Home Ownership for Young Adults More Likely In the Country
An interesting new survey from our from our friends at Stats Canada outlining that:
According to a new study, in 2006, young adults in rural and small towns were more likely to be homeowners than young adults in Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas.
This is not surprising to me, but also a little worrisome. I look at the prices of the homes around me, and wonder how anyone just starting out can afford to live in them. With interest rates where they are, there is a fighting chance, but if rates go up, there may be a bubble bursting sound, just because I think the housing prices in larger cities is just getting out of hand.
RESPs
I need to look up and learn about how you take money out of RESPs and/or whether you can keep putting money in while money is coming out, and a few other interesting questions that I have. If anyone has any insight on this, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail and I will quote your advice, for other folks to read as well.
Comments Please
Just a side note, feel free to comment on things. I do moderate my comments (thanks to being SPAMMED to death a while back), but I am genuinely interested in what you think of my commentaries (good and bad).
Carnivals This Week
- The 123rd Carnival of Personal Finance took my posting on University Costs, Holy Crap!
Altamira has a pretty good explanation of the types of payments that can be made from an RESP: http://www.altamira.com/altamira_en/accounts-services/accounts/resp.htm
(scroll to the bottom of the page).
I don’t see why you couldn’t keep contributing to the RESP while withdrawals are being made, if you wanted to go that route.
You might think that People who can save money because they make lots of money can afford houses. You might also question why the minimum downpayment rules changed, was it because not enough people were buying houses?
I think it’s simplistic either way to assume that young folk can’t afford houses, and also that only those who can save, CAN buy houses too.
I live in Vancouver, and was one of the lucky ones who bought in a brief, somewhat same period of 2000. I figured out my flat is paying me approximately $2K per month to live in it … that’s how much it’s appreciated. While it’s pleasing to see my net worth grow like that with nearly no work or imagination on my part, most of the time, I don’t like, at all, living in a market where the ordinary people who make Vancouver Happen, exist as a city, cannot realistically hope to buy a reasonably sized home for themselves anymore.
What strikes me as somewhat obscene is a neighbourhood near stanley park that is sold out, but most people don’t actually live there. So we have buildings that are half-empty, while middle-income earners who actually reside here, can’t afford to buy.
Hmmm, did you also notice that people who make more money are also more likely to own homes? Did anyone ever question this?
Could this simply be that people just starting out their careers don’t have enough money to buy a house?
It’s also more expensive to buy a house in the metropolitan areas, compounding the career starting which makes it even that much more difficult.
Who would have thunk it? People that make lots of money, or have time to save lots of money buy houses. . . fancy that.