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spoonie

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Laid off from my first full-time job! Started at RIM/Blackberry in Jan 2012 in the BB OS group working on BB10. Was laid off in March 2013.

Got 10 weeks of severance so I was funemployed for most of the rest of that year.

Did some freelancing, projects, and went on a month-long backpacking trip.

But you had to have saved up money in the first place in order to make a downpayment on the mortgage. If your rent is so expensive that you can’t save any money then you aren’t going to be able to get a mortgage anyway. And if you can save money for a downpayment then you have to compare the opportunity cost of investing those savings versus using them to buy a house.

I agree, except that housing right now isn’t a free market precisely because of zoning rules that artificially limit what can be built and where. Until existing land owners lose the right to rig the market, markets should be rigged in favour of tenants who have less power.

Where it’s easy to build new housing supply I’m in favour of looser rent control or removing rent control because it’ll be redundant.

Yup it’s a combination of protecting those who are less powerful and I would argue a way to avoid perverse incentives. If a landlord can arbitrarily raise rent, they have no incentive to perform ongoing (inexpensive maintenance). They can wait until the problems become critical and much more expensive and then pass those costs onto the tenant. With rent control the landlord knows they have to control costs and has more incentive to perform the cheaper preventative maintenance.

I get that those opposed to density claim this is one of the reasons they oppose it, but is there any evidence of it?

Usually an increase in density in an area will increase land values rather then depress them.

Those landlords should go out of business in a free market. Not properly accounting for maintenance costs is a business failure, not the tenant’s fault. If property prices are higher than rents that’s a market failure, not a cost to be passed onto tenants.

No problem at all! :) Just curious about the sources of revenue from me as a customer if I don’t hold cash, don’t issue sell orders, and buy only ETFs.

I use a discount brokerage in Canada called Questrade. I keep as little cash as possible in my account (contributions and dividends get used within a few days to buy more ETFs), and my portfolio is entirely ETFs. If I also pay no commissions when issuing buy orders, how does the brokerage make money from me? Apart from the fees for order placement, is there interest earned for short-sellers borrowing ETFs?

They mean we can stop worrying about those homeowners who oppose an apartment building being built near them on the basis that it reduces property values. Because if the drop in values doesn’t hurt them until they sell then they have no right to complain about property values today when the apartment is built.

When those taxes pay for services and amenities that make your city more attractive and it grows you get two broad benefits: network effect, and quality of life. Network effect is largely your property value going up. Quality of life is from things like more goods and services located closer to you as density increases. If you don’t want either of those things you probably don’t want to live in a city.

We don’t even need to build more cities: we can build more density in existing cities. Vancouver has lots of Neighbourhoods with nothing but single family homes. Add more townhouses and low-rise apartment buildings and the population of Vancouver could double. But people cling enviously to their driveway & backyard close to downtown.

I didn’t say renters dont pay.

What I’m saying is that you don’t (usually) get to buy a house for $0 down. So it’s never a choice of $2000/mo for rent vs $1000/mo for mortgage. It’s more like $20k cash + $2000/mo for rent vs $20k equity + $1000/mo mortgage. Over long enough time horizons the monthly payments don’t matter and it’s a question of which investment appreciates more.

You’re forgetting about the opportunity cost of locking up all of that capital in an asset that has a high carrying cost (maintenance, taxes). The initial downpayment could have been used for other investments, so you have to compare how much you could have earned if you’d invested and rented instead of bought the house.

https://youtu.be/NZR_vMTLfIk

Don’t give them an expectation, first ask what range they are offering. Otherwise give an outrageous number and say it’s negotiable. If they refuse to interview you because you gave too high of a number up front (before any kind of negotiation happened), then you don’t want to work there anyway!