Why we opted for the cottage, before buying a house in the city?
Yes... My fiancé Zach and I bought a COTTAGE! Yes.... a cottage before buying a house or a condo in the city. We may be CRAZY... but lets hope not!
A lot of people are asking WHY WOULD WE DO THAT??? Well the simple reason is that we were simply priced out of market in most urban areas we would like to live. We both have good careers in Toronto and rent a very affordable apartment downtown Toronto. We are both unsure of where we would like to move and unsure of where we would like to start laying down our roots. Moving out of the city wasn't an option for us right now because we don't want to spend our days commuting into the city to work. Plus we enjoy living downtown Toronto, but simply don't have 1.5-3millons dollars to buy our first house here. Home ownership was seeming rather unattainable for us... We weren't willing to give up our careers in the big city to move somewhere just so we could afford to be home owners.
We both spend a lot of time at cottages as kids and both still love going to cottages and entertaining. We started to think what if we could afford to keep renting in Toronto and also buy a cottage/vacation home to start building our equity to eventually be able to buy a home in Toronto. We also knew in order to be able to eventually buy a single family home in the city we needed to enter the market. One of the best things about properties very north of the city they haven't seen as big of a price increase so we were still able to buy low and still take advantage of the low interest rates. On top of it all we have a great space to escape from the hustle and bustle of city.
Some people ask us... well why don't you start building equality by buying a small condo in Toronto? I am pretty sure Zach and I both looked at each other at the same time and said we couldn't see ourself spending over half a million to get 500 sqft condo that we didn't love and couldn't see ourselves living in. It just didn't seem like us!
How did we know where we wanted to buy a cottage?.... it was a huge selling feature to be familiar with the area that we bought the cottage in because we knew we would be satisfied with owning a property there. It wasn't something new to us; we were aware of the responsibilities it was going to take to maintain and keep up with a property in that area. We were also familiar with the drive and knew we were willing to do it on the weekends.
We have been looking for over a year on and off for vacation properties and just before this past Christmas a waterfront cottage was listed in the area we were looking in and the price was something we couldn't past up. It was lower then we would of ever thought because it was being listed to sell in the winter. We went to go look at in mid. December and we had everything finalized before the new year before the mortgage rules and rates changed. It was like it was meant to be! We are honestly still in a little bit of shock that we own our own WATERFRONT PROPERTY WITH 1.3 ACRES & 166FT OF WATERFRONT (like isn't this something your suppose to buy when your 45 years old...) I think we are just doing things in reverse...
So that is our reasoning of why we brought a cottage before buying home. Thanks for following along on this cottage adventure of ours, we will be doing a few updates to the interior and exterior of the cottage and I will be sure to keep you posted!
Cheers,
Kendra
