Maybe I should have gone to Ikea

[bcholmes]

I am consumer. Hear me charge.

A few weeks back, I decided that my office chair was on its last legs -- it's almost exactly 20 old, and really starting to come apart at the seams. So I ordered a new chair from one of the yuppie furniture stores on Queen. Today I heard that my chair was in, so I went up the street to pay the balance and pick it up. The new chair is a really well-designed chair. I'm sitting in it, now, thinking, "This is the best chair ever!" But while I was at the store, I asked about whether or not there's a loading dock to which I could pull up my car; Queen St. is not known for its wealth of parking spaces. Turns out they had a reasonable loading spot in one of the back alleys behind Queen.

"I'll be back in fifteen minutes," I said, then wandered up the back-lane. But that trip took me by the new lighting store that opened up in a former warehouse property near my local DVD place. I'd been meaning to check it out, but it's off the main roads, and was always closed at the times I thought about it. So I popped in. Next thing you know, I'd ordered a new lamp. Spending much more than I thought I'd planned to spend on a lamp. It might, possibly, be the most expensive piece of furniture I now own. Yowza. It should arrive in a week or two.

So then I was walking back from the lamp place, and I remembered that there's a new townhouse development on Richmond, over just a few blocks from me. It's right across from a set of townhouses that I'm always looking at -- I find it an attractive building. So I stopped in and picked up a package. Now I'm fantasizing about buying a townhouse. Truth is, I don't think I can come anywhere near affording it. Housing prices in Toronto are at a ridiculous high, so I feel like it's a bad time to buy (the "bubble" seems to dominate the local news cycle). But their model rooms were very pretty. Hummina.

Comments

[maize]

I'm always on the fence about this bubble thing. We heard extensively about the bubble and how it was a bad time to buy because real estate was so inflated and it would burst any second now when we first started gearing up seriously for buying at this time last year. After hearing that *endlessly* from numerous people, we asked our real estate agent (who obviously has a vested interest in people continuing to buy, so we asked while aware of that bias) and they said that there's some truth to the inflated prices thing and that it will eventually have to end everyone assumes, but that on the other hand, that's been the dominant narrative about real estate in Toronto for something like a decade now. And I did look back a bit and found people saying the exact same thing for probably something like that long. So ... it's hard to say. Even those who think it's the same old story assume that it will crash eventually, but when, and if it did so right after you bought, how upset would you be / how much would it affect you?

[bcholmes]

I think there are a few factors. First, it's pretty damn pricey. It's probably beyond my upper "reasonable" limit for price. I've pondered the numbers a lot, and I think I *could* probably afford it, based on current interest rates and assuming that I could sell my place comparable to the value of other units in my building.

But there are the two big concerns, right there. Since the townhouse isn't going to be ready for two years, I can't guarantee that I can sell my place at the price I need, and I still have a concern about what interest rates are going to do.

Also: I've been looking forward to being without a mortgage (which I should be in about a year and a half).

[maize]

Yeah, those are big considerations. That makes complete sense.

And the idea of being so close to no-mortgage would be hugely compelling for me. It would be hard to put an opportunity cost on that. I know that when we looked for the house we're in now, I strongly considered the idea of moving to Waterloo or Kingston simply because the sale of our condo would have made it possible to get a mortgage-free house. As it is, the house we got was a HUGE step up in value, and so we won't be mortgage-free for quite a while, and that idea does kind of lurk in the back of my mind a lot.