Buying Houses:

Buying houses has never been easy.

Back in the days when a single detached house could be bought for about $50,000, I envied a fellow employee, an older guy, for the fact that he had purchased his 1200-sq ft brick bungalow, detached, a few years earlier, for $25,000.

After thinking about it, I realized that he bought his house when the average weekly salary was less than $100.

That was in the 1950s. Since then, our dollar has been devalued steadily through steady taxation. Every time the politicians increased taxes, everybody had to increase prices on their produce just to stay in business. And everybody needed more dollars to buy the same old goods and services.

That is how money is devalued. Extreme example of that process was the Weimar Republic in Germany following WWI. Unable to keep up with the punitive reparations taxation of the winning allies, the government started printing money.

A story was told about a hungry man who went to a store for a loaf of bread pushing a wheelbarrow full of money. When he wasn't looking, a thief grabbed the wheelbarrow, dumped the money and ran.

That probably didn't happen, but it might have.

About 50 years ago, I used to collect pennies in a large crock. Ten years earlier, coffee was 10 cents. Chocolate bars were a nickel. Gasoline was 15 cents a gallon as recently as the '70s.

The millennials whining that they cannot buy a house should know that nobody ever bought a house on their own when they were 19 years old. We all had to work, save, think it through and be prepared to sacrifice lifestyle before making that kind of investment. 

Buying a home today is probably not more difficult than it's ever been when you factor in inflation. And while our politicians probably didn't get the printing presses rolling every time they needed money, they were quick to tax--all three levels of government.

The latest devaluation of our purchasing power is Trudeau's famous carbon tax on all provinces. While we don't have to get a wheelbarrow full of dollars to go to the store just yet, prices have jumped upward on everything we buy as industry tries to stay in business.

And yes, like all the other taxes, that tax has moved your plans to buy a house a few more years into the future.