spoonie

It’s my understanding that non-competes have no teeth in Canada — in the software industry at least. Is there some except for comp/electrical/mechanical engineers as may be employed at this company?

Specialized travel agency called Your Golf Travel.

Full disclosure: was making CAD 70k/year at RIM and my next full time job started around Nov 2013 for GBP 41k/year (and by March 2014 visa stuff was settled and I’d moved to London).

A layoff isn’t about you! The company said they don’t want anyone working in that position anymore, not just you. It doesn’t reflect on you at all! :)

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.

Canada has free “Interac E-transfers” that you can send to an email address or mobile phone number.

Exclusionary zoning is an even worse form of institutionalized privilege that benefits the wealthy and middle class rather than the poor and middle class.

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.

If I'm happy to have gains when I do nothing but my neighbours improve their properties, then I’m also happy to risk losses when I do nothing but my neighbours make changes.

Yes in Toronto these are called Development Charges and are charged to the buyer/builder proportional to what they are building.

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.

I should be able to build whatever I want on my private property. Whether it’s a house or an apartment building.

That assumes that the market is able to bear those costs. What do landlords do in stable markets where rents are flat or track inflation? Are all rentals dilapidated in those markets?

Wasn’t this specifically made illegal back in 2012? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

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.

Those capital gains don’t go to the municipality though, and can’t be used to build schools or infrastructure.

Agreed, I was mistaking thinking about land values and public transportation within an urban area, not including commuter transit to suburbs.

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.

Because property owners are the ones who directly benefit from the value of their land increasing.

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.

Landlords can move in for personal use, but not as a way to evict a tenant. Seems perfectly fair to me, security of tenure is something that benefits the whole community.

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