> Nowadays, at 69, I receive $1,700 a month from government assistance, $232 from the Canada pension and $1,500 from old-age security. My partner, brings in about $1,200 a month. We still can’t afford to buy food.
This is $4,632 a month. Something needs to change if that’s not enough to buy food. Perhaps spending less on candles.
Edit: Apparently the numbers are doubled up so we’re at 2,932
No it's $2,900 a month. The $232 and $1500 are the breakdown of the $1,700 a month referred to above. The editor missed a semicolon.
Still, she has a really low rent by Toronto standards of $1,100, leaving $1,800 for all other expenses, which given her medical conditions and the fact that provincial governments are cutting, I can see a lot of that getting eaten up pretty quick.
Yeah, that rent is incredibly low for Toronto. But also, 1800 for all utilities, potential medicine, transportation,… does not get you too far.
My wife and I do shopping for a full week at Farm Boy (not the cheapest) and this runs to about $300 for a week of food. Does not include other things such as detergent, toilet paper, etc..
but she only has $60 for food? if you assume phone and internet is ~$250/m and two bus passes are another ~$250/m, that's $1,300/m for other stuff? I can't really make heads or tails of this budget without knowing more.
It's super easy to hit $1k/mo in routine medical/dental expenses. That's one Dr visit, 3 meds and a bit of dental work w/o insurance. Tack on 1 non-routine medical issue and that can easily go up by a factor of 2 or 20.
Florida insurance (all types) each costs far, far more than heating bills. People with cars just got (or are about to get) a 40% f.u. for living in FL bump in their auto. It makes no difference if you've no collision on your own car. And - that 40% is just this year's increase.
Building insurance is many magnitudes worse. I personally know small biz owners that are teetering on shuttering after the legislatures latest insurance fixes.
One of my dads friends lives in Florida and wants to sell her house and move. She doesn't seem to really believe that moving would mean her auto and homeowners insurance would go from $1500/month to that a year.
It is really easy to use Zillow to compare houses across the USA - I can find nearly identical properties in almost any metro area I could consider, and it will list prices, taxes, and even estimate insurance.
But it's much harder to compare all the other expenses involved with month-to-month living (utilities, car insurance, car maintenance, etc).
I'm vacillating between curious & skeptical about how Zillow can give accurate FL structure insurance estimates, while those numbers are changing from month to month or even faster.
I only turned on heating for one month this winter because I padded windows with extra thermal tape. When it's above 0 °C it's enough to just keep windows closed. Inside the room the temperature only dropped to 20 °C up until the outside temperature started freezing
If that’s correct (and it seems it is) there still seems to be some room, especially for applying for additional assistance (but I don’t know how Canada handles it, the USA would likely grant SNAP).
Maybe the location becomes a problem? In my home country life is expensive too. Moved to a lower cost one. Bought land, build a house have a big garden. Raise animals and grow my own crops. I build solar panels and have my own waterwells. I have almost 0 cost. Just my internet. I would never ever be able to this all in my home country without going into debt so much I would be paying for that well into my retirement.
I was working in a well paid IT job almost living from pay check to pay check. Now I work remote for a lower pay and most of it just goes in my retirement savings.
Not sure what my point is but there are alternatives...
Since they have health conditions, they have no choice but to live in the GTA to be able to see their doctors. Trying to find affordable housing and specialists in other cities will have multi-year long wait lists (ignoring the fact that they don't even have the money to afford movers). Nothing in the GTA is remotely cheaper than what they currently have unless they want to rent a 5bdr basement with 4 random students in a firehazard sharehouse. They are effective trapped there until they die.
It takes a fat wad of ready cash to move. Twenty years ago it cost $4k for a local do-it-yourself move (inexpensive state), after the last everything was totaled.
Today it's common to compete with dozens->hundreds of applicants for a rental. We just did a similar move to that $4k of yesteryear (same region, modest house, local move) and it was about $16k.
That's sort of the point, location in a city? Yeah. But an entire city or country where $4k/mo isn't enough for food? Sounds like the people of the country got scammed by politicians and corporations.
Welcome to Canada comrade, where interest rates, monetary policy, corporate consolidation, and corrupt politicians combined to create a country where house prices became obscenely unaffordable first in a few major cities and then in recent years in every podunk town in every province in the country. And with obscene housing prices comes obscene cost of living. $4k/mo doesn’t get you anything close to a reasonable lifestyle.
In the middle of nowhere I'd not buy a ready-made home but a plot of land - which I assume still to be affordable - and build my own house there. I've been to the Yukon - paddled the whole thing from Whitehorse to the Bering strait in a canoe in 2001 - and actually planned to do something like that. I ended up moving to Sweden instead and more or less count my blessings now that Canada has managed to lose a lot of its appeal in the decades between then and now.
Our economy has been based for too long on debt and real estate. When Canadians became the most indebted households in the G8, the government simply opened the floodgates to immigrants to ensure rents and house prices would stay high.
We are following the same path as the UK now in that the conservative parties are moving rightward and gaining ground on populist notions of “this isn’t the Canada we grew up with” (because of immigration) which plays to certain folks who are upset that their quality of life has eroded due to the increase in housing costs. Now these groups have been whipped into such a fury they’ll vote against their own interests like electing politicians who commit to privatizing healthcare, one of the cornerstones of our identity.
The subject of the article mentions having multiple medical conditions, some of which (to my knowledge) require specialists. It's not inconceivable that those consume a significant portion of their take-home, even in a country with socialized medicine.
Perhaps it's meant to read "I receive $1,700 a month total from government assistance: $232 from the Canada pension, and $1,500 from old-age security."
I'd probably buy rice, beans, and frozen veg rather than salad, but if the majority of her expenditure is medical then I'm not sure it matters.
a quick web search would say seem to indicate that the most someone her age could receive from old age security is $700/month?
aslo I personally wouldn't describe old age security and Canadian pension as "assistance" as I imagine its more of an entitlement rather than an something needs based which I would consider more of assistance.
I noticed this as well. I'm also on benefits and have subsidized housing, although in the US as a single person, and I don't have this issue with food insecurity - although now that the public health emergency has ended I lost roughly 400 dollars a month from programs that were extended. It would help if she broke down her monthly budget. Maybe she has some kind of scenario with past debt, or if she was in the US medical stuff, but that shouldn't be the case in Canada. Still confusing
Is it possible that's meant to total up to $2900 a month, where the $232 and $1500 are meant to be a breakdown of the $1700 a month figure and it got garbled?
The punctuation of the sentence is a little odd, but I take it to mean $1732 + $1200 = $2932.
Less $1100 of current rent, that’s $1832 per month to cover all other costs for two people. Few would elect to be traveling 6 days a week obtaining food assistance if there were easy expenditures to cut.
I honestly feel for this person, but the pragmatist in me kind of thinks of this as the expected outcome. You have a person that sounds like they never pursued a career/ was working minimum wage jobs their whole life, never planned for their retirement, decided to live in a relatively high cost area, has health conditions, and their partner seems to make below minimum wage - isn't a subsistence situation sort of to be expected?
My point is that it should not be up to an individual to save for their own retirement (right to exist after they are no longer useful as a laborer). If someone works their whole life, society should sequester some of the profit they generate and keep it to pay for them to life fairly comfortably until they die. That's the idea behind social security.
Hell, even if someone doesn't spend their whole life working we should still afford them that comfort. But to spend your whole life working and consuming and helping push forward the engine of the economy to only be left out in the cold is a real gut punch.
They are already getting taken care of. They chose to live in a high cost of living area. You don't get to complain that you retired in NYC or SF and Social Security doesn't pay your rent.
I never understood this kind of thinking. When 50-60% of humanity live in urban areas why is this an argument that people use? Should people live in cities and then move out to the country when they retire? Shouldn't the answer to this be to make these cities more affordable by building additional housing?
For housing in a city, it makes sense to me to always increase supply such that every place in the USA costs the same. This allows people to move freely, it allows people to congregate with other smart people and have "intellectual density", it allows wealthy investors to live next to struggling bohemian artists, and allows the average Joe to experience all of this just by virtue of existing in that place. I understand there are constraints on land but it's bizarre to me that people have accepted the idea that these places are just naturally "HCOL" locations and not that they have been homogenized and sanitized into this type of place.
> They chose to live in a high cost of living area.
Millions of people are born in HCOL areas and make their lives there. We shouldn't ask them to leave.
You are describing how the should operate given the current situation and assuming it doesn't change. I am saying the current situation is bad and needs to change. I think that what you are saying is unproductive because it gives off the impression that you think that "bad things are good/acceptable, actually".
> then they should make more money
Like this, this is such an incredibly simplistic response that it feels more naive even than a statement like "everyone should be able to live in a big city". If everyone simultaneously makes more money it just changes who is priced out. The current game is zero-sum, I am saying it should not be.
Perhaps the most common US scenario is that minimal bills and income are so close, you'd have to set aside funds from food, utils, rent, etc. Right behind that are folks with income being 80% of minimum bills.
After three decades of working closely with folks of every possible income bracket, I found maybe 1 in 15 had income so high that they could afford to save for retirement.
> After three decades of working closely with folks of every possible income bracket, I found maybe 1 in 15 had income so high that they could afford to save for retirement.
How can this be the case? What decisions are being made that 14 / 15 people across tax brackets can’t save?
I suspect, it’s not 1/15 can afford, but can afford without making trade offs. Budgeting and self discipline are very hard.
Antidotally - just look around, people wearing $300 foam shower sandals, new trucks towing dirt bikes/jet skis, dinking $6 coffees, and the talking on their iPhones etc. these are not people worried about saving
I think it's easy to poo-poo people spending their income on a bunch of material stuff, especially as someone who hardly consumes and saves my money neurotically.
But in the US we are indoctrinated to believe that conspicuous consumption is the best thing we can do for our country. Saving hurts our economy and spending drives it forward. Every mainstream economist talks about savings rates like they are a bad thing.
The system has been engineered to simultaneously require people to save a majority of each paycheck in order to live well after they are no longer useful as laborers, but also we are constantly told to spend spend spend.
I say this just because I don't think that it is productive to place the blame on individuals within the system instead of the system itself. I think your analysis is correct though.
> just look around, people wearing $300 foam shower sandals, new trucks towing dirt bikes/jet skis, dinking $6 coffees, and the talking on their iPhones etc. these are not people worried about saving
That's a picture which doesn't well represent the folks I've known, associated with and worked with.
Out in the public tho, I can see where spendy folks would be the ones that register in our awareness.
iPhones are really not that expensive, even if you spend $1000 on an iPhone, it's something that's useful to you in everyday life
I have a $150 phone and it's constantly slowing me down and wasting my time. When I switch apps 4GB RAM + 3GB swap is not enough to keep the other apps open, so I lose what I was writing on Reddit if I quickly respond to a text message
It doesn't have a lot of extra features like a good touchscreen (have to frequently select the correct candidate word), good GPS, NFC, OLED screen (actually I don't miss this as much as I thought)
I will buy a more expensive phone next time, maybe a discounted previous flagship
Off the top of my head, I can get a new LG V50 for under $200 on ebay. There are tons of phones around $150 with far better specs.
As for usability, iPhones are too limited for my use. I use apps that need root and others are sideloaded. I typically load alternate firmware (Not the current one tho. That was a mistake, I think). Many $200 android device are fast and capable but zero iPhones are.
Do iPhones come with preloaded carrier crapware like Androids do? I hope not and for that I'd give iPhones a plug.
Jobs with degrees pay just a bit more than a family's responsible spending on expenses. We had news stories for ages about people in degree-req positions on food stamps/SNAP. The state resolved that by opting out of food assistance programs.
This really brings home the need to save for retirement. I don't think I'm saving enough. Not in my 40's yet but the sole breadwinner for my family and wages are not as good here in NZ for devs as they are in FANG companies.
I hope that I have enough to get my kids through school and provide a comfortable retirement for my wife and me.
40 years from now when the Auckland Herald does a profile on you someone will comment that that is the expected result - and people will ask why you never worked for FAANG companies
These kinds of feel-bad articles always bury the lede and it's tiring.
> Making minimum wage at 55
30+ years seems like enough time to pick up some skills to earn above minimum wage
> Not saving anything your entire life
This one is debatable, but at some point you have to learn enough life lessons to understand that retirement is going to _suck_ if you don't save anything. Most people manage to learn this before ~40 y.o
> I’m only 69, mobile and otherwise healthy. But what will happen as I get older and need care?
Same thing that happens to all of us. We get sicker and more frail and eventually die. Billions will die in less privileged conditions than receiving $2900/month and living in a country that has free healthcare.
I don't say this lightly, but my dad worked just as hard, probably several times harder and his living conditions aren't anywhere as good as these. It's just that the country he retired in is much more poor. But luckily I can help him, because I have no plans to make minimum wage at 55.
Your sense of injustice, while not unwarranted, is misplaced. Both the person in the article and your father are the victims of unfair systems. Poverty exists in the first and third world. I think that, hypothetically, if you wanted to engineer a world in which everyone was taken care of, empathy and a sense of solidarity would be the foundation of it. It's not productive to point to someone worse off.
I think the author should have tried to improve their situation a bit more given that they lived in a prosperous time and place. But regardless they worked every single day and contributed to society. Is that not enough to at least be ensured a comfortable death?
Especially considering no one actually owns the earth, not Jeff Bezos, not anyone, yet almost every single bit of wealth (significant wealth) was generated from it's exploitation. through mining and pollution, and will continue to do so. Where do we think the bots and EVs will come from? Our ass?
Therefore, realistically, everyone is entitled to a piece of wealth, whether you like this truth or not, given a significantly more intelligent way of seeing things, this would be the only conclusion that can be made.
But we've drawn borders and set up law enforcement to protect the ridiculous wealth inequality that seems like it will never end.
> 30+ years seems like enough time to pick up some skills to earn above minimum wage ... at some point you have to learn enough life lessons to understand that retirement is going to _suck_ if you don't save anything. Most people manage to learn this before ~40 y.o
You can learn all of that and spend decades struggling to afford food. All it takes is not being lucky enough to avoid extremely common catastrophes.
> 30+ years seems like enough time to pick up some skills to earn above minimum wage
This is the fallacy of assuming the person can predict the future. Do you know what happened to typesetters when desktop publishing came along? They were decimated. Some did as much as they could to adapt their skills to the new environment - e.g. learning to use computerized typesetting systems as far back as the 70s, teaching others how to make documents that didn't look like shit instead of typesetting those documents themselves - and still got hammered. The kicker is that those who had invested the most in learning this fairly technical skill were the most vulnerable. Throw in some other kind of savings-liquidating reversal, such as natural disaster or unreimbursed medical expenses (possibly caused by the chemicals used in the related printing industry) and it's easy for someone who tried really hard to make all the right decisions to end up poor (or dependent on their children) in their old age anyway.
We're seeing the pattern repeat with LLMs. A lot of people right here and now have been talking about how "AI" is going to make many jobs obsolete, throwing their practitioners' life plans into disarray. They're probably right, though I'm still skeptical that programming is one of those jobs. The point is that it's unreasonable and monumentally callous to say all of those people screwed up and should accept the consequences. A society where a decent late-life outcome is possible only if you make all the right decisions even in the face of uncertainty is still not as just as one where even mere humans who make a few mere-human mistakes can still expect something better than complete abandonment. I suggest you try reading John Rawls for a fuller exposition.
> I have no plans to make minimum wage at 55
Neither did the vast majority of people who actually end up doing so. You might or might not be smarter - or more "meritorious" in any other way - than most of them, but I guarantee you're less so than some. It could happen to you. It could even happen to me, though it's probably less likely since I'm already retired and comfortably so. Everyone thinks they're going to be the lucky ones (see also: neo-feudalists of both authoritarian and libertarian flavors thinking they'll be among those who thrive by creating a less equitable society) but that's just another delusion.
Inflation is a worldwide phenomenon right now, but it doesn't help that she is living in Canada. Why Canadians pay much more and have access to less despite living in a country that is 95% culturally, economically, and politically identical to the US, I do not know. I didn't fully understand the disparity until I read the amazing stories in a /r/canada discussion. victorn72's account <http://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/1ueai3/why_are_our_pr...> caused my jaw to drop open.
I think it's ok to have to choose between renting in Toronto and eating dinner.
Thanks to decades of the boomer generation's "build nothing" housing policies, millions of young people can't afford to live near where they work. Yet that same generation feels entitled to take up space in one of the most in-demand cities on the planet for their retirement life of socialising and volunteering. They'll complain about being "forced" to move out of a home they've lived in for 10 or 20 years (and paid below-market rent the whole time!) when the rest of us are lucky to be able to hold onto a place for half of that. And their response to their unaffordable lifestyle catching up to them is to ask for more and bigger handouts, funded by those same working people who they're keeping out of the city.
> I think it's ok to have to choose between renting in Toronto and eating dinner.
Hard disagree on this part, it's a short-sighted take. Do you want to live in a city which might effectively kick you out when you're 70, cost of living has gone up and your income has gone down? What's the collateral damage done by this sort of policy? Loneliness in old age is already epidemic in advanced countries - I can't imagine a more effective way to make it worse than asking someone to uproot at that point.
We can disagree on the manner and degree of support or reform, the implementation etc. but my point is a city which doesn't try to address this is actually a pretty shitty city for everyone. It's a shitty place to put down roots. The fact that a small number of cities have so much economic gravity in the modern era is bad economic policy. It's antidemocratic and highly correlated with wealth inequality. These cities suck in thousands of people from other cities because they've got all the jobs, and then tell those people they can't live there anymore when their career is over. This is inhumane, it's a problem which will affect all of us as we age and it should be addressed.
> Do you want to live in a city which might effectively kick you out when you're 70, cost of living has gone up and your income has gone down? What's the collateral damage done by this sort of policy?
What's the collateral damage done by not having it? When we rent-control that money is coming from somewhere.
> It's antidemocratic and highly correlated with wealth inequality.
It's particularly antidemocratic because so many of the people working there can't afford to live there.
Plenty of people already can't afford to live in Toronto, wouldn't be able to afford to eat if they moved there. But somehow those people don't get to make it someone else's problem.
Is rent control the only solution here? Why not build more housing? Build out and up until the price goes down.
Long term I think the solution is to figure out how to structure the national economy so it isn't dominated by just a few cities. This was not always the case and doesn't have to be a given. If the economy itself is less centralized and monopolized the cities will evolve as well.
> Is rent control the only solution here? Why not build more housing? Build out and up until the price goes down.
Exactly. At the risk of being accelerationist, rent control is an anti-solution - it prevents the generation with the most political power from feeling the pain, and also removes some of the profit motive to actually fix the problem.
> Long term I think the solution is to figure out how to structure the national economy so it isn't dominated by just a few cities. This was not always the case and doesn't have to be a given. If the economy itself is less centralized and monopolized the cities will evolve as well.
The main way to avoid it being dominated by a few cities is to give them some competition, by allowing other cities to grow to compete. But unfortunately that hits the same problem of it being functionally illegal to build anything anywhere people want to live.
This article is about living in Toronto. Doesn't sound like these people are living very large. Canada is suffering from decades of housing policy failure.
> Doesn't sound like these people are living very large.
I bet there's a long line of people who'd love to live where they do, even paying more for it - and if those people would enjoy living there more, that's all the more reason they should have priority over these people.
> Canada is suffering from decades of housing policy failure.
I paid more in rent than she does, in Red Deer, Alberta. It was not a large city; suffice to say, rent is too high everywhere. Focusing on the city is a bit misleading, IMO.
Financial speculation is an easy scapegoat but has very little to do with it. The fundamentals of supply and demand matter more. (Though, if you hate property speculators, the best way to burn them would be to suddenly legalize massive amounts of homebuilding. It's win-win).
I have a lot of sympathy for those priced out of the cities - that's exactly why I think there should be more homebuilding and better prioritisation of the limited supply, rather than those who were fortunate enough to be born earlier getting to hold onto subsidised housing units forever at everyone else's expense.
I have an unpopular opinion that the problem described is fine because of overpopulating of the world. Something must to stop us from multiplying even more. Especially I have no sympathy for those who has not bought any bitcoins, because those just seems to continue believing to a wrong guy or in a wrong force.
This is $4,632 a month. Something needs to change if that’s not enough to buy food. Perhaps spending less on candles.
Edit: Apparently the numbers are doubled up so we’re at 2,932