career, how you do have to do some things when you’re young. And that’s just the way you have to do them. Because it makes a difference what age you are, and how physically able you are to do these things. So it’s interesting to have that different take on FI to really focus on the experiences first, and then the money later,

Scott
Yeah, when I was when I was young, I spent probably like, eight, eight or 10 months out of the country in Europe, and North Africa, just traveling. And to the point where you spend, like you’re, my main budget for the whole trip was $3 or $4,000, but you’re gone for four or five months. And that’s things that that’s a different type of travel than you could do and experience when you’re older. And in his story, he was the Die With Zero story, he was talking about one of his roommates did that and went in debt to actually go travel at that time, and wouldn’t give it up for anything, because, because those experiences are timely and important to do. And, and so I coined Reverse FI I kind of talked about because all of the things that I did when I was younger, are kind of the dream of FI is to be able to slow travel to be able to, to, to, to, to have your own career doing what you want to do. And, and I did a lot of those things. And, and I’m really happy I did all those things. But I didn’t have the financial backing, if anything didn’t work out, you have to you have to figure it out, right? And figure out how to how you’re going to solve that problem. Because you don’t have that the same financial backing is as you would if you were financially independent. But um, but it doesn’t change the experiences, they’re still they’re still wonderful.

Chrissy
Yeah, well, similar to Max’s story, how we’re trying to stress that, you know, it’s the concept of FI and what you do to get there it works even at an older age. In fact, it may be more even more important who are, for people who are late to the game and need to start at an older age, those tactics are still effective at those ages. And you’ll just get to retirement at a regular age where you know, rather than in your 30s or 40s. But isn’t that still a great thing to be able to live your life young and then get to retirement at a normal age?

Scott
Well, that is that is great, too. But I actually with the concepts and where I was starting, and my intentionality with money, and then the need for of how much I need, I can shorten, when, depending on how I think about my my FI journey. It could end in a couple years or take five years. But it’s a pretty short period of time to to be able to do things I should, I’d like to just go back to one of the things one of our intentionality is, is my wife actually stayed home and homeschooled for five years when we were here. Because we wanted to spend more time with our kids, and slow, slow down our pace of life. And so that was another intentional thing that we we did. And so we lived on one salary, which appears is not normal. And so just two years now, my wife has started working full-time. And so all of the money she’s making, we don’t need it, well, we don’t need it, we’re not gonna give it to anybody, but for our day to day.

Chrissy
So 100% of it goes to savings.

Scott
Yeah, 100% of that, and we’ve always saved anyways. So a lot of money is going into savings. And we don’t, it doesn’t even matter about our return rate of return. Because when you’re putting money away, at that pace, your rate of return is is is not as important. Because you’re not compounding much, you’re just putting it all the way saving saving. So yeah, that’s an interesting aspect of for us is, is we’ve done a lot of intentional things. But by keeping our expenses low, and always keeping it low, we’re able to now make more money and and save it all, and we don’t need more money to be happy. And we know that as a family we’ve gone on every every year and a half we’ve gone on big trips for for five weeks down to Central American and Southeast Asia and Europe. But our Europe trip we biked from, from Athens to to Rome. And and it was it was a great experience and and we got to hang out as a family for five weeks biking, and it wasn’t expensive. But we still got to do all the things that we want to do. That’s all part of part of your plan. And, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how money can be effective to to make happiness part of our life.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, that’s awesome. I think that is a really important part and getting in the FI or FIRE mindset helps you make those choices that you can use money as a tool to help you it doesn’t bring happiness but it sure helps you choose the things that you want to do with intentionality to find the happiness and the experiences that the mean the most for us. Now Chrissy, I was thinking I thought of a an end of show question now. I was curious because I think about this episode. And I don’t know, I really don’t know much about Northwest Territory. So it’s been fantastic to, to learn some things and hear your story up there. But I thought, well, maybe we need to start asking ballpark like what your annual expenses are and what your FI number looks like, you can be totally ballpark and this is just off the cuff. So don’t have to be too specific. Or I don’t want to be too personal. But I’m just curious, because now we’re talking to people from different places. What are your annual expenses you’ve got? There’s two, two adults and two kids.

Scott
Yeah, there’s four of us in our family, our annual expenses, just the number don’t go deep into it. I’m going to split it up, I’m gonna split it apart. Because Because the one part is housing, and that’s the mortgage. And that can change. We’re actually paying more aggressively than we need to, but we could pay less than we could pay more. So I’ll split that off. So without the without the housing, which is I think we’re paying about $24,000 or $26,000 a month, a year on housing. We’re spending about $40,000… $40, $45,000 to, on everything else. So that’s, that’s just a ballpark. It’s not, it’s not a huge amount of money. And if we were to break that down to the necessities and nice-to-haves, a large percentage of that is nice-to-haves. Because we travel and do lots of great things.

Money Mechanic
Yeah. Well, you’ll have to check out on Chrissy’s blog, EatSleepBreatheFI.com. She has a new interview series of for, how much do you spend a year? Chrissy, I sent you my info. So hopefully, yes, other people out there will be sending you info. So we’ll have a little database of how much it costs everybody to live.

Chrissy
Yeah, if you’re interested, I would love to have you join because you’re in such a unique part of the world. I think it would be really cool to see your expenses laid out.

Scott
Yeah, I just actually started tracking officially tracking them a year ago. So I have a year, year’s worth of data now. But it’s also a year’s worth of data during a pandemic. Yeah, so it’s probably slightly slower. In terms of accurate information.

Money Mechanic
it’s gonna be an outlier at the end of the data set.

Chrissy
For sure, yeah.

Money Mechanic
Well, Scott, it’s really appreciate you joining us on the show today, it’s been fascinating to learn about your story, I think we’ll do a whole other episode on circus because I love how you, you took your small business that you worked in and you turned it into your hobby side hustle that you enjoy doing on the side, and you live vicariously through your kids with that. And then you pivoted to have web development, which used to be your hobby that now is your full-time gig and it’s getting you close to FI within the next few years. So cool. Kudos to you. And I want to drive in an ice road and check out the Aurora Borealis one day, Chrissy?

Chrissy
Yeah, I’m right with you there. I would love to see either of those or both of them.

Scott
And the Northwest Territories is also great in the summertime.

Chrissy
Yeah, I bet it is. It’s a must be lovely. Lots of meadows and different kinds of vegetation than you would see down here.

Scott
And big fish. Lots of big fish.

Chrissy
Very cool.

Money Mechanic
Probably elk or moose walking down the main roads.

Scott
Not as not as much. Well, so we’re not in that Yellowknife. Not in the area of of caribou, which is in the north. There’s the caribou. This is a northern animal. And it’s there are some moose here, but but not as many as, as you would think. driving up here though, you’ll see you’ll see bison or buffalo. And so there’s lots of different, lots of different things that happen up here. So…

Money Mechanic
Very cool.

Chrissy
Sounds gorgeous.

Money Mechanic
Very cool. Excellent. We will, we’ll chat again, Chrissy on the next show. And Scott, thank you very much again, a pleasure having you here with us today.

Scott
It’s been great time. Thanks.

---