The Perfect Opportunity to Save Has Arrived

1 December 2007 by Jb
Filed under News

This week my landlord gave me what she thought was “bad” news: she served me with an eviction notice because she wants to take over my apartment for personal use. Typically this is bad news for most renters, however in my case it was actually welcome news. I had just decided a few weeks prior that I was going to move out in the spring, and had even started looking around online for new apartments just to see what the market was like. So it was a happy coincidence. Of course I’m not that excited at the prospect of moving in the middle of a Canadian winter in February, but I’ll deal with it.

This news led me to start thinking again about purchasing a condo instead of renting. Contrary to what everyone else says, I am not that interested in purchasing right now mostly because I don’t want to have to deal with anything that goes wrong with the property, but also because the market is so hot here in the Toronto area, that in order to find an affordable condo, I’d probably be relegated to the suburbs of the city. I’ve got a particular set of requirements for what I’m looking for in a condo, and I suspect that to find one in my price range in the city, I’d be off in an area I don’t want.

After doing a bit of research on the condo market in Toronto, I discovered that one of the first things all realtors ask is “Do you really want to buy?” And to be honest, I’d have to answer “I don’t know.” So with that, I decided to shelve my purchase plans and concentrate on finding another apartment to rent.

At this point in the dialogue with myself, I started asking more questions:

• Do I want to rent a cheaper apartment in order to save money on rent and put that towards my debt?
• Do I want to rent a similarly priced apartment and stay the course?
• And what area of the city do I want to be in? My current one? Or a new one?

There are just so many questions to be asked and answered, that I’m enlisting the help of a friend of mine to sort through and narrow my focus some. I think I will actually look in a different part of the city that will be more convenient for my current job, but also any future jobs, as well as just being more central geographically in the city so that I’m 25 minutes away from anywhere. Even though I have a car, I like being close to a subway line so that if I want to go downtown or want to leave the car at home, it’s a feasible & pain-free option.

This is what I’m thinking this week. Ask me again next week and see what I say about the whole situation.

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