Life

I’d had my realtor portal just about for 4 months at this point — it was set up Jun 27, and by the end of this week that I’m writing this blog for it will be Oct 27. Two weeks ago, I finally had the first house that I was interested in viewing and in my price range, but that one disappeared off the market pretty much the day it was listed.

Perhaps partly due to that one, when another house opened up this week within my price range on Monday afternoon, and in one of the four or so neighbourhoods I was watching and within a very walkable distance to groceries and a train station, I immediately put in a request to go view the house (though I did this last time too and it didn’t work out). So, on Tuesday afternoon, my realtor and I went down to take a look at it.

This was my first house viewing ever (besides when my family first arrived here and bought the Edmonton 4012 house), and as far as I am aware we were the first viewers there too since I had booked it right away. It was about a 15 minute stroll away from the nearest station, Century Park Station, and Oscar, my realtor, arrived before me and let me in once I arrived. We took the next 1.5 hours or so walking through the place, looking for things like leaks and weird architecture, noting rusted shelves, broken cupboard doors, loose handrails, odd stains, and such, while he also kindly answered many of my questions about the process of buying a house as well as estimates on what would be needed to fix this or that up.

But all in all the house looked solid, and as it was a fairly chilly day, we were also able to more or less ascertain that the house seemed to be able to keep itself warm without a noticeable cold leak anywhere. Oscar was also able to get information from the sellers’ housing agent and he informed me that the roof and hot water tank were both about 2 years old, whereas the furnace was 6-8 years old, and that there were no offers or disclosures on the property at that time.

I hesitated about making an offer on the very first house that I actually came out to view, but there were no red flags that I could see, nor that my gut was telling me about, so I indicated that I was interested in the house. Oscar said that because we were so early to the property and there were likely no other bidders yet, we might be able to try for an exclusive bid, before it went into the open pool for other bids. The house was listed for $375k, so with his help I put in a $370k offer, contingent on financing and inspection and a few other things. Even though I had to put a $10,000 deposit on my offer, if things popped up during inspection or if I got cold feet on the bid or found out that it wouldn’t work out for whatever reason, I could still pull out of the deal without a penalty, according to Oscar. So he drew up a contract that Tuesday evening, and I signed it, contingent on it being accepted by the sellers by 6pm on Wednesday.

The sellers were hesitant at first, and counter-offered with a $373k offer on Wednesday morning, giving me the rest of the day to decide whether to accept or not, since that apparently didn’t change the 6pm deadline. This made me very uncomfortable, because $370k was already at the very top end of what I felt like I was able to offer, so I indicated that I was unsure. Oscar continued conversing with the other realtor agent and told me that the sellers seemed surprised at the resistance and said that they might be willing to budge to a number in between.

But after crunching my finances, and talking with Dad, and also with Henry, my mortgage advisor at RBC, and some friends, I stuck to the $370k offer as I was okay with losing the house otherwise. Frankly, I was not completely sure that I could afford the $370k price as is, due to the downpayment eating up most of my cash on hand, and all the extra costs that would need to be paid before I could move in. I think it will work out, but not comfortably so. Funnily enough, another house, somewhat near Southgate LRT Station this time, opened up for viewing on Wednesday, and that one, which had no basement or upper floor (but that is actually something I’m okay with), was also very tempting but it was on the market for $379k, slightly outside my budget, and only had 1 bathroom, and was a bit less convenient than the Century Park one, though I’d have been a lot more familiar with the area. The presence of that house though made me more laissez-faire about the one I had a bid in on — I told Oscar that if the owners rejected the $370k offer, then I was going to view this other one the next day with him.

As a side note, I learnt from my conversation with Henry here that RBC does have a program which will let me tack on extra cosmetic or renovation work that “adds value to the house” to the mortgage itself, but only if I get a quote from the contractor before the mortgage approval. This seemed a bit wrong to me, other mortgage places might do a “renovation loan” or something similar and that’s what I was looking for, and to my mind that should come after the approval and purchase, but who knows. I might take “advantage” of this, still, especially since the Bank of Canada dropped the interest rate another 0.5%, to 3.75%, on Wednesday, Oct 23 as well, so my initial mortgage will have a lower interest, but we’ll see, since it’s still money. There’s some stuff that has to be done no matter what though. He also indicated that they have various plans revolving around the mortgage (local) that I could dip into as I build equity, like the RBC Homeline Plan (local), for things like renovations, but that’s not a source of money that I want to rely on.

In the end, the sellers said that they would need an extension from the 6pm deadline as they were both at work and were unable to sign it in time, and I was half-tempted at that time to just let the offer expire and let the house go into the general pool. I decided to agree to the extension for 6 hours, until the end of Wednesday, though, and they in turn agreed to the $370k price and signed their end of the offer sheet. Things moved quickly from there — I had a $10,000 deposit due on Friday, and Oscar referred me to a home inspection team that seemed well-reviewed on Reddit as well, and a home inspection was set for next Tuesday.

On Thursday, I had an annoying surprise awaiting me. When I went down to my local RBC branch to transfer money out of my TFSA investment account into my general chequing account so that I could make a wire transfer for the downpayment from there, I found that RBC had renewed and reinvested my “one-time 6-month” investment into another year without my consent, which locked about $64k or so of my money into that investment. Apparently even though I had told the banking advisor, Saurabh, that I was only investing it for 6 months back in January, the bank reinvested it after the first year into a one year non-renewable (locked in for the full duration) without telling me so anyway. What part of this warning email, the ONLY one I received, indicates they will reinvest it if I don’t do anything?

I got the investment reversed at the bank branch, but it cost me the $700.21 interest on the GIC that had accumulated since July and a $52.33 penalty on top of that. I never had the interest anyway, so I didn’t really “lose” it per se, but I had factored in that amount when looking at how many assets I had because that’s what the screen showed me, so that still comes out of the final total that I have to work with. And the $50 penalty on top of that for what I consider to be negligence and shadiness on the part of RBC pissed me off, but I needed the GIC cancelled anyway, so that the money would be deposited in my chequing account the following day, Friday, which was the final day to make the $10,000 deposit for the house, so I did that first and then argued about the penalty later on. Once I got home I sent an email off to Saurabh and Henry asking them to help me reverse that penalty charge, as the lady who had kindly cancelled the GIC for me would not (could not) cancel it without the penalty fee.

It’s very scummy as well because mine was a 6-month GIC, which I had left instructions for saying that it was a one-time thing when I first set it up, and then when they renewed it they did it for a full year anyway instead of 6 months. And then when I closed it this week, they deposited the money right back into my chequing account but also closed my investment account immediately so I could not see how much money I should have had and calculate how much exactly the penalty was. And never sent me any documentation or statement about it too. And I couldn’t access any old statements for my investment account because it didn’t exist anymore. The girl who cancelled my account told me that there would be around a $50 penalty, but would not answer when I asked if I would get a statement or note with how much the penalty was or if I could write it down now, she just said that “the money would be deposited into your account by tomorrow”. The main reason I know exactly how much the penalty was was because I took a screenshot of the amount yesterday once I got home and before they closed it down, otherwise I don’t know if they would have refunded anything.

At least this one ended up fine in the end — Saurabh contacted me the next day and said that he had contacted his manager and they had reversed the charge on my account, so it got downgraded to mostly a non-issue.

Anyway, I like the house and very much like the neighbourhood, but the costs of buying a house are so scary, and the pending to-do list so overwhelming. The $370k house is near my max limit, which means I only had about $8k to play with for moving and pre-move-in tasks, after the removal of $800 or so thanks to RBC. Then less another $900 for the home inspection — not the original $500 that Oscar quoted me. This seems expensive, but I am fine with this because the $900 includes a sewer line inspection for $300 that I opted in to, and this “Buyer’s Choice Home Inspections” company has very good reviews on Reddit. The remaining money will have to go toward kitchen things (the cabinets either need replacing or some sort of refreshing/refacing/repainting and I’m not sure which is better), general cleaning, general painting, furniture, and my own moving costs, the very last of which will likely be around $800.

I do have extra money outside of that that I can dip into, but I am trying not to. This actually feels very much like how people describe a wedding — everyone is lining up with extended hands trying to take a cut of my money.

My future monthly costs are interesting as well. Once I move in, that is. I make a bit over $4,200 a month, though it varies between $4,200-$4,400 depending on the time of the year. Out of the $4,200, I’ve estimated that my mortgage will be around $1,637 (a bit less now due to the interest rate drop earlier this week), and other monthly costs include $500 for parents, $500 for utilities, $280 for property tax, $150 or so insurance, and then I have about $1,150 left for food, misc purchases, and savings. That’s not a whole ton to build savings from, but those are also conservative numbers on the salary ($4,200 is on the very low end), and hopefully I can squeeze out savings on utilities and definitely on monthly spending too.

There will always be misc purchases, and things like monthly fees for this and that, but I’ve been keeping track of my finances the past few months since it was a mini New Year’s Resolution to start a spreadsheet for this, and although I didn’t do it when I was preparing for or going abroad, my monthly expenditures when I was at home look like this: $867.32, $608.36, $1,247.28, $1,007.65, $1,034.39, $1,151.29, $1,113.61. These include a bunch of one-time purchases or temporary purchases that I was refunded for, and also things like Twitch‘s SUBtember promotion or Steam sales or Animethon, and recurring things like my Backblaze subscription or Amazon Prime, which is why it can vary a lot from month to month. This is without any sort of belt-tightening, just expenses tracking, so I can definitely survive just fine on $1,150 or so a month, the tricky part is tightening the belt in order to save up for two nest eggs — one for house expenses ($200-$300 a month) and one for vacations ($100-$200 a month). In theory.

It should be doable though, and I’m sort of interested to see if my strategy in Sims 3 — buying a plot of land close to my maximum and then furnishing it over time — works in real life too. Okay, in Sims 3 I buy a huge plot of land with no house on it and slowly build walls and floors and a bed as I scrounch up savings, but basically the same thing. It’s still a huge headache and stress egg planning for such a big purchase though, I already bellyache enough buying plane tickets for a $2,000 trip and become wishy-washy for that for days, this $370,000 purchase is life-changing and I only have a short window of time to make the decision.

I met Dad on Friday in Southgate Mall and we talked about the house a bit, he said after looking the house over (from online and afar — apparently they had driven by it earlier in the week) that they thought the house seemed like a good one, but I still wanted them to come down and take a look at the inside of it. They couldn’t make it down on Tuesday though, so I invited them down on Sunday afternoon instead and set up a visit to the house with Oscar at that time.

As my blog typically covers only the time period until Sunday morning though, the results of the parental visit and the inspection will have to be pushed to next week’s blog. I could write so much more about the house, but let’s not count that chicken before it’s totally hatched, even though that absolutely consumed my week.

Outside of house stuff, I did that voice coaching online session that I mentioned in last week’s blog, and it went okay. The lady I spoke to over Google Hangouts, who was very nice, gave me some pointers and a few vocal exercises that I could try. I then submitted that claim on Sunlife, our benefits provider at work, and it was denied because she was just a vocal coach and not a speech therapist, so that was good to know, and also means that I won’t be able to set up any sort of lessons with her because I won’t be able to afford it with the house purchase now casting a looming shadow over every aspect of my life.

My upstairs neighbours, the Ukrainian couple who used so much water in their broken bathtub that my ceiling started leaking a few months back, also actually came down to tell me that they could hear my TV on late at night and weren’t able to sleep until 3am the previous night due to that. Discounting the fact that I wasn’t awake at 3am the previous night, I do turn up my computer’s speakers pretty loudly at night, broadcasting Twitch streams or AMQ music, to drown out the sounds of them dragging furniture across the floor and them using their bathroom shower for over an hour every night between 10pm and midnight or so, among other noises.

This has been nothing as cripplingly bad as the last apartment, and certainly nothing I’ve complained to the rental company about, but the bathroom noises from various neighbouring units in particular travel very far in this apartment block, and even when I close the bathroom door and shove a towel into the crack at the bottom of the door to muffle that noise, it still overwhelms my own sounds from my computer and apartment and does get on my nerves when they leave the noisy tap running for over an hour every night. So I usually used a combination of turning up my nightly Twitch stream (usually Nomakk, who streams into the early morning), and/or whatever computer game I was playing, and/or some ambient music, to 100% speaker volume with the speakers pointed at the ceiling, in order to create a noise blanket to drown out that noise.

This never generated a complaint in the last apartment, even when both my upstairs neighbour and I were complaining about each other, and I’ve never heard anything about it from my side neighbours either, but apparently despite what the Midwest Rental managers here promised about the thickness of the ceiling/floors in this new building, sound must travel even better through them than the last apartment if my upstairs neighbours can hear it loudly enough to keep them awake at night. Even though if I have it on past 1am or so it’s generally just ambient music from MyNoise, and nothing loud enough that I myself can’t fall asleep to, so I’m not fully convinced that they were actually talking about me.

Anyway, we had a good chat and I requested that they stop dragging their furniture along the floor if possible too (something the woman vehemently denied, and then later on blamed their cat for, but this has since abated by quite a bit nonetheless). But I apologized and said that I had no idea sound travelled that well in the building, and I adjusted by turning my speakers at night up to 70% instead of the full 100% and turning the speakers to point across my apartment toward the bathroom, instead of up at the ceiling. I haven’t heard a complaint since, so maybe that worked? I still bump the volume up to 100% when they start their nightly wasting of water though, and then turn it down again once I notice that the tap has stopped its incessant whining. Also, I’m pretty sure that they’re not actually a couple, but are instead a mother and son who apparently often work at a nearby Tim Horton’s until 10pm or so. They moved in the same week that I did and we’ve exchanged pleasantries before as I helped them when their box was first arriving on a pallet to the apartment complex. If you search my moving in entry for the word pallet, that was actually them, so our move-in days were actually identical.

But now that I’m on the verge of buying a house, these sounds too have flipped over from mildly annoying to mildly nostalgic, since I won’t have the “comforting” sounds of neighbours next to me at night anymore. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing. I wonder how I’ll react to living alone.

On my way back from viewing the house on this Tuesday afternoon, I stopped by the nearby Safeway as well and marvelled at how similar and yet how different it was from the Safeway right by my house. Among other things, I appreciated the much larger discount section in this Safeway:

The prices of the items that I saw were the same between the two locations, but the exact items that they sold were slightly different for sure, which was interesting. For example, the gourmet potatoes that I saw and bought for my parents two weeks ago — the Southgate Safeway had only one flavour of the potato for sale whereas the Century Park Safeway had two.

Lastly, as usual, here are some pictures of the evening sky from my balcony. I am going to miss these very much once I move, though I hope to find new landscapes and sights to take pictures of once I move in. There’s some nearby parks I’m excited to check out.

Sun Oct 20, 6:01 pm:

Tues Oct 22, 6:22 pm:

Thurs Oct 24, 5:36 pm:

The comet was no longer visible to the naked eye by this point though, so I have no comet pictures at all thanks to the capricious wind spirits blanketing us with heavy clouds for the entirety of the last week.