It’s my understanding that non-competes have no teeth in Canada — in the software industry at least. Is there some except for comp/electrical/mechanical engineers as may be employed at this company?
Full disclosure: was making CAD 70k/year at RIM and my next full time job started around Nov 2013 for GBP 41k/year (and by March 2014 visa stuff was settled and I’d moved to London).
But you had to have saved up money in the first place in order to make a downpayment on the mortgage. If your rent is so expensive that you can’t save any money then you aren’t going to be able to get a mortgage anyway. And if you can save money for a downpayment then you have to compare the opportunity cost of investing those savings versus using them to buy a house.
Exclusionary zoning is an even worse form of institutionalized privilege that benefits the wealthy and middle class rather than the poor and middle class.
I agree, except that housing right now isn’t a free market precisely because of zoning rules that artificially limit what can be built and where. Until existing land owners lose the right to rig the market, markets should be rigged in favour of tenants who have less power.
Where it’s easy to build new housing supply I’m in favour of looser rent control or removing rent control because it’ll be redundant.
Yup it’s a combination of protecting those who are less powerful and I would argue a way to avoid perverse incentives. If a landlord can arbitrarily raise rent, they have no incentive to perform ongoing (inexpensive maintenance). They can wait until the problems become critical and much more expensive and then pass those costs onto the tenant. With rent control the landlord knows they have to control costs and has more incentive to perform the cheaper preventative maintenance.
If I'm happy to have gains when I do nothing but my neighbours improve their properties, then I’m also happy to risk losses when I do nothing but my neighbours make changes.
Those landlords should go out of business in a free market. Not properly accounting for maintenance costs is a business failure, not the tenant’s fault. If property prices are higher than rents that’s a market failure, not a cost to be passed onto tenants.
That assumes that the market is able to bear those costs. What do landlords do in stable markets where rents are flat or track inflation? Are all rentals dilapidated in those markets?
No problem at all! :) Just curious about the sources of revenue from me as a customer if I don’t hold cash, don’t issue sell orders, and buy only ETFs.
I use a discount brokerage in Canada called Questrade. I keep as little cash as possible in my account (contributions and dividends get used within a few days to buy more ETFs), and my portfolio is entirely ETFs. If I also pay no commissions when issuing buy orders, how does the brokerage make money from me? Apart from the fees for order placement, is there interest earned for short-sellers borrowing ETFs?
They mean we can stop worrying about those homeowners who oppose an apartment building being built near them on the basis that it reduces property values. Because if the drop in values doesn’t hurt them until they sell then they have no right to complain about property values today when the apartment is built.