Well as many people in Montreal are getting into the season of Apartment Hunting now as this is the time when you either need to renew your lease or start looking for a new place.
After living in many places around the world over the last few years it is a curious ritual, that I have not seen repeated in other places we have lived. Basically for those who are not familiar for some reason in Montreal most leases are done for July 1st usually for 1 year, July 1 in Canada is a Federal Holiday, “Canada Day” so basically everyone is off that day for the most part, and it is known as moving day for anyone who has to change apartments.
We kind of missed all the “fun” as we came back to Montreal in the beginning of June last year, and started to look almost immediately, at that point the available units were not many as we were cutting very close to the July 1st deadline as most people need to give notice 3 months before the end of the lease, if they are staying or leaving. And many usually secure a place as soon as possible. We actually got lucky as a friend of ours knew someone who had an apartment available, we looked at it and a few others and decided to take it as the price was right and the area and the apartment itself were not too bad and satisfied the immediate needs.
Now we come to today, and we are looking at things and could use a bigger place, after looking in the area we found a few places that we liked, that met the size and neighborhood we were looking for but we could not justify paying almost double of what we pay right now for just 1 extra room?
So now comes the eternal question, Buy vs rent
We have owned a house before, and it made sense at the time as the payments were a little more than the rent we were paying previously, but we had much more space, basically we went from 1000 sqft. 2 bedroom apartment in a complex to a 2100 sqft. house with a double garage, yard and no one above or below us, for about $500 more than what we were paying in rent.
now here is the dilemma we face now, we can always rent a bigger nicer place, but that $ amount will go up, and unfortunately no matter how you look at it you are paying part if not all of someone else’s mortgage.
Now we have decided to stay in our current apartment and see what we can do as far as buying a place, as fortunately Montreal hasn’t suffered the same fate with the housing market as most of the USA. Prices here have been stable or rising over the last few years, and the mortgage market is nothing like in the USA either, it is a lot harder to get a mortgage here than in the USA.
we figured if we can find an income property that we can live in and rent out an apartment that can cover some of the mortgage would be an ideal solution and this would also fall in line with many our “old World” Family values that we constantly get reminded of whenever possible.
Now the challenge is to get enough set aside to be able to put a down payment on something that we would like.
One step at a time….that’s the only way to look at it, you don’t what might be down the road…
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