Four years into writing this blog, I thought I had seen almost everything when it comes to the most common financial suicides committed by the middle class. But today I was hit in the head by a shocking realization:.
When choosing between buying versus renting a house or apartment, people are making much, much worse choices than I would have thought possible. We could save millions of lives and trillions of dollars by just helping certain people operate a basic hand calculator at a beginner level. It sounds improbable, until you review the following stories from this Canadian vacation I am currently wrapping up:. With over six million people in the highly car-oriented metro area, it sprawls on forever and people commute in from an insane zoo of connected cities comprising 31, square kilometres, or roughly a quarter of the entire land area of England.
So what has created this incentive to commute? There are great jobs in Toronto — some of the highest paying in the country. Unemployment is low. The city is clean and quite beautiful along the lakeshore and the many ravines and rivers. But unfortunately, as the saying goes, nobody could ever afford a house there. Somebody offers me a job in the most expensive and hardest-to reach region right downtown.
And wanting to maintain my current luxurious lifestyle, I insist on only the best: living in a huge apartment in a brand-new, modern building near the shore with beautiful views, within walking distance of work, the stadium, the train station, and everything else downtown has to offer.
So I pull open the useful apartment-hunting site called padmapper. This place looks appropriately fancy. All that, just to live near nothing but strip malls and TV-watching suburban commuters. I look at the price. Is this a joke? Are apartments really that cheap? Looking through a few dozen other listings in the prime areas, I realize that yes, they are. And this is in a city where people defy death by driving an hour through a blizzard before paying for parking and heading in to the office.
