Life

On New Year’s Day, apparently there was someone going around lighting dumpsters on fire in the neighbourhood. This linked Reddit thread talks about it and added some pictures of the firebug that they (not me!) somehow captured. Nonetheless, I wanted to archive them here:

I recognized that dumpster because it’s near my apartment, so I went downstairs and took some pictures in the morning too:

Pleasant weather, bright blue sky, late morning moon, burnt-out dumpster, just another winter day in Edmonton.

I went out on Tuesday since the first Tuesday of every month is discount day at the local Safeway, and I saw a snow rabbit being very confused at the lack of snow on the ground to camouflage and burrow in, and some nice clouds:

Then I came back and fought with my upstairs neighbours again. As expected, their noise level rose this week from the lower levels of the previous week. Of what I can surmise, from overhearing the screams of the crazy woman upstairs as well as one conversation they had with Denise, the general manager of the apartment complex, when they were on their 4th floor balcony and Denise was downstairs in the courtyard (after I reported them for another yelling fight between the man and the woman and furniture being thrown around), the girl’s dad passed away recently or something and I’m guessing that she had been away over the holidays for that. I have little sympathy or empathy for them at this point though.

She came back on Tuesday but didn’t seem to be there the rest of the week, not only because I heard no more tantrums but because they react differently when I prod the ceiling with my broom. I did fight with who I think is the guy still residing upstairs pretty much every day this week, but his response is more muted, he tends to get noisier in retaliation too but he doesn’t stomp on the ground, and prefers to turn up his stereo music or whatever nonsense instead. He also seems to clean the house multiple times a day (they both did, when they were both here), and he’s the culprit keeping me up at night by constantly pacing back and forth on creaky floorboards and going out to the balcony for smokes at 1am and 2am and occasionally dropping things on the floor though, and also woke me up at 8-9 am twice times this week from dropping something loud on the ground after keeping me up late the night before.

I have been having trouble concentrating on doing anything for vast swathes of the day because it always sounds like they are having anger management or OCD issues and there’s a constant bombardment of noise above me, and the management is doing nothing about those noise terrorists. And yet they go ballistic the moment I even so much as tap on the ceiling. Oddly, there’s a spate of colder weather coming next week and I’m looking forward to that because it means they will likely have their balcony door open less, and/or will suffer more when they go out to do their chain smoking. I’m looking forward to that. But for now I just toss a poke at the ceiling every now and then when they’re making noise (I never instigate the noise) to keep them riled up so they will leave the first chance they have, while I turn up the volume on whatever I’m doing so I don’t have to hear their retaliation. At least they seem to have stopped going to the management office in tears to complain about it.

I did find some time to work on my Dream Diary a bit though, finishing August 2017. I’m not going to give every single update as I go along on this resolution, but it felt nice to at least be a little productive this week. Next week, work starts up again — a two week vacation around Christmas always feels “right”, not too short, but not too long either.

My new external hard drive came on Tuesday, two days earlier than forecasted. As per its Fedex tracking, it actually could have come one day earlier, on New Year’s Day itself, and was supposedly on a truck there (or scheduled to be on one), but suffered a “Delivery Exception”. According to various pages on the Fedex website, apparently there’s a pretty wide definition for a “Delivery Exception”, including: inclement weather, natural disaster, a vehicle issue like a flat tire, customs delays, holidays, strikes, bad weather, no one was there to receive your package at delivery, missing documentation, security restrictions, business closed, and more. That’s a pretty wide range of errors. I’m going to assume the Jan 1st holiday was at fault here, but it’s a pretty audacious leap of deduction. It’s possible they heard of the nearby dumpster fire overnight.

I’ve started transferring files to it, but I made a mistake at first by attempting to transfer everything from my old external hard disk to the new one, all 11 TB or so of it, with the idea that once it was duplicated I could decide what I wanted to keep on which drive. After 2 days, this transfer (done using a program called TeraCopy which is set to verify each move/copy after performing the action), was only done about 20%. I gave up and cancelled it all and decided to decide (like having a meeting to plan for another meeting) on how I wanted to split it before I started moving things instead. And thus I did so, passing a decree that I’d put my scans and backup/preservation stuff on this new drive, and so I spent the rest of the week moving those things over.

I went down to Scotiabank on Wednesday to try to get an estimate on how much of a budget I have to work with for buying a house. Basically a mortgage preapproval. One credit check and some technical issues later, this came to about a $280k mortgage on a 25 year loan, with only slight deviances based on changing the length of payment or things like that. This is based largely on two things, the current Bank of Canada interest policy rate, which is at 5%, and the yearly salary for my job, which is around $75-78k. That’s also about how much I have in my bank accounts, so with a downpayment of $70k thrown on top of that, that would be about a house value of slightly over $350k.

I also learnt about something called the First Home Savings Account, where Canadians can open an FHSA with a bank and put in $8,000 per year, which gives you an income tax contribution deduction and associated savings from that until you withdraw from that fund to buy your first house. Even though I plan to get a house the middle of this upcoming year, this is still apparently something I can do and which will count toward my next income tax filing in 2025 for fiscal year 2024 now, and if I don’t end up buying a house then 12 months from the day I open the account, I can contribute another $8,000 to it and so on. It was apparently a program that the Canadian government started last year.

The public Scotiabank mortgage lending rate was somewhere around 7.3% for a 3 year closed rate mortgage on a 25-year amortization, whereby the interest rate is locked in for that entire time period, which is a lot higher than the central rate and even the other major banks, but he said that Scotiabank had a Mortgage Plus loyalty thing or something that dropped it to 5.5%, but the program wouldn’t actually allow him to put it in for the calculations, instead insisting on the larger 7.3% rate, nor would it let him up 25 years to 30). I later learnt that this was because I was trying to go over 20% of my downpayment, which they didn’t really allow for, and that that number basically wouldn’t change all that much (it mostly affects the amount I’d pay back per month). From what I could see it would only influence it a couple thousand dollars upwards, as he did drop it from 7.3 to 7.0 (by changing it from a 3 year closed rate plan to a 5 year closed rate plan) and the antiquated mortgage calculator program coughed up about $6,000 more or so in preapproval.

I came away a bit dissatisfied with the process though, especially since the Scotiabank mortgage specialist seemed to not be entirely certain why the program he was using was spitting out some of the numbers it did. Due to that, I walked into my local RBC branch in the mall instead, and asked if there was someone there I could speak to. Amazingly, they said that they had an opening in about 30 minutes, so I went off for lunch and came back to speak to an advisor there as well.

I was expecting to have to give all my details and do another credit check again, but this guy was far more to the point. He took a look at my paycheque, and immediately quoted me the exact same amount as the other guy did, a 280k mortgage. Not only did RBC get me in to see an advisor immediately, instead of having me wait a week like Scotiabank, he didn’t even have to fire up his computer, never mind run a credit check! He had been doing this for 15 years, he said, and could basically eyeball it at this point. He said what I had surmised by then, that the only things that affected it were basically one’s salary and the interest rate, and that a couple years ago when the interest rate was around 2%, that would have made the mortgage 5 times my salary instead of 4 times, so I would have been able to get a $350k mortgage. But it was a medium-level interest rate right now, with a decent chance to be a bit lower come the middle of next year when I wanted to get my house, so 4 times was what I should be aiming for instead.

He was able to answer a bunch of my questions without hesitation. and also pointed out some other things, like how my ability to do a $70k downpayment on top of the $280k mortgage was perfect, as a 20% downpayment meant that my mortgage wouldn’t be a high ratio one and wouldn’t require insurance or something like that, and that the mortgage repayment would come to about $1,800 a month, on top of about $300 property tax, $150 house insurance, maybe $250 utilities or so, and getting a more expensive house would mean the monthly repayment and the property tax would be higher anyway, which would probably be untenable on my current salary. That made a lot of sense.

We also worked out a timeline, like he said if my current lease was ending in September or so, and I wanted a house to move in to by then, then I should tack on 45 days for the owner to move out after the house sale was closed, and that mortgage pre-approvals at RBC were good for 4 months (I believe it’s only 2 months at Scotiabank), so I should look to officially start the formal preapproval process around March. Neat. And we talked about the BoC’s interest rates a little. He also said he could recommend realtors to work with if I wanted some at that time. I felt very comfortable with him, and have his business card now, so I will probably look to work with RBC instead of Scotiabank for the mortgage when the time comes. Especially after putting together this chart in the morning before I went to talk to either advisor:

0

Scotiabank‘s “mortgage plus” rates or whatever are better, like 5.5% for the 3 year fixed, but they don’t seem to be public, and I’m not sure I trust its continued existence. It’s really interesting though. Because specifically of how much I have at this point in time, and because I didn’t quit my job, and because I didn’t go to Japan for the 2nd study abroad program, I have exactly the amount needed to safely (i.e. I still have a little buffer leftover afterwards for renovations and other emergency expenses) put down the minimum 20% downpayment for the maximum mortgage that my job’s salary allows me to get, thus maximizing it without running into high ratio mortgages. So a $350k house it will be, I guess!

He also, in a rather timely manner, warned me not to get a vehicle. He said the last client he spoke with had just gotten a car, with a $600 monthly payment tacked on to his liabilities from it, and that $600/month cost that client $120k off his mortgage limit. Yikes. Get the house first, then the car, he said! Duly noted!

I went for a haircut after that, because why not get all the weird painful adultish things out of the way while I was at the mall? So that’s done now, and for under $100 at that since I went to the cheaper non-salon barber shop to get it done. My hair feels light now and no longer contributes to occasional headaches and tinnitus. It’s nice. I also no longer feel like I need to shampoo my hair daily or feel gross. I don’t think I’ve had a haircut since April. My blog confirms this. Good blog.

Because we’re only 3 days into the year and I have all my receipts within easy reach still, I also decided to start an optional new year’s resolution to track my budget expenditures in a spreadsheet, something I’ve never needed to do and don’t think I really *need* to do still, it’s just that it’s actually useful from a personal archive standpoint since I’ve wished that I could look back on things in the past few years instead of just having an armful of unsorted receipts. I have this in a Google Sheet at the moment.

My new Alberta ID card also arrived on Wednesday, so that’s nice. Glad that online renewal worked, since I wasn’t 100% sure if it would. Even if I plan to get that other ID, the driver’s licence, soon. Lots of other minor “new” things started this week due to the start of the new year, things like new organizer files for my receipts and bills, new archival folders to store my screenshots, and so on.