Welcome to another edition of Leaky's life updates.
Here's a little of what's been going on in my life over the past month or so, starting back around Christmas time, hence the photos.
New Job
Well, for starters I got a new job after we moved back to Canada. You may have noticed that I have been a little less active with my commenting.
I'm still reading some posts and commenting here and there and voting of course, just maybe not to the extent that I was before.
Anyway, I'm working in a hospital in my field of Social Work and its going alright. I started back in December.
Christmas Lights
Around Christmas time we went for a walk in this estate home community outside my city to view some Christmas lights.
The homes really went all out in their decorations, as you can see in the photos.
I know that everyone has moved on from Christmas by this point but I'm bringing it back, just for a moment.
I was going to write about the lights a while back, but then I decided that they didn't warrant their own post, so here I am adding them into the life update.
The one above is actually a person's front yard. Can you imagine!?!
Here is one last one just to top things off.
Birthday
I celebrated my birthday at the begining of January.
My wife made me this Black Forest cake and it turned out amazing.
It was her best cake to date in my opinion and probably one of the best pieces of cake that I've had in years. It was really delicious.
Bought and Sold
Lastly, we had been discussing moving homes even back when we were living in France, so we started to casually look almost immediately upon our arrival back to Canada.
If you didn't know this already the housing market in Canada has been insane for the past 5 years or so, possibly longer. High immigration and historically low mortgage rates has made the housing demand extremely high. Larger construction companies and regular "home flippers" have also been driving the prices up by buying up the cheaper homes, renovating them and then selling for significantly higher prices. They are really taking advantage of low mortgage rates it seems. In some cases the price of a home has more than doubled in just a few years. It's to the point where even simple "starter" homes or condos are ridiculously expensive and it makes one wonder how anyone could possibly get into the market if they weren't in it already. Recently the bank of Canada has been steadily increasing interest rates each quarter though. In only a year or two the rates have gone from around 2% all the way up to 5-6%. It has had a cooling effect in the market and now home prices are finally starting to come down a little. I have noticed that some real-estate flippers are getting massively burnt in the process. New real-estate apps allow everyone to see the price history on nearly any home and even the renovation work done inside in a lot of cases. Check out this absolutely wacky listing to see what I mean. You have to look at it from bottom to top but you can see how many times that the seller has tried to sell or lease it at an extremely high price but to no avail.
That is someone who doesn't know when to cut their losses I think, or maybe it is just greed. They bought the house, did a few minor cosmetic renovations painting and floors, and they wanted 340 thousand dollars just a little over a year later for their effort... that's the insanity of what we are dealing with here.
Anyway, they don't seem to be able to unload the house on anyone as you can see.
Double Anyway, all of that was to say that we bought a house and sold our own lol. Perhaps I'll do another edition of inside Leaky's home in the near future...