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Comment by toadi | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the location becomes a problem? In my home country life is expensive too. Moved to a lower cost one. Bought land, build a house have a big garden. Raise animals and grow my own crops. I build solar panels and have my own waterwells. I have almost 0 cost. Just my internet. I would never ever be able to this all in my home country without going into debt so much I would be paying for that well into my retirement.

I was working in a well paid IT job almost living from pay check to pay check. Now I work remote for a lower pay and most of it just goes in my retirement savings.

Not sure what my point is but there are alternatives...

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Since they have health conditions, they have no choice but to live in the GTA to be able to see their doctors. Trying to find affordable housing and specialists in other cities will have multi-year long wait lists (ignoring the fact that they don't even have the money to afford movers). Nothing in the GTA is remotely cheaper than what they currently have unless they want to rent a 5bdr basement with 4 random students in a firehazard sharehouse. They are effective trapped there until they die.

It’s somewhat understandable that people being “forced” to move from where they have always been is annoying, but sometimes it’s the best option.

It takes a fat wad of ready cash to move. Twenty years ago it cost $4k for a local do-it-yourself move (inexpensive state), after the last everything was totaled.

Today it's common to compete with dozens->hundreds of applicants for a rental. We just did a similar move to that $4k of yesteryear (same region, modest house, local move) and it was about $16k.

That's sort of the point, location in a city? Yeah. But an entire city or country where $4k/mo isn't enough for food? Sounds like the people of the country got scammed by politicians and corporations.

Welcome to Canada comrade, where interest rates, monetary policy, corporate consolidation, and corrupt politicians combined to create a country where house prices became obscenely unaffordable first in a few major cities and then in recent years in every podunk town in every province in the country. And with obscene housing prices comes obscene cost of living. $4k/mo doesn’t get you anything close to a reasonable lifestyle.

I feel betrayed; everyone has been telling me Canada is perfect and does everything right :(

Our economy has been based for too long on debt and real estate. When Canadians became the most indebted households in the G8, the government simply opened the floodgates to immigrants to ensure rents and house prices would stay high.

We are following the same path as the UK now in that the conservative parties are moving rightward and gaining ground on populist notions of “this isn’t the Canada we grew up with” (because of immigration) which plays to certain folks who are upset that their quality of life has eroded due to the increase in housing costs. Now these groups have been whipped into such a fury they’ll vote against their own interests like electing politicians who commit to privatizing healthcare, one of the cornerstones of our identity.

Wild times.

I've looked into houses in the Yukon out or curiousity and it was the same thing. Middle of nowhere in the arctic is also expensive.

In the middle of nowhere I'd not buy a ready-made home but a plot of land - which I assume still to be affordable - and build my own house there. I've been to the Yukon - paddled the whole thing from Whitehorse to the Bering strait in a canoe in 2001 - and actually planned to do something like that. I ended up moving to Sweden instead and more or less count my blessings now that Canada has managed to lose a lot of its appeal in the decades between then and now.

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