A good overview of the housing crisis in Canada, which has been a problem for decades now, only got worse during COVID, and shows no signs of stopping.
Excellent read. So much of what is written here applies exactly the same to Australia and New Zealand. Except for this part:
> More than a fifth of our national wealth is tied up in housing.
In Australia, it's closer to two-thirds.
Yep same in NZ, two-thirds here too. No matter what we do, someone is getting burnt. House prices fall? Interest rates climb. Chuck inflation in there and ohh boy.
We're going from a 2.90% rate into something north of 7% in October this year. It's gonna fuckin' suuuuuck. We've planned for this by upping our current repayments (to the threshold, just before we would be penalised) to prepare for the increase.
That said, we're in a far better position than most, and we're grateful to only feel a pinch, not be forced out of our home.
Now I think about it, we had an absolute dream run to purchasing the house.
- Both myself and my partner got a gift from our respective families, bumping our deposit from 10-15% to like 32%.
- I had money put into my retirement fund that I was allowed to dip into for buying a first house
- The banks hadn't yet started their incredibly invasive perusal of our spending, so we were practically waved through the approval process.
- We loaned less than we were approved for.
- We only visited 10 open homes, and settled on the first one we saw.
- It was under offer, but that offer came with finance conditions and we had everything ready to go.
- The building inspection came back glowing, not even signs of borer (almost impossible to not have them down south).
- We made the offer, got it, and everything was signed off.
July 2021 we started looking after receiving the money, October 2021 we had moved into our home. December 2021 the market began to tumble, but I guess we're in now. We don't intend to sell, just going to chip away at it as effectively as we can.
Still, fuck house prices.