Family Formation & Housing

For young couples starting families, buying their first home and/or other real estate. Covers mortgages, credit cards, interest rates, children’s education savings plans, joint accounts for couples and the like.

The four Ds to buying your first home

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An old wooden house in Dalarna, SwedenBy Sheila O’Hearn, Zoocasa

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

 “If a monkey can be taught to salt away money by sticking it in a sock, so can we.”

That’s what my partner and I told each other the day we decided to start saving for a home. Real estate can be tough, so we started our plan early. In some ways, it was madness. We still had to pay monthly rent and a first baby was on the way. It meant cutting back on activities we enjoyed, little extras and big extras.

But what we had going for us were the four D’s: the dream, the drive, the discipline, and a deadline.

Eventually we hit our target and moved to a small town where houses still cost less than they do in a city. Ours was a modest, century-old farmhouse that would require work, just right for my partner’s creative outlet. It was a cozy fit for our two additional children, but it was home and has been for 28 years.

How a person or couple saves for their first home is not a question of doing it one way, but of having knowledge of the options to make informed choices and a solid plan.

The dream

Continue Reading…

Millennial Blog Wrap: Budgeting now to be debt-free later

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Business desk concept - BUDGETBy Helen Chevreau, Hub Staff

As a millennial, it’s important that we begin to create good financial habits to govern our lives, starting with budgeting.

From a healthy morning routine, to being grown-up about money, as we get into this new stage in our lives, we need to make sure to put ourselves on the right track, or risk ending up in serious financial trouble.

From the blog Making Sense of Cents comes a new post that touches on some common bad money habits that are extremely easy to fall into. Whether you’re of the “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” or the “it’ll-never-happen-to-me” mindset, or any of the other bad money habits mentioned, this post is here to help you change your ways before it’s too late.

Now, Not Later

Along the same lines, it seems that the bad habit of paying down debts more slowly to reap the rewards of ‘more cash in hand how’ is springing up, and Bridget Eastgaard of ‘Money After Graduation’ is here to tell us why that’s such a terrible idea. Continue Reading…

Leave an inheritance of cottage relaxation, not taxation

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Cottage On The Carpenter Lake, CanadaBy Tarsem Basraon, TD Wealth 

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

The summer is quickly approaching and for many Canadians that means one thing: cottage season.

While many parents envision leaving the family cottage as part of their inheritance one day, with the value of cottages often appreciating since purchase, there’s also the risk of bestowing the legacy of a large tax bill.

To help make sure you’re leaving an inheritance of cottage relaxation and not taxation, here are three strategies you can discuss with your financial advisor when planning your cottage legacy. These strategies are available to you while you are alive, and there are various other strategies that can be implemented on your death in your will.

• Co-own with your Kids

Adding your children to the deed and making them co-owners of your cottage could help defer capital gains tax and save money. For example, if your cottage value has increased over time, it would trigger a capital gain on the portion of the cottage that your children now own and you would pay the tax on that now. Down the road, your kids would only pay tax on the capital gains owing on the remaining portion of the cottage you own when you die. There is,  however, a risk with this approach. Continue Reading…

Housing Bubble? Why it’s Crazy to buy in Vancouver or Toronto

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Beautiful view of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Vancouver, B.C.

When central and southern Alberta experienced catastrophic flooding in June 2013 there were 32 states of emergency declared and over 100,000 people displaced throughout the region. Reports of price gouging at various retailers surfaced on social media; one story in particular claimed that an unscrupulous Calgary retailer was selling individual bags of ice for $20.

Given the urgency of the situation, and depending on your level of preparedness, what options do you have?

  1. Move on to the next retailer and hope to find an honest owner
  2. Go home with no ice and wait for the situation to return to normalCalgary-price-gouging
  3. Suck it up and buy the ice, grumbling the entire way home about how you got ripped off
  4. Hope for some kind of government intervention to protect you and other consumers from price gouging
  5. Borrow ice from a friend or neighbour who has plenty to spare

Continue Reading…

Millennial Wrap: Wedding Bell Blues, good debt and other illusions

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a04a25d7-0da5-4af5-96b7-1e10d3b96580By Helen Chevreau, Hub Staff

Wedding Bell Blues

After reading this new post from Broke Millennial, I feel lucky to have been spared the first few years of the “wedding apocalypse.” At 24, I have yet to have any of my close friends or relatives tie the knot, and now I know that in addition to being thankful for this budgetary hall-pass, I should really be taking this extra time to start saving for “other peoples’ weddings.”  I know I’ve got at least another few years before I will need to start paddling the wedding wave, but knowing it’s something I will eventually need to factor in is important.

Millennial Illusions

The pressure to have our lives together has, I would assume, always been a very real and stressful issue for millennials. Since the onslaught of social media “dream lives” we see on sites like Pinterest, Etsy, Apartment Therapy etc., it’s extremely easy to fall into a pit of expectations that no normal 20-something should be expected to live up to. This is a huge issue I’ve found with becoming a grownup. We see snippets of peoples’ lives and we want our lives to look just like that, but we forget what it’s taken for them to get there. Continue Reading…