Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

Not any worse then anywhere in the FV, smaller, but still close enough to Abby and Langley to get everything you need.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

well, we count among the happy ones

why??

NOT because of the value of the house .............

but because we are retired and are no longer in the rat race of working and having to always be "producing" papers, reports, etc etc


We bought the house in 1972, and the assessed value has risen from the initial just under $28,000 to over $1 million, but we ourselves are not going to see any money from it ........ the house will not be sold until we die or have to go into care. The money will go into our estate with some to be distributed to relations, although most will go to certain groups in Vancouver.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

Nobody has suggested that the value leads to happiness, it's the simple ownership. In your time, a young couple with a bit of rat racing could afford to buy a house like yours, these days, the same couple would need to be very well paid and/or have some capital behind them to buy the same house.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

+1

It's the cost of obtaining housing that keeps people down, even the burbs are too high priced these days.

Back in the day, one could buy a house, and by retirement have it paid off and not have a mortgage or rent to pay. Now the younger generation have a difficult to impossible time to own housing or have to buy so late in life, they end up with a mortgage or rent for their entire lives. People buying in their late 40's and early 50' on 25 year mortgages may end up dead before it's even paid off, or end up putting money towards housing and having nothing to put towards retirement since employers don't generally provide that benefit any more.

I do not see the seniors of tomorrow having the same quality of life of seniors today.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

Was just thinking on this yesterday. I bought my old 2 bed, terraced house in Bristol, before the first 80s boom. I borrowed the typical maximum allowed for one salary at that time and added the other £2.5k myself for the £17.5k needed.

From what the house sold for 3 years ago, had I still been in the same job as 1984 at least 10 times the salary would be needed. :eek:

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

And now you can have 2 full-time workers who still don't make enough to even buy a condo let alone a house.

It's amazing anyone can afford anything these days.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

I don't necessarily agree with you that it was easier for us ...........

smaller amounts involved, yes ....... but our salaries were also MUCH smaller than what people are paid now. So percentage-wise ........ about as much of our money had to go towards finding the down payment and the mortgage payments

OH was then earning about $9000-10,000 a year ........... now people in the equivalent positions are earning over 10x that a year. I was in a year-by-year always likely to be laid off research position that brought in less than $5,000.


Buying a house back then was not exactly easy .......... we had many months when there were more days left than we had money. Entertaining friends to dinner meant spaghetti with meat sauce, and candles in old wine bottles.

BUT, we also did not insist on immediately buying the house we really wanted, we bought a house that we could just afford, and did not do any renos for several years.

Nor did we insist on having topline appliances or furniture ...... we made do with what we had collected during the previous 4 years, some of it second-hand, and bought as little extra as we could get away with. Friends loaned us 2 carpets until we could afford new.


In fact, the previous owners of the house took the fridge and stove with them (not usual here, as you know).

We carefully counted our money, and realised that we could only afford to buy one of those appliances before we moved in. We also could not afford to pay a moving company, so we had arranged a cadre of friends to help us ..........

the choice of appliance was thus made easy .......... a fridge to hold the beer for them to drink. :lol:

I cooked on a camp stove placed on boards over the kitchen sink, with the window above it wide open, until we could afford the range.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

Oh, we had a kitchen sink did we? Bloody bourgeois dilettante. We had to go the dried out river bed to dig for water.

Hallo agan scilly. I missed you and I needed a laugh.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

glad I amused you!

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

Speaking as a current homeowner, I'm not sure I really understand the obsession with owning a house. We bought ours at the "wrong time" (not in Vancouver) and it has since dropped drastically in value and is a real burden now. The mortgage is paid off through the rent but it's still not fun being an accidental landlord.

Owning a house gives good stability but you also lose a ton of flexibility and I'm not sure if the tradeoff is worth it. I definitely don't think it's worth being miserable over.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

Doesn't it go back to the saying off "put your money in bricks and mortar", I know a few people that have walked away from houses in negative equity and been the better off for it. They looked at it as cutting away of a liability. I think that takes some balls.

My mum rents in Germany, it seems to be the norm there.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

Even if buying at the right time it needn't be a great advantage. What's the point, for example, in getting ten times as much as you paid if it costs you the same to buy a home to live in somewhere else.

Of course, it might not cost ten times as much to buy or you might not need to buy again for a variety of reasons. Then it's become a huge stroke of fortune.

But surely a massive advantage is that you are more likely in control. No moving because the landlord wants you gone. No having to rely on a good landlord to get things done. Your own choice of decor and alterations etc.

Of course, it comes with disadvantages too - all the other costs.

But you do, at least, retain some control over a major aspect of life.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

Only if the value of the house goes up. If it goes down you have less control over your life than if you'd never owned it; you are obliged to continue to live in it, to sell it and be burdened by the shortfall, or to go bankrupt.

I can't see any reason to be miserable about the price of houses in Vancouver particularly, people choose to live there because it's convenient for Asia or because they like the scenery; they could move to other places in Canada. People in, for example, NYC, Tokyo or London deal with higher prices and many of them are tied to those cities because it's where their trade is conducted.

"I can't afford to live in Vancouver" is a complaint like "I can't afford to live in Monaco". Well, ok, don't then.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

Rather than amusing, exasperating.

Please do try to post something, sometime, which isn't an aphorism followed by personal anecdotes.

If you'll go that far I'd be happy to leave the punctuation up to you, at least provisionally.

Re: misery at Vancouver housing cost?
 

I did try to differentiate between the two but I obviously failed. :unsure:

Having said that, there are other circumstances that need to be present for a fall in value to be a burden and those circumstances could just as easily be troublesome if one was renting.