Quote:
Originally Posted by The Fonz
Does it seriously cost 600k to buy a home in an undesirable area? I don’t live in Calgary.
As for my previous post, the point I was making is that it wasn’t so easy for Boomers to buy their 1st home either. They struggled much like the 25-35 year olds of today.
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IMO $600K is not a realistic average home. $600K is a fricken nice and above average home. No one is living in squalor with a typical $400K home in this city and there's an amazing selection of well maintained condos between $200-300K that are in excellent locations due to oversupply right now.
$600K is more than enough to buy into something decent in the inner city, but you'd likely be sharing some walls for something relatively new or you're buying a detached fixer upper/an older home with a few refreshes done to it. Heck, you could buy around a 1300 sq ft townhouse in the inner city built around 3-8 years ago for around $450K. With that price point, you could probably access a crud ton of brand new condos downtown as well. I hear large two bedrooms condos built around 10-15 years ago in Renfew go for around the low to mid $350s.
$600K is enough to buy a brand new place in most new suburbs and a nice home with slightly lower spec in desirable neighborhoods. $600K will probably buy you 1.5 detached homes in a "less than desired neighborhood" in Calgary.
I'm a millennial myself. The serious inability for most people to understand what is necessity and luxury is one of the biggest reasons for their bemoaning of their debt load. I will agree with Girlysports that the demand for post secondary education is a legitimate problem. However, the fact you have a ton of individuals that do useless full degrees and aren't even getting decent grades in those useless degrees to go back out and work barely above minimum wage jobs is also making the problem worse.
Socially, the push for people to just do post secondary and figure out their future there is inappropriate. I've seen enough friends go from high school, work 2-3 years minimum wage/blue collar and then go to post secondary and flourish because they know exactly what they want to learn and are fully focused on learning while in school. Then there's a ton of those individuals that spend 5-10 years in school just schooling/playing and never really wanting to be there minus partying with people. That's a serious waste of time and resources. I do want to mention that one of the things I really appreciate about Calgary is the overall mutual respect of blue collar and white collar. Most cities are blue vs white or vice versa.
I know someone who dropped out of school and went to work the rigs to be the sole bread winner due to unfortunate family circumstances. 3 years later he had amassed enough to provide for his family, had a car and home paid off and significant savings. He came back then got an engineering degree. This is what O&G is capable of affording us, but more often than not, we hear stories about how most people are the "working poor". That's kinda messed up.
The majority of people are in debt because they aren't financially responsible. Full stop. This isn't like many other countries. We don't have the many major expenses that aren't covered by the government that force us to live with unforeseen major debt loads. Most debt loads in Canada are very obvious decisions by the individuals that incur them.