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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • It’s not the simple unfortunately, because of 2 factors:

    1. Our boomers are a very large generation, larger than the millenials

    2. Life expectancy has increased so people live much longer (with high medical costs)

    In the 70s - 2000s we had a large generation of in their working years paying for a small generation’s 5-10 year retirement

    Now, we have a small generation in their working years paying for a large generation 15-25 year retirement

    And this is not something we can solve by just “taxing the rich”. The numbers are so huge that taxing Canada’s richest people is a drop in the bucket



  • This is a bit of a fallacy. In a normal market, the rent for a home is less than the costs of home ownership (mortgage + maintenance + taxes) and that saved money can be used to purchase other assets.

    Until the real estate mania of the last few years, if you followed this strategy, you would not be any worse off than the person who bought their home.

    I personally would much rather have equity in more fungible assets than a home. Owning a home ties you to a specific location, and can’t easily be sold in an emergency. Plus it’s not a very diverse portfolio if most of you wealth is in a single property









  • The only developed country that doesn’t seem to have a housing crisis right now is Japan. After their real estate market collapsed in the 90s, they instituted a number of reforms to make housing less attractive as an investment vehicle. Now housing there tends to depreciate over time, not appreciate. Consequently, it’s viewed not as an investment but as a consumer product, much like buying a car, and there is competition that brings costs down.

    I think this is the sensible approach we need to follow in the rest of the developed world, but I don’t think it’s not going to be politically feasible until a lot of homeowners feel a lot of pain and give up on the idea of housing as an investment