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Post by sandman on Oct 26, 2021 14:49:34 GMT -5
So, for a few years I've been saving. Been told to save hard and I can own a home.
Covid hit. I was told it'll bring prices down.
It didn't. I continued to save.
I'm at the point where I can't buy anything south of Barrie that spans from Waterloo-Kingston. There's a few smaller cities and towns in there where it's still somewhat affordable but WTH am I gonna do with my life? I'm not a person who rides dirt-bikes or 4-wheelers, I don't care too much about fishing and the farm land. I like my city, suburban living.
And here I am looking at townhomes starting at $800K or more.
A townhome. Which should be a starter home.
Don't get me started on this ugly 3/4 storey townhome trend now too. ZERO front or backyard. ZERO privacy. Roads as narrow as they can be. 1 car driveway.
Should've been born 5 years earlier.
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Post by freewheel on Oct 26, 2021 15:50:52 GMT -5
I was there many years ago. Its mostly bad luck and bad timing. Nothing you can do about who you were born to or when. I don't have parents who will help me with a down payment, but if they had passed away I might have had enough to get into the real estate market. But that is such a morbid way of thinking I don't dwell on it. My parents have done me well and are very old now.
It would have been nice have owned a place...shrug, so be it.
I'm probably too old to buy a house now and expect I will be renting for life, fortunately I'm doing well enough investing that I will be able to afford renting.
FYI. I was flat broke with no job and little prospects at age 37.
Dont wait until you're in your mid thirties to start saving and investing for retirement like I me. Start saving early and take advantage of every tax protected account you can. TFSA, RESP, RRSP, FHSA (if it becomes a reality). It helps to have a wife making good money. Even if she isn't working its still good because having two TFSAs is huge for investment growth. I max it out every year but damn I wish the TFSA room was bigger.
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Post by haisan on Oct 26, 2021 17:34:42 GMT -5
Yeah, cities have become damn expensive everywhere. Not just Toronto. Otoh, a lot of what makes cities interesting is the artists and musicians and other cultural leaders … and they don’t have money either, so should be looking for other places to live. I imagine there must be some interesting cultural oases springing up here and there.
I’m told a few years ago, it was Hamilton (and before that, Montreal), but that’s getting expensive too now.
For what it’s worth, in my 40s, I really began to lose interest in cities after spending my whole adult life in the middle of big busy metropolises. As long as there’s a decent supermarket and I have internet, I’m fine.
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Post by scully19 on Oct 27, 2021 8:07:56 GMT -5
The housing market is completely insane for sure. I'm lucky enough to have gotten into it like 10 years ago but we're looking to move and it's basically a massively bad value. I know it keeps getting said but there is no way this is sustainable, there will be a general market crash coming and that will lead to a housing crash. Both are massively overdue.
I'm basically done looking, houses that would cost me 100k extra in mortgage are now 300k more and I'm not willing to be one that gets caught up in the hype and ends up regretting their house, especially as rates go up that will force prices down but if you already bought the house you're stuck.
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Post by haisan on Oct 27, 2021 9:01:39 GMT -5
Honestly, I think Japan-style stagnation is a lot more likely than a market crash. Remember when the property bubble in Japan popped around 1989 ... at the time, Tokyo real estate was insanely expensive. Like, totally off the scale. But after 30 years of the world economy growing and housing exploding, and now, Tokyo's housing prices aren't so bad anymore. Time has a way to taking the edge of pretty much everything.
But for now, for people like myself who are not property owners, things kind of suck.
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Post by Pseudonym on Oct 27, 2021 9:32:34 GMT -5
It's a double bind. Sure, you feel rich because you managed to nab a house in the GTA, but most people won't want to move out of that area.... So if you have a million dollar home, but all the other houses in the area have drastically risen, then the actual gains aren't nearly as big as they seem.
Not only that, but there is the actual opportunity cost of all the money being thrown into JUST a home. Not even some baller ass MTV Cribs shit, but a normal home. If a home cost $500k instead of $800k, that difference could be used to travel all over the world, retire pretty comfortably, pay for a kid's college fund, buy a lot of things to put in the house, etc, etc. But here everything goes into that land ownership. Subtly, the GDP is overleveraged, the stuff of mediocre European countries.
I think it's a national security issue. People aren't self-aware enough to see that this is the kind of situation that enables a Canadian Trump to come into power. The finance minister or whoever saying that they need whatever growth they can get as rampant inequality worsened with the pandemic means that this will get a lot worse before it ever gets better.... If it does.
The thing with the truth is all you need to do is wait. Wages haven't risen for decades. Even factoring the foreign and corporate investments, the numbers don't really add up. Either it'll crash, making America's 2008 crisis look like the Industrial Revolution in comparison, or we will continue to slowly careen to actual cyberpunk dystopia. Or perhaps something like Japan, which is pretty cyberpunk...
The politicians are across the board will meet this with utter cowardice. Actually addressing this will alienate boomer voters that got in for the gold rush and also likely have litlle actually saved for retirement... We are one of the most debt ridden societies iirc. UBI is a patch, not a root solution. So will most restrictions for citizens looking for a home. Those non-existent interest rates now basically have to stay non-existent. Double bind.
The economy here has little actual creative output. It's some horrid combo of exploring Mother Earth, rent seeking and regulatory capture (see: who owns Dinosaur Team? Why is phone and internet so expensive? Why do we have the highest bank fees on the world? Etc, etc). The biggest sign of fraudulent success is closing the door to others after you pass through and look at what people have been doing; the 2nd biggest country in the world somehow has a housing crisis. Fix the zoning laws and the problems will largely be fixed.
Do that AND actually have wages increase and you'll have conservatives 70 years from now being nostalgic for a time that they never lived in, because things go in cycles. But then you'd likely have to make tweaks to immigration, which nowadays will get you reflexively called a racist before you can make any real criticism of it being a vector for companies to import cheap labour.
That's just the way things are going. "You'll own nothing and be happy." The word is stagflation. It's a slow burn
I personally moved outside of the GTA. But that came after a lot of inner work and partly out of necessity. Forget the housing market - the RENTING market in the GTA is too damn high, my God. A lot of things I thought that I "had" to do, I didn't even want or really need and as a millennial, I still wonder if I'll ever get that. Still have a ton of work to do and keep growing, but nothing can happen until you swing the bat.
No, no we're on a basketball forum - you miss all the shots you don't take.
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Post by scully19 on Oct 27, 2021 10:37:14 GMT -5
Honestly, I think Japan-style stagnation is a lot more likely than a market crash. Remember when the property bubble in Japan popped around 1989 ... at the time, Tokyo real estate was insanely expensive. Like, totally off the scale. But after 30 years of the world economy growing and housing exploding, and now, Tokyo's housing prices aren't so bad anymore. Time has a way to taking the edge of pretty much everything. But for now, for people like myself who are not property owners, things kind of suck. My main argument against this is interest rates. If rates go up housing prices go down, that's just how it goes. Everyone gets approved for lower mortgages then they would otherwise and they then can't pay those higher numbers. Anyone who bought a house in this last year will hold form as they won't be able to afford to sell. But anyone else will pay less because they're part of the market and their house will go down so will others. |
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Post by haisan on Oct 28, 2021 4:15:46 GMT -5
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Post by Pseudonym on Oct 28, 2021 7:23:09 GMT -5
I've been learning French through Duolingo since COVID hit. I'm on a 437 day streak now... Mais, je dois apprendre le français plus vite. |
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Post by sandman on Oct 28, 2021 16:47:47 GMT -5
The wage thing is huge. Every year people get shocked by the amount of people on the Sunshine list and I keep telling them, does 100K have the same value it did when this list first came out? It doesn't. While $100K is still a good salary, it's not that prestigious anymore. Sadly, it's not easy to attain that figure but everything else becomes more expensive.
For reference, the sunshine list started in 1996. 100K back than is equivalent to 160K now.
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