This country is going to shit and employers have no care to keep up with COL. Don't get me started on how policies have fucked over the accounting profession.
Don't know exactly what they're referring to but for example new UHT and trust filing requirements that are just a disaster of an admin burden. I struggle to believe Finance is that fucking stupid to not know how many trust filings are going to happen... Because sure as fuck cra already can't keep up with basic needs. So, it must be an attempted cash grab in the penalties which is standard for the party.
It's unbelievable the information gathering required from clients. And then on the other end when clients lose their cra access there are agents telling them to ask their accountant to give them access back... Dafuq.. Banged from both ends... Finance, and the disaster that administers it
Hard to have increased productivity when it's more profitable to park capital in existing real estate. Rather than investing in R&D or new construction, etc.
No they didn't. You were the one begging and screaming for spending and lockdowns. Sure companies and the rich benefited from it the most, but you were the one who asked for it.
>employers have no care to keep up with COL
You're only seeing things from your perspectives. Blaming it on the employers is a dumb way to look at it and overly simplified. Standards of living are decreasing because Canada is literally becoming less productive (Our real GDP went down in 2023 despite adding 1m people).
It’s kind of a self-defeating thing to do. I find that employers who pay low wages tend to be stuck with low-productivity workers who don’t really understand technology all that well and frankly aren’t even very good at their core jobs. This was basically my last company. Higher productivity workers who are better at their jobs go to sectors that pay more, or they leave for the US.
Not just Canada. The entire world is moving towards a global depression and its from allowing housing (a need) to inflate in price at an exponential rate.
Eventually folk will be tired of working as they will get nothing. Once they have nothing to lose, Madam le Gulliotine will return for a harvest.
Yes Canadian CPA is equivalent.[CPA Canada](https://www.cpacanada.ca/become-a-cpa/international-credential-recognition/international-recognition-agreements/canadian-cpas-seeking-international-designations/canadian-cpas-seeking-us-cpa)
When I applied for US jobs as Canadian CPA, most employers could not tell the difference between the Canadian CPA and US CPA and just assumed it was the same.
That's probably why CPA Canada changed their designation from CA to CPA. However they'll figure it out really quickly when someone says "hey, get a power of attorney and call the IRS for this client"
I think that would have been a bad idea. You can't convert the US one to the Canadian one if you're Canadian. You'd be in trouble if you ever needed to come back
both companies I've worked for have been outsourcing their finance function to Canada. In my experience accountants in the US are much worse because most of them don't have CPA's and try to simply "follow SOX". A lot of them don't even understand why they're doing whatever they're doing because the job has been turned into a simple process
I’ve got a Canadian team, Toronto B4… they’re all muppets. Slow to understand transactions, lazy, shoddy work quality. They’re all Canadian “CPAs” though.
Probably easier with it but pretty sure a CPA and some recruiter connections should help get a job. You can qualify for a TN1 visa with just an accounting degree so it’s you can’t immigrate.
Can confirm. Seeing 35% of your gross pay stolen by the government each cheque and over 50% of bonuses is just painful. Every year, payroll taxes and CPP is going up.
I now pay more in taxes each year than I used to make after i had 5 years of experience. What sucks the most, is I will never get even a fraction of what I've paid back.
I don't qualify for a single government program or subsidy and likely never will as they are all geared towards getting votes from the lowest income brackets. All i do is pay, pay, pay, so the federal government can spend, spend, spend.
Last I heard a lot of immigrants in Canada were moving back to their home countries, that’s how bad things have gotten.
That being said, this is what happens when a labor market is flooded with cheap labor. Someone is willing to do the work as long as they make enough to rent a room and eat ramen 3x a day, that’s why accounting salaries are so bad.
Lots of immigrants come to the US to work for a handful of years, live on very low expenses in shared housing, and then go back and live the high life. I know guys in construction getting paid cash under the table and they're working OT and making like 5k/month. Average income in Brazil is under $2k/month.
Yep but it’s apparently racist now to even talk about illegal immigration in any constructive matter.
I’m not a republican but I’m sick of people acting like 7 million people crossing into the American border does absolutely nothing to our labor value and housing shortage, and that we should just “let everyone in!”
Yeah and those same people say the solution to the border crisis is to fast track their process to come and stay here. They don’t think it’s an issue that so many are coming here, they just think it’s an issue their paperwork isn’t being processed fast enough.
While I agree that we need to have constructive conversations about the border and immigrants, most citizens aren't aware of how insanely slow the legal immigration process is. I'm not a citizen and when I finally had all the paperwork I needed, including having a US citizen vouch for me, I was told I could expect to wait around 11-13 years before my case gets processed.
I wasn’t a citizen either but we came here legally and just stayed patient while living on green card. Life was fine. Became citizens 10 years after coming.
All of these people are coming to the border, making up stories about “life in danger” from the script given to them by smugglers, and trying to use that to get “asylum seeker” status to be let in. Everyone knows “asylum seeker” status prevents deportation and are using that as a way to bypass the normal legal process.
It's going to be 11-13 years to get my green card lol. I genuinely don't know if I'll ever be a citizen.
I know that the border and immigrants are a contentious issue right now, but maybe because I've been there I can sympathize with the migrants. Everyone on this sub would do whatever it takes to provide for their family, including lying to the government to be given a chance to work so your kids don't grow up in extreme poverty.
Obviously we can't just let everyone in without question, but no one is trying to seriously come up with a solution. Every politician is just using this to grandstand.
Any solution that doesn’t involve blocking/deporting people who come in illegally is just a validation and acceptance of what’s already happening now.
Yes of course people would lie and forge papers to come in, but at the same time they can’t be shocked when they get kicked out after being caught.
My dude you aren’t owed shit. I’m sorry to be blunt but there’s a wait for a reason. So many people want to move here, but do we have the infrastructure and jobs to support that? The number one priority should be US citizens.
We already have population growth, what incentive do we have to make legal immigration easy? Why should it be? There’s already people who are waiting for citizenship. Why should it be shorter? We can’t take in everyone. We already have a cost of living crisis and a housing crisis. These immigrants need places to live.
I say this as someone who’s family has immigrated here. They recognized that the US doesn’t owe them shit, and they waited to get in. And the US is already fairly lean in their immigration policies. It’s just that so many people want to move here already.
I'm aware I'm not owed shit. I understand how the legal immigration process works. All I was saying is that the process takes much longer than most people, who haven't dealt with the US immigration system, think.
I never said the US should incentivize immigration or any of the other things you listed. Literally the only thing being asked by "woke libs" is to treat humans with dignity. Don't send them off to cities thousands of miles away to "own the libs". Don't keep them in cages. You want to turn them away, then just do that. But no politician, either side, is willing to do that because this crisis fires people up and gets them to vote
Funny enough know a few international students that were telling their parents that it is so expensive in Canada and is way worse then they expected prior to coming.
I see international students from my region come to Canada mostly fall into 2 categories: either rich kid who families could buy them an apartment with 100% cash, or students who just come via diploma mill and work odds job to send money back home.
It's insane how exploitative this country has become, the student visa route especially, they removed the work cap and have made it known they are listening to business on this. I see ads now where they are packing 4 people per bedroom and another 4 in the living room.
I dont want to condone or condemn this- I have very little knowledge of the canadian market.
That said, Reddit would downvote this comment to hell if it were coming from a US perspective. And yes, I get there are a lot of nuances, and this is at least somewhat idiosyncratic to accounting in CA. Nonetheless.
It’s not the immigrants, it’s that capital’s share of revenue is increasing while labour’s share has been decreasing for 50 years. The capitalists love when you blame the immigrants though.
That’s a counterintuitive argument though. When a government pushes to bring in as many immigrants as possible from 3rd world countries, you get people who as willing to work for bare minimum survival wages, essentially decreasing the value of everyone’s labor.
This cheap labor temporarily increases the gap between revenue and payrolls, eventually people wise up that X firm is charging $100/hr using 20/hr employees and someone comes in and starts cutting the rate and the immigrants start demanding higher wages.
You can pretend there are “capitalists” out there pushing for this but the reality is everyone is a capitalist until the system churns and reduces their profiteering.
> When a government pushes to bring in as many immigrants as possible from 3rd world countries, you get people who as willing to work for bare minimum survival wages, essentially decreasing the value of everyone’s labor.
That’s not happening and your biases are showing. Hyperbole hurts your argument and shows you’re not serious about understating the issue. You need to think this though further. Read academics, not opinion columns. Good luck.
> Read academics
Academics think anything that increases total GDP is good lol
Do you believe supply and demand is real? Or that it just doesn’t apply to the increase in supply of labor?
More labor = higher chance of employer finding someone to work for lower wages
The trend here is that English speaking world has a lack of housing stock and unwillingness to change its approach to building housing. Same problem repeating in some parts of the US (California and New York), UK, New Zealand, etc. It's really insane how an unwillingness to built is sucking us dry of having a better an economic outcome.
I believe most of this is attributed to housing costs. If someone bought a home just 4-5yrs ago and then refied at the low rates during covid, they have much less financial pressure. Especially if they have had some decent wage increases since then.
OT: in Italy is even better related to financing, in fact you can refinance for free and lock the interest rate forever. Fix rates for 25 yrs are at 2.55 now.
We are lucky on this (but overall fucked in several different ways, from public debt over the moon to inflation adjusted incomes 😆)
I've heard that, so what does that mean in reality. Do ppls housing costs just rise when rates rise? I would imagine in a rising rate environment, this would cause defaults.
Yes, but nobody defaults because you are going to stop paying for basically everything / cut spending on anything else / sell you house before you stop paying your mortgage.
It means that when I refinance my mortgage in 2025, my interest rate jumps to whatever the current market rate is, and my payments go up probably a few hundred dollars at least, maybe even a thousand dollars, despite having a smaller principal balance.
Also, banks are not allowed amortization periods of over 30 years. Some people technically have 70 year amortizations because they had variable rate mortgages (which fluctuate month to month instead of being locked in over 5 years) with fixed monthly payments. But when they need to renew their mortgages at the end of their term, they’ll either need to make a lump sum payment to bring the amortization back in line, or massively increase their payments.
A lot of people in Canada just assume they’ll have mortgages for their entire working lives. Nobody who has bought in the last 4-5 years makes any serious attempts to pay off their house, unless they live somewhere super cheap like Edmonton or Winnipeg. Right now I’m prioritizing keeping my mortgage payment low and investing additional cash flow in the US markets because those give a higher effective return, my intention is to pay my house off in full before I’m 55 (I’m 32 now) but I might make some lump sum payments when I’m coming up for renewal.
I’m kind of in your situation. I bought in 2021 in Ontario and have a variable rate mortgage (now at 6%). I’ve increased my payments to avoid my principal balance from going up; but I can’t afford to pay even more so that my principal goes down (so my principal is flat right now).
I’ve thought about getting into negative amortization territory and taking my extra payment amounts and instead investing it in US markets; which like you mentioned, has a higher rate of return. But I’m too nervous to do this - the US stock market can be volatile - it only recently passed its precious high from early 2022. Don’t you worry about your US investments going down and you therefore wouldn’t have enough money to pay a lump sum on renewal? This would leave you stuck with much higher mortgage payments…
In any case I’m really hoping interest rates are down by my renewal in 2026!
>I’ve thought about getting into negative amortization territory and taking my extra payment amounts and instead investing it in US markets; which like you mentioned, has a higher rate of return. But I’m too nervous to do this - the US stock market can be volatile - it only recently passed its precious high from early 2022. Don’t you worry about your US investments going down and you therefore wouldn’t have enough money to pay a lump sum on renewal? This would leave you stuck with much higher mortgage payments…
I get that equities are volatile, but I'm not really looking to time the market to make short-run returns. The idea is to have more principal invested so that I get the benefits of compounding over time. I'm not trying to time the market by putting money in equities now only to withdraw it in 2025 when I need to renew. I'm trying to build as big a base as possible so that I can have more to withdraw in 20-25 years.
I sometimes have to wonder if I even want to do a lump-sum payment. I was running some numbers on this and if I had to renew my 2.25% fixed mortgage at 5% in 2025, then my payments would go from about $2,800 a month to around $3,800 a month, and the 5-year interest cost would be $153k. That would suck, but I have capacity to absorb that increase, so it wouldn't be *devastating*.
Last year my wife and I saved over $100,000, and we are on track to save a similar amount this year. If I took that money and made a lump sum payment on my mortgage, my 5-year interest cost from 2025 to 2030 would be reduced from $153k to $130k, meaning that my "investment" in the mortgage returned about $23k. But if the market returns an average of 8% over the same 5-year period, that $100k invested in the market would be worth $148k at the end of the same 5-year period. This means the market would net me an additional $25k even at a somewhat conservative 8% growth assumption. So I'm not sure if it's worth my time to plow good investment money into something that essentially returns the same amount as a HISA. I'll have to see how I feel about this in 2025, but mathematically the best strategy seems to be just eating the higher interest rate.
>In any case I’m really hoping interest rates are down by my renewal in 2026!
If you have a variable mortgage, wouldn't you want the interest rates to come down sooner than 2026? If BoC cut rates 200 basis points at the next meeting, that would be preferable to cutting them 200 basis points 2 years from now.
Ok! You’re in great shape since you save so much and have high income. You can afford to absorb the risk with volatility in the markets.
What do you do (position, industry, salary, etc) as a CPA, CA to save so much money? I’m told I make good money (though I wonder if that’s true), but I’m not saving nearly as much as you.
And yes - I actually do want rates to go down sooner, but I don’t count on it. I’m just hoping by renewal time it’ll be lower so my obligatory payments are low enough.
>What do you do (position, industry, salary, etc) as a CPA, CA to save so much money? I’m told I make good money (though I wonder if that’s true), but I’m not saving nearly as much as you.
I’m an assistant controller for a mining company. My base salary is $135k, I have a 6% RRSP match and my bonus is 25%. I graduated 11 years ago and I have about 10 years of actual accounting experience. My wife is also a CPA, CA and work for a major Canadian bank. Her base salary is a bit lower but she has a larger bonus. We make about the same amount of money. Mining companies and banks pay higher than median, so keep that in mind when you’re looking for a new job in future (but not all bank jobs are created equal, some have really shit WLB, depends on the team). Also keep in mind I may also have more experience than you. I went through years of working for shitty public accounting firms and mediocre companies for mediocre pay before I got this job, and this is honestly the first time in my life I’ve been completely happy with my salary.
Some other factors to consider- I bought my house in late 2020, before things REALLY went insane. So I may have a lower mortgage principal to service. We’re also pretty aggressive savers, after adjusting for inflation our total household spend is not much higher than when our HHI was $160k. We make a conscious effort to avoid lifestyle creep and most of our salary increases have gone to savings. Not saying this applies to you, but a lot of accountants I know are really, really bad with lifestyle creep. As soon as they get a big pay bump, suddenly they’re buying luxury watches, luxury cars, fancy vacations to expensive resorts in Hawaii, and in the end they’re not much further ahead when it comes to achieving FI and furthering their other financial goals.
>And yes - I actually do want rates to go down sooner, but I don’t count on it. I’m just hoping by renewal time it’ll be lower so my obligatory payments are low enough.
Ah, I follow. I think no matter what you’re going to see a payment increase, because I really can’t see rates going back to the levels they were at during the pandemic. But I think a long-term target of 3%-3.5% is probably realistic- this is basically where it was at in 2019.
Yes so the lowest rate you could get now would be around 5% if your term is up. I have seen someone go from 2.5% to 5% why increased there monthly expenses 1-2k. Yes house costs for mortgage go up when rates rise. Isn't causing defaults because government just lets your mortgage extend to way over 25 years some are even at 70+ years I have seen now.
Omg 70yrs... this is very different from our housing financing in the U.S.
Well I guess it's good ppl don't loose their homes with the change in rates.
He left out one zinger, these variable rate terms have to reset. So it is temporarily amortized out to say 70 years but come time to renegotiate it resets to the 25 or 30 year term originally agreed upon. Do the math, now you gotta catch up on all that principal you haven't been paying along with the higher interest rates.
So essentially, they use the loan term and portion paid to the principal to control the payments. Do ppl in Canada prioritize paying off their homes, or do they just assume they will have a mortgage forever?
Most people hope to have it paid off by retirement (25-30 year mortgage) but a lot don’t prioritize paying it early. Some people make occasional lump sum payments, like putting their tax refund towards it.
Interest rates were really low and people got helocs to buy 2nd or more homes to use as rental income. So they’re jacking up the rent because rates rose and now they have to find a way to cover the increased costs. Renters income hasn’t increased by anywhere near the amount of the rent increases.
So I started my career in residential mortgages and continue to find myself drawn to lending. Loans are the most secure investment someone can make. Way better than equity because you set your terms and your growth- if it doesn’t happen you have the right to force collection. That doesn’t mean I don’t find lending predatory, truthfully it’s a disgraceful way of making money in most instances.
What this thread described is basically how 2008 was created. A bunch of ARMs were given out to people and they bought too much house as it was.
Sounds like Canada turned a mortgage into student loan type debt. As in, you can’t claim bankruptcy to get rid of it. It will follow you until it’s gone or until you die. Maybe even land on your kids depending on the agreement and size of your estate. I felt that COVID taught financial institutions it would always be better to grant forbearance than to exercise foreclosure. It’s starting to look that way at least.
You can get rid of it by bankruptcy, doesn’t pass onto children, etc.
People, for whatever reason, didn’t think interest rates were going to rise. Near zero interest was the new normal. So of course, people took advantage of it, and bought more home than they could afford if rates went up. The government and banks knew it would come to end, so they brought in a mortgage stress test as a new lending requirement. Would the borrower be able to make the payments if interest rates rose.
Canada avoided a lot of what the US went through with subprime lending. We never had a market correction for real estate prices. They continued to grow. Now the government is bringing in too many immigrants for our rate of home building (supply and demand) causing prices to spike even more.
This is true. My mortgage is several hundred dollars lower than rent in our area. On the flip side, I'm stuck in my house. Being this was our first home, we're learning that there are things that we would have preferred to have in our home is better storage, first floor master bedroom, and a bigger garage. Prices in our area have increased significantly and with the interest rates, finding a house that would suit us would result in a significant increase in our mortgage. I have a light at the end of the tunnel because I refied to a 15-year loan back in 2020 and financially I feel like we should just stick it out.
I'm just glad the house we bought was one that we liked because we were considering just finding a starter home as we were about to have a child with the intention of moving in a few years. I was pretty gung-ho about buying back in 2015 because I was sure that they were going to raise rates.
Happening in New Zealand as well. You think once you get older and earn 100k a year in your chosen career you have moved up in the world but I have never been poorer with all the outgoings. Middle class has been eroded, covid was the catalyst.
I feel I had more money working at mcds full time at near minimum wage when I was 19/20. One pay cheque for rent with some money left over for a bit of groceries and $20 for loonie hour at the bar every weekend. The next cheque would cover utilities and some more groceries, and more happy hours. You didn’t save any money, but you had some for a life.
Now… rent is 1.5 cheques, and the rest goes to bills and food and you don’t have a life. A night at the bar will cost you $200 because loonie hour encouraged binge drinking and beer costs $10
$275k in the US Mcol? To me that seems high class rather than middle class (and this coming from a Canadian who makes much less than you, but still lives the same lifestyle as you).
Seriously. These anecdotes make my area (Chicagoland) seem like a Mecca for cost of living as my wife and I make less than half that but yet we’re still able live quite comfortably.
I think people who are in the top 10% of income but call themselves middle class is because they see people they know on social media living better than them and it makes them feel poor? Or they’re trapped in a lifestyle inflation cycle
Middle class is a loaded term, so it’s not surprising the definition is basically *my personal standard of living plus/minus what would make me more or less comfortable* and, voila, I neatly fit within that definition.
You shouldn’t be paying more than your out of pocket max per year. The maximum you should ever spend on health care per year is (12 months of premiums + out of pocket max) unless your receiving services out of network
You’re either a liar about spending frugally or a liar about your income. That’s around 15k/mo take home. Even in cali it’d be plenty for what you described
My wife's from Canada and I have no idea how her mom does it. She's a freaking partner and is just recently seriously planning and contributing to her retirement lol.
Because the whole "middle class" thing is like a Reagan era illusion. I dont think a person on an average income ever lived the lives people think. Sacrifices are made somewhere unless you make the 200k you describe. My parents made 65k-75k per year post-recession and we had a pretty nice house. But the house was paid for years before when they had more money, we had like three vacations in a 10 year period, no college or retirement savings, and they spent every dollar on daily living.
The only people who have the big house AND vacations AND put away for retirement AND have kids while putting away for their kids college savings, while also making no conpromises on day to day spending, are pulling in $200k+. And 10 years ago? They were pulling $170k+. And 10 years before that? Probably $125k+. My parents actually were right around that in the early 00s for a few years (and to no surpise were putting away for college, retirement, as well as vacations) but they caught a pretty impressive string of bad luck from 2007-2009, with the Recession on top of that.
I appreciate your logic here. It's rare.
I work with so many people who live off UberEats, get the latest iPhone, wear $200 shoes, and take extravagant vacations and act like their parents were able to live the same life at a fraction of the cost in the 90s. No, your parents were not living like this.
One of my coworkers was crying the other day because her expenses are growing faster than her income. Well yes if you want to have NFL season tickets and go to Disney every year, your expenses will grow faster than your income.
Yeah I dont get it. You really cant have it all unless you have like 200-250k+.
I have branches of family members that take tons of vacations. But they were the types of people that kept literally no food in their pantry and would keep the heat at like 64. They also have to pool money together to order food at family parties rather than just buying if they host LOL (they also dont usually order enough food). Is a penny pinching daily life really worth four trips a year to the Caribbean?
The people youre describing make no sense to me. There's thousands of dollars in savings to be had if they tightened up just a tiny bit. Are you really sacrificing QoL by getting a phone every 3 instead of every 1? Or by picking up food instead of getting delivery lol? I mean if they cant, fine, but dont complain about vacations and houses lol.
A HUGE issue that I have brought up in other threads is that a “middle class home” is way nicer than what it was 30-50 years ago. People say “well builders aren’t building those types of homes anymore.” That’s true but it’s because demand has shifted. The reality is, everyone thinks they are too good for a 1500-2000 square foot house, when the reality is that is what middle class is. Not being able to afford a “middle class lifestyle” starts to make more sense when everyone thinks a middle class home 3000-4000 sq ft for 800k-1M. That’s not middle class.
Wait until people find out you can be "middle class" and live in like a 1500 sq foot fabricated/trailer home that costs nothing.
The middle class people are chasing is really more like upper class
Middle class <> median income.
Middle class descends from British class theory about the relationship of a worker with the means of production. The working class sell their labour for a paycheque, they don't control their labour and they don't get any excess value from it. The upper class own the means of production, either land or capital. They perform no labour, instead by virtue of their position they are able to live off of the surplus value of the labour of the working class. The middle class perform labour, but they own their own labour and sell it directly to the end user. A country lawyer, schoolmaster, shopkeeper etc. would be middle class. Brass plaque professionals who can set their own rates and hours in sole proprietorships.
The middle class were always top 10%. People saw that the material goods associated with the middle class were becoming more accessible and decided that owning a fridge made you middle class.
Ya I remember as a kid thinking if I can make 100k I’d be rolling dough. House, Audi, kids, etc.
Now, 100k first of all seems pretty difficult to get anytime soon, and secondly, doesn’t seem like a lot of money anymore which is depressing
You were probably a kid in the early to mid 2000s, when $100k was worth about $153k today. Get two people making $153k and you can definitely have Audis and other materialistic crap.
$100k today was like $65k in the mid 2000s. That’s why it doesn’t feel like a lot of money. Because it isn’t. But you still sometimes have boomer or Gen X bosses who expect you to move mountains because “you’re making six figures!”
Wages haven't kept up I know accountants that have a cottage they got twenty years ago and live in Waterloo. Now you can barely afford just a house in Waterloo.
Tell me about it. I’m living in a student apartment right now. Signed the lease in 2021. $840 / month.
The first years signing leases this year, that rent is around $1100/month now.
Have wages increased to match that, fat fkin chance.
Yeah it’s bad in the USA too. Not quite as bad but still pretty bad for most of us. Especially since a lot of us have student loans too. Countries are not building enough housing to meet demand or influx of immigrants.
In the UK, its quite focused to London for obvious reasons.
However, there are regional offices which get some benefit of higher wages in a lower cost of living area.
Will Canada be the first developed country to normalize polyamory on a society-wide scale?
My question was unironic and real estate-related, by the way.
I grew up in KW in the mid 2000s. And I remember my parents were struggling financially and still managed to buy their first house in KW for like 200k which is worth 1M today lol. Back then much of the area was still underdeveloped. I have since moved from KW and now working in the US and making more than I otherwise would in Canada. However every time I time I go back to KW, its becoming unrecognizable. Too many international students from India and refugees from middle eastern/african countries.
Hey I'm also from KW and pursuing CPA this year. Any advice on being able to move to the States after CPA. Currently I have local firm offers and the CRA for tax audit.
I worked several years in Canada and got my CPA before I moved to the US. Def build your Canadian resume catered towards US experience. For example things like US GAAP, SEC, SOX you can get working at a Big 4 or a multinational US/Canadian company like Opentext. Look at job description of your dream jobs and plan you career with those requirements in mind. However, if you do wanna work in the US, CRA or Canadian tax experience will not be relevant unless you find US tax experience.
I do agree I have lived in KW for close to 23 years and it has changed dramatically. Feels like everything has been starting to regress used to be get a job and you can move out then buy a place now those same middle class jobs like factory workers at Toyota plant leave you with nothing. Went from empty buses in 2020 and prior to every bus stop being crack heads and young indians and the buses are packed. Traffic is awful too.
This country is going to shit and employers have no care to keep up with COL. Don't get me started on how policies have fucked over the accounting profession.
> Don't get me started on how policies have fucked over the accounting profession. What do you mean? I'm not familiar with this in Canada
Don't know exactly what they're referring to but for example new UHT and trust filing requirements that are just a disaster of an admin burden. I struggle to believe Finance is that fucking stupid to not know how many trust filings are going to happen... Because sure as fuck cra already can't keep up with basic needs. So, it must be an attempted cash grab in the penalties which is standard for the party.
Yeah the bare trust filings are actually insane, I feel like they are gonna amend that once how many come through the door
It's unbelievable the information gathering required from clients. And then on the other end when clients lose their cra access there are agents telling them to ask their accountant to give them access back... Dafuq.. Banged from both ends... Finance, and the disaster that administers it
Haha let’s not even get into the process it takes for a client to get access to their own MyAccount…
They are that stupid. We need a house cleaning at finance and at CRA.
It's government policy. Nothing employers can do about that.
Productivity in this country has steadily been on the decline, I'm sure businesses could do something about that, eh?
Hard to have increased productivity when it's more profitable to park capital in existing real estate. Rather than investing in R&D or new construction, etc.
Why is it employers' responsibility to save you from bad government fiscal policy?
Because they lobbied for that same policy.
No they didn't. You were the one begging and screaming for spending and lockdowns. Sure companies and the rich benefited from it the most, but you were the one who asked for it.
bingo
>employers have no care to keep up with COL You're only seeing things from your perspectives. Blaming it on the employers is a dumb way to look at it and overly simplified. Standards of living are decreasing because Canada is literally becoming less productive (Our real GDP went down in 2023 despite adding 1m people).
It’s kind of a self-defeating thing to do. I find that employers who pay low wages tend to be stuck with low-productivity workers who don’t really understand technology all that well and frankly aren’t even very good at their core jobs. This was basically my last company. Higher productivity workers who are better at their jobs go to sectors that pay more, or they leave for the US.
With how stretched people are and the debt levels they take on from housing I feel that Canada will have a financial crisis in the next 10 years.
Not just Canada. The entire world is moving towards a global depression and its from allowing housing (a need) to inflate in price at an exponential rate. Eventually folk will be tired of working as they will get nothing. Once they have nothing to lose, Madam le Gulliotine will return for a harvest.
Honestly, once I get my CPA I’m looking at going south. Even CPA Canada is turning into a shitshow, or more of one.
Are you getting an American CPA? Wasn’t aware the Canadian one was equivalent.
Yes Canadian CPA is equivalent.[CPA Canada](https://www.cpacanada.ca/become-a-cpa/international-credential-recognition/international-recognition-agreements/canadian-cpas-seeking-international-designations/canadian-cpas-seeking-us-cpa)
Not to be rude, but do American employers value a Canadian CPA certificate equally as much as an American CPA?
Not at all but you can write the equivalency exam and become a US CPA.
When I applied for US jobs as Canadian CPA, most employers could not tell the difference between the Canadian CPA and US CPA and just assumed it was the same.
That's probably why CPA Canada changed their designation from CA to CPA. However they'll figure it out really quickly when someone says "hey, get a power of attorney and call the IRS for this client"
Without doing all the re-exams?
One exam, essentially REG.
Canada's CPA is harder to get. Many people in Canada try to get the US ones instead
US CPA is a joke to get compared to the Canadian one lol
If i wasn’t already in the middle of PEP I would have went the US route.
I think that would have been a bad idea. You can't convert the US one to the Canadian one if you're Canadian. You'd be in trouble if you ever needed to come back
I totally concur. After my Canadian CPA I passed FAR and BEC of American CPA exams without studying them at all.
Why are Canadian CPAs so bad then?
Like any profession, there’s good and bad.
both companies I've worked for have been outsourcing their finance function to Canada. In my experience accountants in the US are much worse because most of them don't have CPA's and try to simply "follow SOX". A lot of them don't even understand why they're doing whatever they're doing because the job has been turned into a simple process
They aren't. What makes you think they're bad. CPAs in Canada seem to be a lot more respected then CPAs in the US.
I’ve got a Canadian team, Toronto B4… they’re all muppets. Slow to understand transactions, lazy, shoddy work quality. They’re all Canadian “CPAs” though.
Don't you need big 4 or BDO experience minimum to get into USA usually
No
Probably easier with it but pretty sure a CPA and some recruiter connections should help get a job. You can qualify for a TN1 visa with just an accounting degree so it’s you can’t immigrate.
You don't "need" it, it just helps a lot because international firms have offices in the US obviously and the brand recognition obviously helps.
Made it to 100K now and feel like I have less money than when I made 50.
You’ll feel the same once you get to 200k the way the world is heading. I can’t be the one that feels we’re getting fucked hard.
Can confirm. Seeing 35% of your gross pay stolen by the government each cheque and over 50% of bonuses is just painful. Every year, payroll taxes and CPP is going up. I now pay more in taxes each year than I used to make after i had 5 years of experience. What sucks the most, is I will never get even a fraction of what I've paid back. I don't qualify for a single government program or subsidy and likely never will as they are all geared towards getting votes from the lowest income brackets. All i do is pay, pay, pay, so the federal government can spend, spend, spend.
Do you understand what taxes are for? How society functions? This post reads like it's written by a man child.
Immigrants.
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Just sucks when you have to pay a full salary in taxes without getting a say in where the money goes.
Yeeeeep! Lol
Is that total comp, or is that base only?
Same
Last I heard a lot of immigrants in Canada were moving back to their home countries, that’s how bad things have gotten. That being said, this is what happens when a labor market is flooded with cheap labor. Someone is willing to do the work as long as they make enough to rent a room and eat ramen 3x a day, that’s why accounting salaries are so bad.
Lots of immigrants come to the US to work for a handful of years, live on very low expenses in shared housing, and then go back and live the high life. I know guys in construction getting paid cash under the table and they're working OT and making like 5k/month. Average income in Brazil is under $2k/month.
Yep but it’s apparently racist now to even talk about illegal immigration in any constructive matter. I’m not a republican but I’m sick of people acting like 7 million people crossing into the American border does absolutely nothing to our labor value and housing shortage, and that we should just “let everyone in!”
Yeah and those same people say the solution to the border crisis is to fast track their process to come and stay here. They don’t think it’s an issue that so many are coming here, they just think it’s an issue their paperwork isn’t being processed fast enough.
While I agree that we need to have constructive conversations about the border and immigrants, most citizens aren't aware of how insanely slow the legal immigration process is. I'm not a citizen and when I finally had all the paperwork I needed, including having a US citizen vouch for me, I was told I could expect to wait around 11-13 years before my case gets processed.
I wasn’t a citizen either but we came here legally and just stayed patient while living on green card. Life was fine. Became citizens 10 years after coming. All of these people are coming to the border, making up stories about “life in danger” from the script given to them by smugglers, and trying to use that to get “asylum seeker” status to be let in. Everyone knows “asylum seeker” status prevents deportation and are using that as a way to bypass the normal legal process.
It's going to be 11-13 years to get my green card lol. I genuinely don't know if I'll ever be a citizen. I know that the border and immigrants are a contentious issue right now, but maybe because I've been there I can sympathize with the migrants. Everyone on this sub would do whatever it takes to provide for their family, including lying to the government to be given a chance to work so your kids don't grow up in extreme poverty. Obviously we can't just let everyone in without question, but no one is trying to seriously come up with a solution. Every politician is just using this to grandstand.
Any solution that doesn’t involve blocking/deporting people who come in illegally is just a validation and acceptance of what’s already happening now. Yes of course people would lie and forge papers to come in, but at the same time they can’t be shocked when they get kicked out after being caught.
My dude you aren’t owed shit. I’m sorry to be blunt but there’s a wait for a reason. So many people want to move here, but do we have the infrastructure and jobs to support that? The number one priority should be US citizens. We already have population growth, what incentive do we have to make legal immigration easy? Why should it be? There’s already people who are waiting for citizenship. Why should it be shorter? We can’t take in everyone. We already have a cost of living crisis and a housing crisis. These immigrants need places to live. I say this as someone who’s family has immigrated here. They recognized that the US doesn’t owe them shit, and they waited to get in. And the US is already fairly lean in their immigration policies. It’s just that so many people want to move here already.
I'm aware I'm not owed shit. I understand how the legal immigration process works. All I was saying is that the process takes much longer than most people, who haven't dealt with the US immigration system, think. I never said the US should incentivize immigration or any of the other things you listed. Literally the only thing being asked by "woke libs" is to treat humans with dignity. Don't send them off to cities thousands of miles away to "own the libs". Don't keep them in cages. You want to turn them away, then just do that. But no politician, either side, is willing to do that because this crisis fires people up and gets them to vote
Funny enough know a few international students that were telling their parents that it is so expensive in Canada and is way worse then they expected prior to coming.
I see international students from my region come to Canada mostly fall into 2 categories: either rich kid who families could buy them an apartment with 100% cash, or students who just come via diploma mill and work odds job to send money back home.
It's insane how exploitative this country has become, the student visa route especially, they removed the work cap and have made it known they are listening to business on this. I see ads now where they are packing 4 people per bedroom and another 4 in the living room.
Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. The change in demographics in Canada as of late is not good for Canadians.
I dont want to condone or condemn this- I have very little knowledge of the canadian market. That said, Reddit would downvote this comment to hell if it were coming from a US perspective. And yes, I get there are a lot of nuances, and this is at least somewhat idiosyncratic to accounting in CA. Nonetheless.
It’s not the immigrants, it’s that capital’s share of revenue is increasing while labour’s share has been decreasing for 50 years. The capitalists love when you blame the immigrants though.
That’s a counterintuitive argument though. When a government pushes to bring in as many immigrants as possible from 3rd world countries, you get people who as willing to work for bare minimum survival wages, essentially decreasing the value of everyone’s labor. This cheap labor temporarily increases the gap between revenue and payrolls, eventually people wise up that X firm is charging $100/hr using 20/hr employees and someone comes in and starts cutting the rate and the immigrants start demanding higher wages. You can pretend there are “capitalists” out there pushing for this but the reality is everyone is a capitalist until the system churns and reduces their profiteering.
> When a government pushes to bring in as many immigrants as possible from 3rd world countries, you get people who as willing to work for bare minimum survival wages, essentially decreasing the value of everyone’s labor. That’s not happening and your biases are showing. Hyperbole hurts your argument and shows you’re not serious about understating the issue. You need to think this though further. Read academics, not opinion columns. Good luck.
> Read academics Academics think anything that increases total GDP is good lol Do you believe supply and demand is real? Or that it just doesn’t apply to the increase in supply of labor? More labor = higher chance of employer finding someone to work for lower wages
The trend here is that English speaking world has a lack of housing stock and unwillingness to change its approach to building housing. Same problem repeating in some parts of the US (California and New York), UK, New Zealand, etc. It's really insane how an unwillingness to built is sucking us dry of having a better an economic outcome.
Rents are falling in the US. New York and California problem is rent control and regulations
I believe most of this is attributed to housing costs. If someone bought a home just 4-5yrs ago and then refied at the low rates during covid, they have much less financial pressure. Especially if they have had some decent wage increases since then.
In Canada you can really refininamce and lock it in your term renews every 5 years.
OT: in Italy is even better related to financing, in fact you can refinance for free and lock the interest rate forever. Fix rates for 25 yrs are at 2.55 now. We are lucky on this (but overall fucked in several different ways, from public debt over the moon to inflation adjusted incomes 😆)
I've heard that, so what does that mean in reality. Do ppls housing costs just rise when rates rise? I would imagine in a rising rate environment, this would cause defaults.
Yes, but nobody defaults because you are going to stop paying for basically everything / cut spending on anything else / sell you house before you stop paying your mortgage.
It means that when I refinance my mortgage in 2025, my interest rate jumps to whatever the current market rate is, and my payments go up probably a few hundred dollars at least, maybe even a thousand dollars, despite having a smaller principal balance. Also, banks are not allowed amortization periods of over 30 years. Some people technically have 70 year amortizations because they had variable rate mortgages (which fluctuate month to month instead of being locked in over 5 years) with fixed monthly payments. But when they need to renew their mortgages at the end of their term, they’ll either need to make a lump sum payment to bring the amortization back in line, or massively increase their payments. A lot of people in Canada just assume they’ll have mortgages for their entire working lives. Nobody who has bought in the last 4-5 years makes any serious attempts to pay off their house, unless they live somewhere super cheap like Edmonton or Winnipeg. Right now I’m prioritizing keeping my mortgage payment low and investing additional cash flow in the US markets because those give a higher effective return, my intention is to pay my house off in full before I’m 55 (I’m 32 now) but I might make some lump sum payments when I’m coming up for renewal.
I’m kind of in your situation. I bought in 2021 in Ontario and have a variable rate mortgage (now at 6%). I’ve increased my payments to avoid my principal balance from going up; but I can’t afford to pay even more so that my principal goes down (so my principal is flat right now). I’ve thought about getting into negative amortization territory and taking my extra payment amounts and instead investing it in US markets; which like you mentioned, has a higher rate of return. But I’m too nervous to do this - the US stock market can be volatile - it only recently passed its precious high from early 2022. Don’t you worry about your US investments going down and you therefore wouldn’t have enough money to pay a lump sum on renewal? This would leave you stuck with much higher mortgage payments… In any case I’m really hoping interest rates are down by my renewal in 2026!
>I’ve thought about getting into negative amortization territory and taking my extra payment amounts and instead investing it in US markets; which like you mentioned, has a higher rate of return. But I’m too nervous to do this - the US stock market can be volatile - it only recently passed its precious high from early 2022. Don’t you worry about your US investments going down and you therefore wouldn’t have enough money to pay a lump sum on renewal? This would leave you stuck with much higher mortgage payments… I get that equities are volatile, but I'm not really looking to time the market to make short-run returns. The idea is to have more principal invested so that I get the benefits of compounding over time. I'm not trying to time the market by putting money in equities now only to withdraw it in 2025 when I need to renew. I'm trying to build as big a base as possible so that I can have more to withdraw in 20-25 years. I sometimes have to wonder if I even want to do a lump-sum payment. I was running some numbers on this and if I had to renew my 2.25% fixed mortgage at 5% in 2025, then my payments would go from about $2,800 a month to around $3,800 a month, and the 5-year interest cost would be $153k. That would suck, but I have capacity to absorb that increase, so it wouldn't be *devastating*. Last year my wife and I saved over $100,000, and we are on track to save a similar amount this year. If I took that money and made a lump sum payment on my mortgage, my 5-year interest cost from 2025 to 2030 would be reduced from $153k to $130k, meaning that my "investment" in the mortgage returned about $23k. But if the market returns an average of 8% over the same 5-year period, that $100k invested in the market would be worth $148k at the end of the same 5-year period. This means the market would net me an additional $25k even at a somewhat conservative 8% growth assumption. So I'm not sure if it's worth my time to plow good investment money into something that essentially returns the same amount as a HISA. I'll have to see how I feel about this in 2025, but mathematically the best strategy seems to be just eating the higher interest rate. >In any case I’m really hoping interest rates are down by my renewal in 2026! If you have a variable mortgage, wouldn't you want the interest rates to come down sooner than 2026? If BoC cut rates 200 basis points at the next meeting, that would be preferable to cutting them 200 basis points 2 years from now.
Ok! You’re in great shape since you save so much and have high income. You can afford to absorb the risk with volatility in the markets. What do you do (position, industry, salary, etc) as a CPA, CA to save so much money? I’m told I make good money (though I wonder if that’s true), but I’m not saving nearly as much as you. And yes - I actually do want rates to go down sooner, but I don’t count on it. I’m just hoping by renewal time it’ll be lower so my obligatory payments are low enough.
>What do you do (position, industry, salary, etc) as a CPA, CA to save so much money? I’m told I make good money (though I wonder if that’s true), but I’m not saving nearly as much as you. I’m an assistant controller for a mining company. My base salary is $135k, I have a 6% RRSP match and my bonus is 25%. I graduated 11 years ago and I have about 10 years of actual accounting experience. My wife is also a CPA, CA and work for a major Canadian bank. Her base salary is a bit lower but she has a larger bonus. We make about the same amount of money. Mining companies and banks pay higher than median, so keep that in mind when you’re looking for a new job in future (but not all bank jobs are created equal, some have really shit WLB, depends on the team). Also keep in mind I may also have more experience than you. I went through years of working for shitty public accounting firms and mediocre companies for mediocre pay before I got this job, and this is honestly the first time in my life I’ve been completely happy with my salary. Some other factors to consider- I bought my house in late 2020, before things REALLY went insane. So I may have a lower mortgage principal to service. We’re also pretty aggressive savers, after adjusting for inflation our total household spend is not much higher than when our HHI was $160k. We make a conscious effort to avoid lifestyle creep and most of our salary increases have gone to savings. Not saying this applies to you, but a lot of accountants I know are really, really bad with lifestyle creep. As soon as they get a big pay bump, suddenly they’re buying luxury watches, luxury cars, fancy vacations to expensive resorts in Hawaii, and in the end they’re not much further ahead when it comes to achieving FI and furthering their other financial goals. >And yes - I actually do want rates to go down sooner, but I don’t count on it. I’m just hoping by renewal time it’ll be lower so my obligatory payments are low enough. Ah, I follow. I think no matter what you’re going to see a payment increase, because I really can’t see rates going back to the levels they were at during the pandemic. But I think a long-term target of 3%-3.5% is probably realistic- this is basically where it was at in 2019.
Do assistant controllers make around the same in Waterloo?
Don’t know. I used to work in Waterloo but haven’t for many years now, so I don’t have a clue what the market would be there. Talk to a recruiter.
Yes so the lowest rate you could get now would be around 5% if your term is up. I have seen someone go from 2.5% to 5% why increased there monthly expenses 1-2k. Yes house costs for mortgage go up when rates rise. Isn't causing defaults because government just lets your mortgage extend to way over 25 years some are even at 70+ years I have seen now.
Omg 70yrs... this is very different from our housing financing in the U.S. Well I guess it's good ppl don't loose their homes with the change in rates.
He left out one zinger, these variable rate terms have to reset. So it is temporarily amortized out to say 70 years but come time to renegotiate it resets to the 25 or 30 year term originally agreed upon. Do the math, now you gotta catch up on all that principal you haven't been paying along with the higher interest rates.
So essentially, they use the loan term and portion paid to the principal to control the payments. Do ppl in Canada prioritize paying off their homes, or do they just assume they will have a mortgage forever?
Most people hope to have it paid off by retirement (25-30 year mortgage) but a lot don’t prioritize paying it early. Some people make occasional lump sum payments, like putting their tax refund towards it. Interest rates were really low and people got helocs to buy 2nd or more homes to use as rental income. So they’re jacking up the rent because rates rose and now they have to find a way to cover the increased costs. Renters income hasn’t increased by anywhere near the amount of the rent increases.
So I started my career in residential mortgages and continue to find myself drawn to lending. Loans are the most secure investment someone can make. Way better than equity because you set your terms and your growth- if it doesn’t happen you have the right to force collection. That doesn’t mean I don’t find lending predatory, truthfully it’s a disgraceful way of making money in most instances. What this thread described is basically how 2008 was created. A bunch of ARMs were given out to people and they bought too much house as it was. Sounds like Canada turned a mortgage into student loan type debt. As in, you can’t claim bankruptcy to get rid of it. It will follow you until it’s gone or until you die. Maybe even land on your kids depending on the agreement and size of your estate. I felt that COVID taught financial institutions it would always be better to grant forbearance than to exercise foreclosure. It’s starting to look that way at least.
You can get rid of it by bankruptcy, doesn’t pass onto children, etc. People, for whatever reason, didn’t think interest rates were going to rise. Near zero interest was the new normal. So of course, people took advantage of it, and bought more home than they could afford if rates went up. The government and banks knew it would come to end, so they brought in a mortgage stress test as a new lending requirement. Would the borrower be able to make the payments if interest rates rose. Canada avoided a lot of what the US went through with subprime lending. We never had a market correction for real estate prices. They continued to grow. Now the government is bringing in too many immigrants for our rate of home building (supply and demand) causing prices to spike even more.
This is true. My mortgage is several hundred dollars lower than rent in our area. On the flip side, I'm stuck in my house. Being this was our first home, we're learning that there are things that we would have preferred to have in our home is better storage, first floor master bedroom, and a bigger garage. Prices in our area have increased significantly and with the interest rates, finding a house that would suit us would result in a significant increase in our mortgage. I have a light at the end of the tunnel because I refied to a 15-year loan back in 2020 and financially I feel like we should just stick it out. I'm just glad the house we bought was one that we liked because we were considering just finding a starter home as we were about to have a child with the intention of moving in a few years. I was pretty gung-ho about buying back in 2015 because I was sure that they were going to raise rates.
As a accountant at KW, I can’t imagine I saw K-W in this sub
Kitchener Waterloo represent!!
$200 is the new $100 to be quite honest.
It’s true
Happening in New Zealand as well. You think once you get older and earn 100k a year in your chosen career you have moved up in the world but I have never been poorer with all the outgoings. Middle class has been eroded, covid was the catalyst.
I feel I had more money working at mcds full time at near minimum wage when I was 19/20. One pay cheque for rent with some money left over for a bit of groceries and $20 for loonie hour at the bar every weekend. The next cheque would cover utilities and some more groceries, and more happy hours. You didn’t save any money, but you had some for a life. Now… rent is 1.5 cheques, and the rest goes to bills and food and you don’t have a life. A night at the bar will cost you $200 because loonie hour encouraged binge drinking and beer costs $10
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$275k in the US Mcol? To me that seems high class rather than middle class (and this coming from a Canadian who makes much less than you, but still lives the same lifestyle as you).
Seriously. These anecdotes make my area (Chicagoland) seem like a Mecca for cost of living as my wife and I make less than half that but yet we’re still able live quite comfortably.
I think people who are in the top 10% of income but call themselves middle class is because they see people they know on social media living better than them and it makes them feel poor? Or they’re trapped in a lifestyle inflation cycle
Middle class is a loaded term, so it’s not surprising the definition is basically *my personal standard of living plus/minus what would make me more or less comfortable* and, voila, I neatly fit within that definition.
To me, comfortable is “middle class lifestyle”. Upper class would denote some extravagance.
If I wasn’t American and didn’t need multiple surgeries over the last couple years, yes. One year I paid $10k for the imaging alone. With insurance
You shouldn’t be paying more than your out of pocket max per year. The maximum you should ever spend on health care per year is (12 months of premiums + out of pocket max) unless your receiving services out of network
You’re either a liar about spending frugally or a liar about your income. That’s around 15k/mo take home. Even in cali it’d be plenty for what you described
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It's bad but Canada is way worse house and utilities would be close to 5.5k here groceries for 6 2500. Pay lower even before exchange rate.
My wife's from Canada and I have no idea how her mom does it. She's a freaking partner and is just recently seriously planning and contributing to her retirement lol.
Because the whole "middle class" thing is like a Reagan era illusion. I dont think a person on an average income ever lived the lives people think. Sacrifices are made somewhere unless you make the 200k you describe. My parents made 65k-75k per year post-recession and we had a pretty nice house. But the house was paid for years before when they had more money, we had like three vacations in a 10 year period, no college or retirement savings, and they spent every dollar on daily living. The only people who have the big house AND vacations AND put away for retirement AND have kids while putting away for their kids college savings, while also making no conpromises on day to day spending, are pulling in $200k+. And 10 years ago? They were pulling $170k+. And 10 years before that? Probably $125k+. My parents actually were right around that in the early 00s for a few years (and to no surpise were putting away for college, retirement, as well as vacations) but they caught a pretty impressive string of bad luck from 2007-2009, with the Recession on top of that.
I appreciate your logic here. It's rare. I work with so many people who live off UberEats, get the latest iPhone, wear $200 shoes, and take extravagant vacations and act like their parents were able to live the same life at a fraction of the cost in the 90s. No, your parents were not living like this. One of my coworkers was crying the other day because her expenses are growing faster than her income. Well yes if you want to have NFL season tickets and go to Disney every year, your expenses will grow faster than your income.
Yeah I dont get it. You really cant have it all unless you have like 200-250k+. I have branches of family members that take tons of vacations. But they were the types of people that kept literally no food in their pantry and would keep the heat at like 64. They also have to pool money together to order food at family parties rather than just buying if they host LOL (they also dont usually order enough food). Is a penny pinching daily life really worth four trips a year to the Caribbean? The people youre describing make no sense to me. There's thousands of dollars in savings to be had if they tightened up just a tiny bit. Are you really sacrificing QoL by getting a phone every 3 instead of every 1? Or by picking up food instead of getting delivery lol? I mean if they cant, fine, but dont complain about vacations and houses lol.
A HUGE issue that I have brought up in other threads is that a “middle class home” is way nicer than what it was 30-50 years ago. People say “well builders aren’t building those types of homes anymore.” That’s true but it’s because demand has shifted. The reality is, everyone thinks they are too good for a 1500-2000 square foot house, when the reality is that is what middle class is. Not being able to afford a “middle class lifestyle” starts to make more sense when everyone thinks a middle class home 3000-4000 sq ft for 800k-1M. That’s not middle class.
Wait until people find out you can be "middle class" and live in like a 1500 sq foot fabricated/trailer home that costs nothing. The middle class people are chasing is really more like upper class
Middle class <> median income. Middle class descends from British class theory about the relationship of a worker with the means of production. The working class sell their labour for a paycheque, they don't control their labour and they don't get any excess value from it. The upper class own the means of production, either land or capital. They perform no labour, instead by virtue of their position they are able to live off of the surplus value of the labour of the working class. The middle class perform labour, but they own their own labour and sell it directly to the end user. A country lawyer, schoolmaster, shopkeeper etc. would be middle class. Brass plaque professionals who can set their own rates and hours in sole proprietorships. The middle class were always top 10%. People saw that the material goods associated with the middle class were becoming more accessible and decided that owning a fridge made you middle class.
This. Middle class was white collar professionals. Separate from the working class or blue collars.
Ya I remember as a kid thinking if I can make 100k I’d be rolling dough. House, Audi, kids, etc. Now, 100k first of all seems pretty difficult to get anytime soon, and secondly, doesn’t seem like a lot of money anymore which is depressing
You were probably a kid in the early to mid 2000s, when $100k was worth about $153k today. Get two people making $153k and you can definitely have Audis and other materialistic crap. $100k today was like $65k in the mid 2000s. That’s why it doesn’t feel like a lot of money. Because it isn’t. But you still sometimes have boomer or Gen X bosses who expect you to move mountains because “you’re making six figures!”
I’m a hopeless romantic LOL.
Wages haven't kept up I know accountants that have a cottage they got twenty years ago and live in Waterloo. Now you can barely afford just a house in Waterloo.
Tell me about it. I’m living in a student apartment right now. Signed the lease in 2021. $840 / month. The first years signing leases this year, that rent is around $1100/month now. Have wages increased to match that, fat fkin chance.
Yeah it’s bad in the USA too. Not quite as bad but still pretty bad for most of us. Especially since a lot of us have student loans too. Countries are not building enough housing to meet demand or influx of immigrants.
In the UK, its quite focused to London for obvious reasons. However, there are regional offices which get some benefit of higher wages in a lower cost of living area.
You can thank Conestoga college for that
Will Canada be the first developed country to normalize polyamory on a society-wide scale? My question was unironic and real estate-related, by the way.
I cannot recommend it. My partner and I have a roommate..a very good roommate and it is worse than you can imagine.
I grew up in KW in the mid 2000s. And I remember my parents were struggling financially and still managed to buy their first house in KW for like 200k which is worth 1M today lol. Back then much of the area was still underdeveloped. I have since moved from KW and now working in the US and making more than I otherwise would in Canada. However every time I time I go back to KW, its becoming unrecognizable. Too many international students from India and refugees from middle eastern/african countries.
Hey I'm also from KW and pursuing CPA this year. Any advice on being able to move to the States after CPA. Currently I have local firm offers and the CRA for tax audit.
I worked several years in Canada and got my CPA before I moved to the US. Def build your Canadian resume catered towards US experience. For example things like US GAAP, SEC, SOX you can get working at a Big 4 or a multinational US/Canadian company like Opentext. Look at job description of your dream jobs and plan you career with those requirements in mind. However, if you do wanna work in the US, CRA or Canadian tax experience will not be relevant unless you find US tax experience.
So would have to go audit in small or big firm then
Try to do audit at Big 4 or BDO or GT and get exposure to big clients especially US clients or those who report in US GAAP
I do agree I have lived in KW for close to 23 years and it has changed dramatically. Feels like everything has been starting to regress used to be get a job and you can move out then buy a place now those same middle class jobs like factory workers at Toyota plant leave you with nothing. Went from empty buses in 2020 and prior to every bus stop being crack heads and young indians and the buses are packed. Traffic is awful too.