But let's stay with the juggling act. In the past 15 years, the price of an average home in Victoria doubled.
The cost of a new car soared from $20,000 to $32,000, a 60-per-cent increase.
With incomes barely higher, how can that be? A small amount of the extra money has come from women increasing their hours of paid work.
We've also cashed in whatever nest eggs we had. Two decades ago the average Canadian family saved nearly 20 per cent of take-home pay. Today, that figure is zero.
And apparently working families are also drawing down their pension savings to make ends meet -- a dangerous scenario. With life expectancy rates continually growing, we'll need more pension funds, not less, to cover those extra years.
The elephant in this room is debt. Mountains of it. As big-ticket items take more of our pay packet, and that pay packet doesn't expand, we turn to borrowing.
At the national level, the amounts involved are hard to comprehend. Canadians collectively owe three quarters of a trillion dollars in personal debt.
But at the household level, our whole way of life is changing.
http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/comment/story.html?id=4398649f-6fb4-454f-a09c-bd4afd87b1c3
See also:
House Prices, Mortgage Rates Present Challenges
Jun 19th, 2007 by A Vancouver Realtor
CTV
Rising housing prices combined with mortgage rates hitting a five-year high have created a double-whammy effect, making it more expensive than ever to get into the Canadian real estate market.
The average price of homes in urban markets has risen 10.2 per cent from a year ago, hitting $333,524 last month. That’s the highest average price ever recorded by the Canadian Real Estate Association.
http://vancouverrealtorblog.com/
[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on June 26, 2007]
Note: http://www.canada.com/v...
http://vancouverrealtor...
Family Finances And House Prices ... Rising Pressures
Posted on Sunday, June 24 at 11:55 by BC MaryContributed By
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Banks loans used to be limited to $20. for every $1. on deposits, but they're now permitted to "create" any amounts of imaginary money by using the properties as collaterals.
Banks in certain countries are now "creating" imaginary capital for the takeover of the assets, resources and properties of people on the other side of the world, and then charge interest, paid by the people whose properties have been stolen by the perceived power of this non existing money. The biggest and best con-job and racket in human history. Steal the properties, then make the victims pay for the cost of the theft.
In Vancouver house prices started jumping with the influx of would be Hong Kong refugees. We sold our brand new house on East 47 for $65,000 in 1979, a year later it was sold for $138,000. to Chinese immigrants. Which shows where the inflation started.
Here in the interior, land prices jumped 1000%, virtually overnight, in the early 90s with the influx of German and Swiss monies fleeing Europe before the introduction of the Euro. Now, we have worthless US dollars, created by the billions by their banks, buying up our land and resources, in one of the few countries that still accept them. The reason is, obviously, resource control after the collapse.
Big business won't be caught with their pants down, they've learned their lesson in 1929, and now are causing the collapse, so they can achieve world political control with the power of imaginary capital.
My wife and I have VISA cards from 2 different banks, with the ridiculous limits rising every year. Which we have no intention of using, but many do, burying themselves in debt, while our harebrained economists and governments are reporting this total and inexcusable madness as "booming economies" and Mr.Dodge of the Bank of Canada reports 2% yearly inflation .
As long as these irresponsible actions are permitted to go on and on, out of control, by bought and paid for politicians, and taught in our universities as the "science of economics" there's no hope for any improvement and we're heading into a catastrophe.
Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC.
When will politicians and the public finally realize that so called "foreign investment", especially with today's imaginary money, is nothing more than the inflation of a country's money supply from abroad, therefore it is not needed and is counter productive.
Ed Deak.