No, this was all our money.

But we're a double STEM couple with no kids (at the time). We're also the most boring people you'll ever meet, so our expenses are low.

We saved up a 20% down payment after a few years together. And interest rates were 2.5% at the time, so the payments were manageable.

The long and short is "make lots of money and live like you don't".

(That said, a year ago I was a 300+ developer, which is part of how we paid off the rest of the mortgage in 7 years.)

I didn't even think it was realistic to get above 200k CAD in Canada, but now it's not even realistic to land a job. Strange time in this country. Beautiful summer here in BC though :)

There's a few companies offering good money, when hiring starts again.

There's the typical Amazon, Google, Uber who pay decently (though Google is only in Waterloo and no remote). Shopify was paying well because they wanted to grow quickly and outbid on top talent elsewhere, but that blew up in their face (I was in the 20% laid off in May).

2 years ago Instacart offered me a ridiculous total comp for remote Canada, but it was mostly paper money- pre-IPO stock that will be worth something, someday, maybe.

Instacart has claw back clause. So if you happened to be laid off or piped, your paper money will become paper

Google is in Montreal, too

Ya, it's just tough out there. I was laid off in April, haven't worked for a Canadian company since 2020. We'll see how it goes.

So that means you only put down 118,000 CAD and you were leveraged up

Your family wealth didn't increase by 72,000 CAD/year it increased by 135,000 CAD/year

but I see, you paid it off. you didn't have to, the option was to just make the minimum payments and sell, could have used your big income for other things but now I'm just reminded why its not interesting to listen to boring (your words) mortgage holders.

if you plug those numbers into an affordability calculator, you'll see that 18k/130k is very very very sane. I mean, I've paid that much in rent on less income.

> How do you afford something that high?

Another simple answer is to have renters. It's not glamorous, it means people are in your space, but when it's necessary, it's necessary.

Some of this might be your expectation of housing costs? A 220k mortgage, even at 7.5% interest, is still affordable on a 130k salary. This works out to < 25% of your after-tax income which is pretty average or maybe lower than average (unsure if most affordability stats are quoting pre or post-tax income).

tbh the hypernormalization of needing to go in debt and pay interest for a home is extremely scary, regardless of the rate

It's been that way for almost a hundred years. It's not so scary when interest rates and values have stayed relatively steady (as they have in most of the post-ww2 era in inflation-adjusted terms). All that seems to have fallen apart around the year 2000 (when interest rates were made lower than they should have been).

To the extent that government tinkering in the lending market ends up making housing more expensive, we should at least treat it as a policy failure.

I don’t understand what that 220k mortgage actually bought… a broom closet? A parking space? A tiny house in a countryside town far from anywhere?

The 220k is the value of the mortgage and not the original purchase price; there was most likely a downpayment at time of purchase. Or, they recently renewed their mortgage and the remaining amount owing is 220k.