I was reading in the local paper. Well, not the local paper, but the one for a city ten miles from us, that housing in our town is up. WAY up. Like a single family home is up 350% from LAST YEAR, and our place, a duplex, is up 303.9%. All in one year!
Our new neighbors paid 137,000 more for their house than what we paid for it. AND, we paid LESS than 137,000 for our house. The kicker? Their house is the exact same as ours. Same footage, same layout, same everything.
When we applied for our mortgage we had to jump through hoops. I have no fear of foreclosure on our place because the mortgage lady made damn sure we could afford the month payments on our loan. But in 2007 a new kind of mortgage lender was allowed to operate in our province. This mortgage lender acts much like the ones in the states, meaning, they allow you to be approved for way more that you can afford to be approved for.
Here is a great example. At the place hubs works, there is a guy who was approved for 250,000 MORE than what we were approved for three years ago and yet he makes the same wage as Hubs - and no, his wife does not work - just like me.
Fact is, with housing at the price it is now, mortgages that are 40 years long are the norm (ours is 20 years) and if you want a house now, you will have to loan outside of your comfort range. When housing prices started rising less than six months after we bought our house I was thankful we bought when we did, but now that I am seeing houses sell for more than double what we paid for ours I feel like we are blessed!
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