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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
The nice thing about (aboot?) being here is that, since I eventually plan on moving back, I have effectively got a 10%+ raise in pay.
...and Vancouver real estate has been wicked expensive since the Hong Kong handover of 1997.
All-in-all I completely agree with the article about Canada's economy as a whole. However, I've seen a lot of funky mortgages in Vancouver, shallow rationale ("the Olympics are coming!"), and a lot of the property are "second homes" to people from elsewhere.
1. You have to have 40 pct down payment to buy a house there and interest rates are 3 pct higher than here. Thus, less housing bubble.
2. Banks aren't allowed to do stupid loans and they are REGULATED.
3. They invest in their own country and they have THREE TIMES the investments in alternative energy sources and infrastructure per capita than we in the US do.
4. They actually encourage highly skilled people to become Citizens and move there, while we don't.
5. National Health Care - which they love, other than whiny Albertans.
Canadians led the world, something like 25 times (or more) the US value.
Yeah, sure.
Actually there's a couple perverse things here you should know about. Basically you need to have degrees to become a Canadian citizen, unlike in America where you have to bring in the foreskins of 37 slain terrorists. That might sound great, but if you're thinking about it, they're skimming off the top, only allowing immigrants with high social status, never letting any ruffians in who didn't have the decency to get a PhD first. But then once they're in, they don't even allow them to use their education: professional accreditation is almost impossible for foreigners, unless they want to earn their degrees again at a Canadian institution.
So basically, Canada says to poor people from other countries, "screw you you can't come in!", and then says to educated people from other countries, "oh you can come in, but btw screw you!". I really wouldn't idealize their immigration system.
The minimum down payment is only 5% for first time buyers, if it were 40% no one would ever be able to afford to buy a home.
@11 Yeah, that's basically about what I see.
Also: during the good years of the 90s and early 2000s, Canada ran surpluses and paid down their debt by a *lot*. So when things turned bad and it was Stimulus Time, there was a lot lower debt threshold to begin with; you can spend more money. (And even with that, the per-capita federal deficit here, right now, is about a third what it is in the US.)