TIL buying a condo in Vancouver was a better move than renting for me

Everyone kept telling me renting was smarter, but I bought a 600 square foot place in Kitsilano last year. My mortgage payment is $2,800 a month, which is only $200 more than my old rent for a similar unit. In 12 months, my place has gone up in value by about $40,000, and I'm building equity instead of just paying a landlord. Has anyone else found that buying, even now, worked out better than they expected?

Switched from a $70 monthly gym pass to a $20 rec center membership

I was paying for a fancy gym downtown for over a year, mostly for the classes. I finally checked out the city rec center near my apartment and their basic pass is a third of the cost. The classes are just as good, and I'm saving $600 a year. Anyone have other good swaps for cutting monthly bills without losing much?

My kid's school science fair showed me why my weekly spread was a mess

I was helping set up the project boards last Tuesday and saw how they used color coded sections for each part of the experiment. It hit me that my own weekly log was just a wall of black ink. I went home and tried using a single highlighter to mark different types of tasks, like green for errands and yellow for calls. It made my page way easier to scan in the morning. Has anyone else tried a simple color system that actually stuck?

So my laptop charger blew up in a Lisbon cafe and I had to work from a library for three days