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This is how you gofundme
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Toronto Life publishes a story about a couple with self-described nightmare of a purchase + reno experience. Turns out to be a crack house and the contractor they hire almost demolishes the house with one slip of the bobcat he "borrowed". The poor couple manage to get by with only a six figure loan from a family friend and by moving into one of their other properties.

I get that Toronto housing can be quite the mess right now, but when you buy an underpriced house from a motivated seller on a whim, and then hire a guy who randomly shows up at your door to be your contractor, sometimes these things happen.

And when you write up your harrowing ordeal from an obvious place of privilege, sometimes the only proper response is snark.

A few of the donation comments are worth a read:
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With a couple rolls of the dice, perhaps they use this money to add more houses or even a hotel to — where was it? Atlantic Avenue? Marvin Gardens?
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Re: This is how you gofundme [timbasile] [ In reply to ]
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It's sad enough that these victims have only raised $4100 in the last 2 days to extricate themselves from they unenviable position of having made 2, yes 2 bad real estate investments in less than 7 years. Now after displacing innocent homeless humans, I've learned that they've displaced a family of beavers in Ontario's mildly overpriced cottage country. Worse still, it's all probable but nearly impossible that they've invaded the secluded residence of the ever reclusive chupacabra. I can not believe the amount of stress this poor couple had to endure evicting these unappreciative never do well's while they were only trying to improve their respective neighbourhoods.
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Re: This is how you gofundme [timbasile] [ In reply to ]
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So i've spent the last 1/2 hr going down the rabbit hole of articles put forth about this family. I cannot believe how they can be so not self-aware and see how all this comes across. Apparently they're now patting themselves on the back for a cottage purchase too.

http://cottagelife.com/...am-cottage-for-59000
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Re: This is how you gofundme [timbasile] [ In reply to ]
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"If you, like me, cannot imagine the hard work it would take to make the people that used to live there homeless, much less to get the poor-people smell out"


Nothing is worse than the smell of poor-people.
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Re: This is how you gofundme [madcap95] [ In reply to ]
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I need to move to Canada. Based on what I read, any full-time job -- like McDonalds -- should make it possible to borrow $ million to buy a house (Canadian dollars that is).

________
It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev
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Re: This is how you gofundme [H-] [ In reply to ]
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I need to move to Canada. Based on what I read, any full-time job -- like McDonalds -- should make it possible to borrow $ million to buy a house (Canadian dollars that is).


That sounds like the U.S in 2007 but the reality here is not really like that at all, if you borrow from a real bank.
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Re: This is how you gofundme [Sanuk] [ In reply to ]
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Sanuk wrote:
I need to move to Canada. Based on what I read, any full-time job -- like McDonalds -- should make it possible to borrow $ million to buy a house (Canadian dollars that is).


That sounds like the U.S in 2007 but the reality here is not really like that at all, if you borrow from a real bank.

We bought around a year and a half ago. The mortgage we qualified for, through Scotiabank, was absolutely ridiculous, to the tune that our payments, should we borrow the whole amount, would have devastated us in short order.

Long Chile was a silly place.
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Re: This is how you gofundme [BCtriguy1] [ In reply to ]
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It isn't just with a big bank, we had a broker tell us that we could essentially take double the mortgage we were seeking 2 years ago. Sure, we have good credit, blah blah blah, but I'm not sure we could have floated a variable mortgage paying approximately double in monthly payments. (or whatever it worked out to be).

Rates haven't gone up, sure, but that's all in hindsight. (I should note that I'm not in Toronto or Vancouver where you'd need the extra mortgage cap just to get into the market)
Last edited by: timbasile: Jun 3, 17 14:30
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Re: This is how you gofundme [timbasile] [ In reply to ]
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timbasile wrote:
Rates haven't gone up, sure, but that's all in hindsight. (I should note that I'm not in Toronto or Vancouver where you'd need the extra mortgage cap just to get into the market)

There are a lot of people in the market right now who are very, very sensitive to interest rates. If the rates were hiked by 1% overnight (not going to happen unless we time travel back to the early 80's) a lot of people who just be walking away. Too many people mortgaged to the hilt.
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Re: This is how you gofundme [Durhamskier] [ In reply to ]
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Durhamskier wrote:
timbasile wrote:
Rates haven't gone up, sure, but that's all in hindsight. (I should note that I'm not in Toronto or Vancouver where you'd need the extra mortgage cap just to get into the market)


There are a lot of people in the market right now who are very, very sensitive to interest rates. If the rates were hiked by 1% overnight (not going to happen unless we time travel back to the early 80's) a lot of people who just be walking away. Too many people mortgaged to the hilt.

How are those people even qualifying for variable mortgages? My wife and I had stellar credit, but only put 5% down, and couldn't get a variable rate.

Long Chile was a silly place.
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Re: This is how you gofundme [BCtriguy1] [ In reply to ]
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My brother in law is a mortgage broker and we were chatting about this just last week. He's the one that said that a lot of people are interest rate sensitive. One issue he mentioned is that people have to qualify for a variable mortgage at a higher rate (so if your variable is 2.5% you have to qualify at 5% for example). The amount that you put down on your house affects the rate that the bank uses to qualify you, too.

Then the mortgage closes and they take on additional debt to renovate the house which changes their debt servicing ratio and makes them interest rate sensitive.

Or they fudge the numbers to qualify for the house they want. (They being the borrowers, or the lenders, or both).

We're not going to see a dramatic interest rate hike any time soon, anyways.
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Re: This is how you gofundme [Durhamskier] [ In reply to ]
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Interesting, thanks for the explanation. It boggles my mind how much debt people will take on for homes.

In our case, we barely squeaked in to the market and, at the time in my mind, over extended ourselves for a bit (the first year we had to cover the whole mortgage plus renos, but the renos gave us a basement suite that now covers 40% of our mortgage payment) but in hindsight we got a screaming deal at just the right time.

Long Chile was a silly place.
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