"i'm just a front-end dev but i read this article on medium about smart contracts and the syntax looked familiar so i thought i could just cobble together a smart bank over the weekend and now all my ethereum is gone pls halp"
Personally, I'd find that far more entertaining than yet another show with people complaining about their builders not turning up on time (not that I watch these you understand).
"What did you expect? They're builders! Have you ever seen a film where the hero is a builder? No, no, because they never f-cking turn up in the nick of time. Bat-builder? Spider-builder? Huh? That's why you never see a superhero with a hod!"
"Finally, Julian called in a professional. Peter was reliable, organized, patient and came with glowing references. He was the contractor we should have hired from the start—in fact, Julian had already interviewed him twice but we had passed because he was charging market rate."
Maybe I don't watch enough of these shows but isn't the dream of DIY home renovation actually, you know, picking up a hammer and doing it yourself as much as legally allowed? Seems the husband hired a neighbor to help with ripping everything out but then the construction was all handled by a contractor. I don't see the analog for IT projects.
OK I only skimmed to the bit where current house prices are in the $2 million range.
Sounds like the whole city, perhaps the whole capitalist western world, is on crack.
I keep being reminded of when Oslo opened their second needle room, closer to the more affluent areas of the city.
All of a sudden the got well dressed visitors driving expensive vehicles. These were people that stopped by to get their dosage done before landing some deal or making some high level decision that day...
Some places have safe, clean, injection rooms. This is good because it reduces some of the public health problems associated with injection drug use.
People use clean needles. They get information about rehab if they want it. They can dispose of the sharps safely. There's help nearby if they overdose. They can get other medical advice about infection or sexual health.
I don't know much about Toronto so I'm surprised that these two jobs:
"Julian had just finished his PhD in education and was teaching part-time at Humber; I was an editor for the Food Network’s website and preparing to go on maternity leave."
Don't provide an income for a reasonably sized family home in the suburbs?
Just for a reference point on how ridiculous Sydney is; $4,900,000 AUD will buy you this[1] about 50 minutes from the CBD.
The mortgage loan book of the 4 major banks here is hovering at about 50% interest-only loans. Nearly 1 in 3 people lie on their mortgage application too [2].
If the only outcome of this story would be this ridiculous hate piece from Vice, it would still be worth it. I can feel bad for someone down on their luck, but when they show their political colours like that, I can only feel shadenfreude at someone getting exactly what they deserve.
> This is the first time in my life I have ever heard this phrase, in all its privilege-dripping glory. The more you know, I guess. Carry on.
"Besenrein" is a pretty normal thing if you rent out something in Germany. In fact, every holiday-house-rental and every rented flat / house I ever helped moving, this was the standard.
Even when we went to Switzerland and France - so isn't this a thing at all in the US?
It's not a phrase I've ever heard (as an American) and it's not immediately obvious to me what it means if there's supposed to be implications beyond the obvious.
> The piece shows nary a care for the neighbourhood's identity or the complex socioeconomic barriers those in the historic community sometimes face and seems entirely unfamiliar with the term "schadenfreude."
It was literally a crack house with squatters that they had to bribe to vacate. I wouldn't call that "complex socioeconomic barriers". Would fellow Toronto residents prefer the squatters in the neighborhood to this couple?
"rooming house"? I'm curious, what neighborhood in Brooklyn do you live in? You can save a lot of money and avoid "adult-children" if you move to certain neighborhoods. You can also try the Bronx where you can buy homes for < 100k. It's a great deal for someone like you who doesn't mind drug addicts and vacant dilapidated residences
This article would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. I don't know whats worse. The authors general ignorance about 'flipping' houses or their arrogance around the disadvantages drug users experience.
The fact that they expect the occupants to just leave when asked as if they have somewhere to go is bizarre. Who are these people?
Which utopian planet do you live on? Since when asking to leave the people who're squatting in your house illegally is a bizarre thing to do? In most places in the world, illegal occupants deal not with a couple of polite and scared copywriters but with law enforcement & enraged legal owners of the property.
> The fact that they expect the occupants to just leave when asked as if they have somewhere to go is bizarre. Who are these people?
Well, I mean, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to ask people to leave the property you just bought.
Like, don't get me wrong, I'm all for ensuring that there is good housing for everyone, and property values and gentrification are having a horrible effect on anyone not fortunate enough to be born into a family with some money, but it's not like it's a house the buyers had just let sit empty for years at a time. The seller probably should have been more involved in ensuring that the property was either actually empty or at the very least securing it and ensuring there were no existing contracts, as one of the residents there apparently had.
Like, there's plenty to be annoyed with regarding the buyers. This isn't one of the reasons.
The one party jack was determined to have legal residence there. The other parties were allowed to stay there by the legal resident. Bums that broke in would have been removed on the spot.
Legal residence gives them the right to time to move on peacefully rather than be dumped immediately into the sometimes permanent downward spiral of homelessness because this would be awfully convenient for the new owner.
Buying the properly doesn't entitle you to skip this step. I can't imagine a world in which it ought to. This is something the prior owner ought to have ironed out prior to selling. Either the property was still a worthy project despite the issue or they should have taken their money elsewhere.
Put yourself in the place of the residents. You have few resources and nowhere to go. The government provides that the new owner must give you a finite and reasonable time to move elsewhere do you a) lose most of your few belongings and go sleep on the curb because some yuppy comes and yells at you or b) use that time to save money, make plans, and secure yourself a new place to live.
You see it from the perspective of someone with connections, family, money. Many people have none of these things. It wasn't a choice between the inconvenience of moving to a new home and thumbing their noses at her it was in all likelihood a choice between the street and keeping their lives together.
If you have never struggled you likely don't understand.
I'm not really disagreeing with you. I do believe strongly in tenant rights because I've seen what bad landlords can do, and I've have close friends (now basically family) suffer because of the spiral of of homelessness.
What I was suggesting was that no, it wasn't really unreasonable for the buyers to be surprised and expect squatters to not be present in their newly bought property. That is the responsibility of the seller. The seller sounds to have been fairly irreputable and tried to pawn off a problem property.
At no point did I suggest, or am I suggesting, that a buyer should be able to immediately force legal residents or tenants to vacate. I'm saying that they probably had every right to be a bit surprised and annoyed/frustrated to find that the seller hadn't really done their duty.
The story is farcical enough without inventing more ways to be upset at the buyers in the story, and such outrage really isn't useful for anyone.
I've had to leave a rental residence twice now in under 30 days because the owner wanted to sell instead of renew a lease and didn't bother telling us until just about the legal limit. It sucks, it'd be much better to have 2 months, but as a person with some dignity I recognize I don't own the property and I'm no longer welcome after 30 days. Sure I could be an asshole and fight the eviction out in courts as they worried Jack could do (with some weird incomplete post-sell-date form with the original owners) but no. In the story he had 2 months already, according to the original owners, and to make things worse no rent was being collected. Struggling with life doesn't give you a free pass to be an asshole, we all have our struggles, so if you've had legal notice, which is designed to take away the threat of immediate homelessness by giving time to find a new place, GTFO.
I'm pretty sure 30 days is the minimum you are required to give in virtually any circumstance but these laws do vary by state.
We really need a semi official landlord rating website where you can expect to see ratings for landlords. A landlord shouldn't be able to get a second set of decent tenants at market rate 10 years after he screws over the first.
To be clear yelp for landlords with less of an extortion angle.
Why would the owner care if they had anywhere to go or not? If you don't have anywhere to live, go die on a street. You can _ask_ people for charity, but you sure as hell are not entitled to it.
The strapline: "We were cash-strapped, desperate to move and hemmed in by a hot market."
I read the article in full (nothing like a bit of procrastination on a Monday morning) and I think probably the two most abhorrent aspects are: 1) the utter and seemingly limitless stupidity of their decisions; 2) the way their back-up condo is casually introduced about halfway through - "Luckily, we still owned..." (An honourable mention goes to the wealthy English godfather making a sudden, ridiculous appearance. This bit sounded totally fictitious, to be honest.)
I think that colloquially we consider "cash-strapped" to mean significantly lower on funds than the authors were. You're not cash strapped if you have borrowed; by definition you are no longer low on funds. A minor point in the article, regardless.
On the actual content of the article: Is the housing market really this bad in Canada? My SO has been pushing for us to consider moving there (Toronto, Vancouver) after school but the more I learn the more I am content living somewhere with a low cost of living.
Another thing that does bother me: This seems like classic gentrification. Is there some fund in Toronto that goes towards the lower income/homeless folk who get displaced by these sorts of situations?
I moved from Europe, so I probably have a mildly more communist view ;-), but I'm appalled by Toronto's city government inability to do what I'd call table stakes beyond picking up the garbage - public transport and public housing. Neither seems to be going anywhere, and I have no clue whether it's finance ("we will not raise property taxes" is often heard), unions that frustrate everything, incompetent leadership or just outright lack of experience in running a metropolis. I love Toronto, but it sure has its share of big city problems.
Housing market wise: expect to be in the CA$750k-1m range for something that doesn't suck bad. Given the weak dollar, that's not a huge amount of money for a major city but it's rapidly rising. Myself, I'm moving to a chalet with some acres of forest shortly, 2hrs from the city, but then I can work from home almost 100%.
Toronto is a great place to live, but yeah - check your housing budget before moving here.
I frankly wouldn't mind this sort of piece about people with so much wealth that this sort of profligate spending is no big deal for them -- if these weren't the same people who are NIMBYs and have succeeded at preventing the construction of cheap, high-density housing in US by ending public/social housing and with land use regulation / zoning laws that prevent any sort of private equivalents.
Indeed. I get that certain areas of certain cities are simply more expensive to live in, but they make it sound like they are practically living in the slums and one missed mortgage payment from the streets in their million dollar house.
That's a pretty churlish take on their story considering the time, effort, stress and money expended in turning a neighbourhood eyesore and liability into an attractive family home and neighbourhood asset. Without efforts like this neighbourhoods would remain forever total dumps.
You make them sound so heroic, as if they solved the problems they found instead of offloading, displacing, and exacerbating them. It's probably not fair to expect them to, but it's definitely fair to question their attitude of being put-upon when some of the primary counterparties of this offloading are part of the same damn story.
This is not an understatement for anyone who has just finished reading the entire article. It's in every paragraph. You have to read it just to get a sense of the level of selfishness on display at every level.
That said, I don't think these people are evil, it's easy to loose sight of the fact how lucky you are for all of us. We need to guard against it at all times and it's not easy. I'm guilty of having got somewhat irritated by a homeless person in the past and now I think I was an idiot for being like that and having children has made me so much more understanding and loving of everyone. Going up is also easier than going down, if these people had as much money as me (and owned no properties) they might be suicidal, however I'm quite happy with my life :-) Although of course I do aspire to own one home at least for my family.
Luckily, we still owned the two-bedroom condo at King and Bathurst. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of the soon-to-be four of us sharing 900 square feet, but I figured it would only be for a few months.
almost made my blood boil. Oh dear, how could life treat you that badly. My god. This is nothing but two privileged naive idiots stupidly buying a half million dollar house without even having looked inside and then trying to backwards rationalize and talk themselves deeper into neurosis.. publicly even, so they can farm consolation and attention so their mental abstractions never have to fall apart.
I keep the (UK) National Statistic report of salaries.
* 22K is the median salary. The people under 22K get propped up by social security up to around that amount (theoretically, practically not)
* top-20% percentil starts at 38K
* top-13% is 45K (relevant in the UK as it is the limit for high tax bracket)
* top-10% is 50K
* top-5% is 70K
* top-2% is 110K
* top-1% is 160K
The average cost of a house is 250K, 400K in London. Only the smallest fraction of the population will be able to get that amount of money from just working. You need to be propped up by something, your parent, luck, post-code lottery on your first ring of the property ladder, ...
You need to borrow from the future and the past to afford the present.
You are very right on your main point, but some nitpicks on your data:
* Your data is for all workers including part-time workers (including students and part time for lifestyle reasons like parenting). Full time work pay averages are quite a bit higher - median at £28k, 90th percentile at £56k. In London where the housing lottery problem is more extreme, it is partly because pay is also higher - full time annual median at £35k, 90th percentile at £75k.
* The median earner doesn't buy property - the people who buy houses are the prime-age segment who earn quite a bit more.
And the house wasn't even in particularly bad condition as the new owners try to imply. Sure, it was neglected, but taking out trash, hiring a cleaning company, getting new paintjob and furniture would make a place livable, and as a bonus, you'd save ~$1m. My kitchen and bedroom in a rented flat during university years looked way worse than these "horrible conditions".
I mean, some additional stuff needed to be done (stripping carpet, re-finishing floors, replacing bathroom and kitchen fixtures). But there was no call to "gut it to the studs".
In this case something as simple as "having a family member with $150k" creates a remarkable difference in consequences.
They did something stupid, which is embark on a renovation without sufficient funds and having no idea what they were doing. The consequence for them is owing a family friend money and being even higher on the wealth and assets ladder with growing equity.
For the person that doesn't have that, the consequences would be losing all of their savings, foreclosure, ruined credit, and a near zero chance of getting another shot at doing it again.
Having access to resources compounds and grows over time, and and changes everything about ultimate outcomes.
I just skimmed the article, but if that was a crackhouse then wouldn't it be in a bad neighborhood? Then once their shiny new place becomes known to the local denizens, break-ins galore!
The author describes walking their children through the house upon becoming the owner and finding two people smoking crack. So yes, it was a crack house.
It was also in Parkdale - not exactly one of Toronto's "best" neighborhoods.
Toronto is probably one of the safest cities in North America (and that's saying something, since North America is largely so safe). That said, Parkdale is a fairly risky place as far as Toronto goes. Recently some Parkdale landowners have sold land to condo developers though, so something tells me it won't be that way for long.
"I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of the soon-to-be four of us sharing 900 square feet"
What planet do those people live on. Am I the only one who grew up in a place where 85 square meters is ample for a flat for 6 people, not 4, to live in?
Ample if you all have meager possessions. More or less fine if you're the same family. 4 adults though? Good luck, unless you're all college students, but they can suffer even less room.
Where would that be? In most of the Western world, you won't get a building permit for (newly) building such units (as 'full' houses, not student flats or some such)
Funny that you should mention it, because there was an article here some time ago that basically said that 90% of buildings in New York wouldn't be allowed to be built today, they wouldn't get the permits. I've moved several times in my life and never lived in a house/flat that was newer than 50 years old, and older houses/flats were built small - although over here in UK I would argue that if you want space you need to look at older houses, everything new that I looked at was absolutely tiny, 3-4 bedroom houses with bedrooms that would fit a bed and literally nothing else.
According to this, 85 square meters is enough for 6 people to live in:
A series of astonishingly poor decisions. Why are they so mystified that the people living there already are so hostile given that they've just strolled into their home?
How does one go about due diligence before buying a house ? Do you hire a law firm ? What are their fees ? It is hard to imagine dropping half a million sight unseen, especially since it is not insignificant for the people in the article, but how much would it have cost them had they hired a lawyer/firm ?
Having researched home buying a bit I think it's too much to list in a HN comment if you want to cover cases where every party is unreliable but maybe someone will try. At the very least look at the damn thing in person. When I've done rentals with a friend we do a fairly thorough inspection before signing but it'd take 10x longer if we had intent to buy, we'd check a lot more, and that's before involving various 3rd parties. If you're planning a remodel from the beginning though your criteria will change.
Yes, I understand doing your own homework. I recently avoided a rental pretty narrowly. Nothing quite as unsavoury as this, but due to a couple of layers of indirection through agents, the fact that parking was tandem wasn't evident until the very end. Own homework aside, I just wanted to get some ballpark estimate on legal fees that one would incur with such an undertaking, and whether this is all pretty boilerplate, or do you have to have to get some bespoke solution from a law firm.
So if you got steady walls and you have cash left to refurbish everything it's a good deal compared to buying something ready to move in? Who would have thought?
But at the end of the day it's a good way to test the stability of your marriage.
My observation is that it works the other way around - it's the consequence-insulating money that engenders the lack of common sense, rather than the converse.
127 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] thread"i'm just a front-end dev but i read this article on medium about smart contracts and the syntax looked familiar so i thought i could just cobble together a smart bank over the weekend and now all my ethereum is gone pls halp"
"What did you expect? They're builders! Have you ever seen a film where the hero is a builder? No, no, because they never f-cking turn up in the nick of time. Bat-builder? Spider-builder? Huh? That's why you never see a superhero with a hod!"
[In The Loop]
"Finally, Julian called in a professional. Peter was reliable, organized, patient and came with glowing references. He was the contractor we should have hired from the start—in fact, Julian had already interviewed him twice but we had passed because he was charging market rate."
I keep being reminded of when Oslo opened their second needle room, closer to the more affluent areas of the city.
All of a sudden the got well dressed visitors driving expensive vehicles. These were people that stopped by to get their dosage done before landing some deal or making some high level decision that day...
Not sure what it means?
People use clean needles. They get information about rehab if they want it. They can dispose of the sharps safely. There's help nearby if they overdose. They can get other medical advice about infection or sexual health.
https://theawl.com/vancouvers-supervised-drug-injection-cent...
"Julian had just finished his PhD in education and was teaching part-time at Humber; I was an editor for the Food Network’s website and preparing to go on maternity leave."
Don't provide an income for a reasonably sized family home in the suburbs?
"See! Buying a home is so easy! All you need is your parents to give you tens of thousands and you're set!"
The mortgage loan book of the 4 major banks here is hovering at about 50% interest-only loans. Nearly 1 in 3 people lie on their mortgage application too [2].
[1] https://www.domain.com.au/26-south-street-strathfield-nsw-21... [2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-07/mortgage-fraud-systemi...
> [...] broom-swept condition
> This is the first time in my life I have ever heard this phrase, in all its privilege-dripping glory. The more you know, I guess. Carry on.
"Besenrein" is a pretty normal thing if you rent out something in Germany. In fact, every holiday-house-rental and every rented flat / house I ever helped moving, this was the standard.
Even when we went to Switzerland and France - so isn't this a thing at all in the US?
It was literally a crack house with squatters that they had to bribe to vacate. I wouldn't call that "complex socioeconomic barriers". Would fellow Toronto residents prefer the squatters in the neighborhood to this couple?
I live in Brooklyn. But if I had to choose between a rooming house and these insufferable adult-children for my neighbors I would opt for the former.
The fact that they expect the occupants to just leave when asked as if they have somewhere to go is bizarre. Who are these people?
They have everywhere else to go.
Well, I mean, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to ask people to leave the property you just bought.
Like, don't get me wrong, I'm all for ensuring that there is good housing for everyone, and property values and gentrification are having a horrible effect on anyone not fortunate enough to be born into a family with some money, but it's not like it's a house the buyers had just let sit empty for years at a time. The seller probably should have been more involved in ensuring that the property was either actually empty or at the very least securing it and ensuring there were no existing contracts, as one of the residents there apparently had.
Like, there's plenty to be annoyed with regarding the buyers. This isn't one of the reasons.
Legal residence gives them the right to time to move on peacefully rather than be dumped immediately into the sometimes permanent downward spiral of homelessness because this would be awfully convenient for the new owner.
Buying the properly doesn't entitle you to skip this step. I can't imagine a world in which it ought to. This is something the prior owner ought to have ironed out prior to selling. Either the property was still a worthy project despite the issue or they should have taken their money elsewhere.
Put yourself in the place of the residents. You have few resources and nowhere to go. The government provides that the new owner must give you a finite and reasonable time to move elsewhere do you a) lose most of your few belongings and go sleep on the curb because some yuppy comes and yells at you or b) use that time to save money, make plans, and secure yourself a new place to live.
You see it from the perspective of someone with connections, family, money. Many people have none of these things. It wasn't a choice between the inconvenience of moving to a new home and thumbing their noses at her it was in all likelihood a choice between the street and keeping their lives together.
If you have never struggled you likely don't understand.
What I was suggesting was that no, it wasn't really unreasonable for the buyers to be surprised and expect squatters to not be present in their newly bought property. That is the responsibility of the seller. The seller sounds to have been fairly irreputable and tried to pawn off a problem property.
At no point did I suggest, or am I suggesting, that a buyer should be able to immediately force legal residents or tenants to vacate. I'm saying that they probably had every right to be a bit surprised and annoyed/frustrated to find that the seller hadn't really done their duty.
The story is farcical enough without inventing more ways to be upset at the buyers in the story, and such outrage really isn't useful for anyone.
We really need a semi official landlord rating website where you can expect to see ratings for landlords. A landlord shouldn't be able to get a second set of decent tenants at market rate 10 years after he screws over the first.
To be clear yelp for landlords with less of an extortion angle.
If you don't want to buy a house with existing tenants you should check before you buy.
The level of privilege fucking burns.
You two in this thread sound like children. Grow up.
These people had a backup condo to live in after selling their first house. You don't get to use 'cash strapped' when you have a backup condo.
He's an education PhD and she's an online editor, they have two kids. They borrowed heavily and sold their old house to finance their new one.
I suppose because it's written by a middle class woman and not a desperately poor person then her story is abhorrent to HN.
I read the article in full (nothing like a bit of procrastination on a Monday morning) and I think probably the two most abhorrent aspects are: 1) the utter and seemingly limitless stupidity of their decisions; 2) the way their back-up condo is casually introduced about halfway through - "Luckily, we still owned..." (An honourable mention goes to the wealthy English godfather making a sudden, ridiculous appearance. This bit sounded totally fictitious, to be honest.)
If you can drop nearly three times the entire median family income per year for half a decade on renovations alone, you're not 'cash-strapped'.
How about you just look up the definition of this phrase?
On the actual content of the article: Is the housing market really this bad in Canada? My SO has been pushing for us to consider moving there (Toronto, Vancouver) after school but the more I learn the more I am content living somewhere with a low cost of living.
Another thing that does bother me: This seems like classic gentrification. Is there some fund in Toronto that goes towards the lower income/homeless folk who get displaced by these sorts of situations?
Housing market wise: expect to be in the CA$750k-1m range for something that doesn't suck bad. Given the weak dollar, that's not a huge amount of money for a major city but it's rapidly rising. Myself, I'm moving to a chalet with some acres of forest shortly, 2hrs from the city, but then I can work from home almost 100%.
Toronto is a great place to live, but yeah - check your housing budget before moving here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cry me a river.
This is not an understatement for anyone who has just finished reading the entire article. It's in every paragraph. You have to read it just to get a sense of the level of selfishness on display at every level.
That said, I don't think these people are evil, it's easy to loose sight of the fact how lucky you are for all of us. We need to guard against it at all times and it's not easy. I'm guilty of having got somewhat irritated by a homeless person in the past and now I think I was an idiot for being like that and having children has made me so much more understanding and loving of everyone. Going up is also easier than going down, if these people had as much money as me (and owned no properties) they might be suicidal, however I'm quite happy with my life :-) Although of course I do aspire to own one home at least for my family.
Luckily, we still owned the two-bedroom condo at King and Bathurst. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of the soon-to-be four of us sharing 900 square feet, but I figured it would only be for a few months.
almost made my blood boil. Oh dear, how could life treat you that badly. My god. This is nothing but two privileged naive idiots stupidly buying a half million dollar house without even having looked inside and then trying to backwards rationalize and talk themselves deeper into neurosis.. publicly even, so they can farm consolation and attention so their mental abstractions never have to fall apart.
* 22K is the median salary. The people under 22K get propped up by social security up to around that amount (theoretically, practically not)
* top-20% percentil starts at 38K
* top-13% is 45K (relevant in the UK as it is the limit for high tax bracket)
* top-10% is 50K
* top-5% is 70K
* top-2% is 110K
* top-1% is 160K
The average cost of a house is 250K, 400K in London. Only the smallest fraction of the population will be able to get that amount of money from just working. You need to be propped up by something, your parent, luck, post-code lottery on your first ring of the property ladder, ...
You need to borrow from the future and the past to afford the present.
edit: formatting
edit2: all amounts are in GBP.
* Your data is for all workers including part-time workers (including students and part time for lifestyle reasons like parenting). Full time work pay averages are quite a bit higher - median at £28k, 90th percentile at £56k. In London where the housing lottery problem is more extreme, it is partly because pay is also higher - full time annual median at £35k, 90th percentile at £75k. * The median earner doesn't buy property - the people who buy houses are the prime-age segment who earn quite a bit more.
In this case something as simple as "having a family member with $150k" creates a remarkable difference in consequences.
They did something stupid, which is embark on a renovation without sufficient funds and having no idea what they were doing. The consequence for them is owing a family friend money and being even higher on the wealth and assets ladder with growing equity.
For the person that doesn't have that, the consequences would be losing all of their savings, foreclosure, ruined credit, and a near zero chance of getting another shot at doing it again.
Having access to resources compounds and grows over time, and and changes everything about ultimate outcomes.
> a young family without a lot of money.
...
> Our budget was $560,000, but nothing came on the market at that price
wat.
> We sold our two-bedroom rat trap for $635,000
wat.
> Luckily, we still owned the two-bedroom condo at King and Bathurst.
Well, that's okay then.
Seriously, these people live in a completely different universe from me.
It was also in Parkdale - not exactly one of Toronto's "best" neighborhoods.
But man, these folks are so clueless it hurts.
What planet do those people live on. Am I the only one who grew up in a place where 85 square meters is ample for a flat for 6 people, not 4, to live in?
You don't see McMansions until you get out to the suburbs and bedroom communities.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house
According to this, 85 square meters is enough for 6 people to live in:
http://www.privatehousinginformation.co.uk/site/files/LHMO%2...
I meant a family of 2 adults + 4 children, in which case yes, 85sqm is ample. For just 2 adults + 2 children it's way more than enough.
As you do.
Luckily they are still brave souls in this world, willing to help them
But at the end of the day it's a good way to test the stability of your marriage.
the story was a cringeworthy read.
glad it worked out well in the end... but life was gentle and kind here.
I used to work as a residential remodeling contractor, I quickly learned to steer clear of this type of client/"victim"