You can pay yours with a CC?

This was a couple pages back.

If you sign up for the Canadian Tire Mastercard, you are able to pay property tax, BC Hydro, and Fortis. This is the only credit card that can pay property tax and utilities because of the way Canadian Tire handles these payments.

So if you get a world elite mastercard from Canadina Tire, you get 1% back in CT rewards. + you get free BCAA (well it's Canadian tires version, which I've used and it's just as good) + no annual fee.

I see 1%…. So that’s $70?

soooo i accepted an offer last night after a little back n forth

was pretty tough to convince myself to do it....

very quick close, next tuesday, and long term possession date (late Oct) with option to close early with one month notice as we haven't even found anything we like

little concerned but only had 1 offer, i still thought we should have waited

i sure hope i don't regret this

Congrats! I think it's a tough market out there particularly for anything that's not detached - my BIL just pulled his townhouse off the market and is going to rent it out instead. He wanted to get above assessed and that's just not happening for him.

oh i'm well above assessed, just couldn't price myself out of the area.

highest sale price in the area and highest by far on price per square foot.

i know i did well, just wanted a little more but it's not having the next one locked in that's got me the most concerned. we have a place to live if necessary but i don't want to move my life twice especially since i have a 10 month old. she's a total game changer

I don't think there is ever a realistic price that we'd be totally be satisfied with when you play all these "what if" games.

You made a decision and by accounts it was the best one to be made. Just have to look forward and keep moving.

You'll be surprised how resilient kids are. When we moved, I think it took us longer to adapt than our kid.

oh i'm not worried about HER moving....i'm worried about moving her and all her shit lol

i've been looking around the house/garage/under deck.....amazing how much stuff you can accumulate over 14 years....i'm going to need 3 moving trucks

Or just leave it all behind for the buyer:ilied:

Be surprised how much stuff a moving truck can pack. We only needed one truck from our 1400sqft townhouse, though some of it we moved with our car as the bulk of the furniture went to the garage at the new house, the crib and some of the kids stuff went to my parents as we were staying there while the house was being reno'ed

ahh you are right. the calculator on the CT website where you can enter your spending to calculate your rewards is per month, and I missed that part.

Do yourself a favor and throw out / give away all the shit you havent used in 2 years / even 1 year. Knick knacks / cardboard boxes / etc.

Life is so much better with less shit laying around for no reason.

Does the CT card open immediately? Cuz they want you to shop in store? Or do you still need to qualify and wait 2 weeks for the card?

If you can’t get your home presentable in 30-45 minutes at any given point (sans kids) you’ve probably got too much shit.

I signed up online and they give me a credit limit right away. About a week later I got the card in the mail. I read on the credit card forums that if they don't give you your limit right away, there's a high chance you got denied.

we've already started doing that, but realistically it's our winter gear, my sports gear, and all the stuff stored in the garage and all my tools

i plan on getting a PODS can and loading all that shit up myself along with anyhting else that is ok to be "outside" in tupperware or boxes in the can. then just get the movers to handle the big stuff and our clothes. then i'll get the PODS moved over and we can unload at our own pace

Thats what exactly i did when we moved. However did not take our time just unloaded that pod asap as we had a bunch of furniture deliveries too which needed the front door for access.

Would recommend people to use pods for moving a bunch of unused shit from old to new place.

I got a call from my neighbour across the lane yesterday. She needed help bringing groceries in. 82 year old lady, her husband passed away last year, she has a bad hip and is very overweight and needs help from time to time.

She was complaining about her two adults kids who don't come to see them often and don't help her out. I don't know how long ago (it seemed like it was years ago), but she bought them each a house in the neighbourhood (Vancouver) for them and their families and they both ended up selling the houses and one moved to coquitlam and one moved to Abbotsford.

Pretty sad to just get up and leave like that. Then again, I don't know their family dynamic.

Her house is huge, way too big for a couple, let a lone one person. It's on a 55'x130', they even have an indoor pool inside, it's wild. I told her to just sell the house and move into one of those high end living residences but she scoffed at the idea. But she also says she gets really lonely these days. Moving into one of those residences would probably be good for her since they have so many activities she can do.

Tell her to sell and go to Legacy.

Tell her to call me before calling Legacy

Yep. We also did this. Took our time packing, over about a month.

Picture of the full container, before I added a 14" thick king-size mattress and sealed it up. My buddy and I had to simultaneously ram ourselves into the doors to get 'em to latch all the way :D.
https://i.imgur.com/c3iEWBMl.jpg

Then UPack shipped all the way from Bay Area to Toronto in a couple days, without any issue for $2800. PODS wanted twice that. Should only be a couple hundred if it's local.

Also, we just closed on selling our house in California!! Got $30k over asking :).

How do you feel about leaving Cali?

Honestly I used to live across from Tapestry at Wesbrook Village and it seems like a pretty ideal retirement to me if I can afford it when the time comes.

They have lecturers from UBC come in, field trips, social events if you want them, your own apartment if you don't want to socialize... if you wanna travel you lock the door and go, no worrying about maintaining a gigantic home...

I was pretty torn up about it in the months leading up to leaving - I'd lived there for 9 years - but it helps that Toronto's such a great place to be.

I lived in the SF South Bay Area, aka Silicon Valley. It's about 40 minutes south of SF, and the environment is mostly tech campuses in a collection of small towns. E.g. Cupertino, Menlo Park, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood City: each of their downtowns were maybe the size of Kerrisdale, and each of them are about 10-15 minutes of driving down the highway. Never too far from the mountains and Pacific Coast, where a good drive or ride could be had on the weekends or after work.

And the access to world class tracks!! Sonoma (Infineon) is an hour north. Thunderhill is another hour up. Laguna Seca is 2 hours south. Buttonwillow another hour down. Between my S2k, R6, and R56 Cooper S, I'd been to 25+ track days.

It was also great to be within an hour's flight to LA (we used to drive there, but it really wasn't worth burning up a whole 5 hours each way for just a weekend). The food there is great, and there the beaches and warmth are really California as advertised.

I liked it but I missed living in a bigger city. I suppose I could've gotten that living in San Francisco: some of my colleagues took the company shuttle to and from every day. But SF's a little grungy these days, esp after COVID.

I also got kind of sick of the continuous sunny blue skies. When every day is the same, it all just kind of blurs together. You're less grateful. It doesn't feel special. I missed the seasonality of Vancouver. I missed the rain, I missed the snow.

But the work life: wow. For engineering, it is the major leagues. You get really good at what you do, because you work with the best, they expect the best, and the challenges are numerous and fun. You patent. And you get access to work on some truly bat-shit crazy stuff that only SV has the resources to fund. The pay is pretty ok too: you look around in the parking garage and it seems like 911 Carreras are rare to see, only because there are so many GT3s lol.

Anyway in the end, I moved for family. It's kind of hard to let go of the work responsibilities to really be present for your kids (my colleagues try, to varying degrees of success. it takes a lot of willpower to drop what you're doing and skip out on stuff, when you know it's going to let people down). Also my wife's family is all here and we wanted the kid to be among family. She also has a career that she loves here and we feel like it's her turn to see how far she can go. So when I finally shipped the hardware I was working on for so many years, we figured it was time to go.

P.S.: Silicon Valley the show is way exaggerated, but it has some basis in truth :D: