
“George, who lives with his mother in a townhouse, wants to open a wine bar. To get a leg up given his modest income, he is looking to speculate in real estate.”
“George has the lofty goals and dreams befitting a budding entrepreneur: He wants a business of his own, easy money, and the freedom wealth brings to put up his feet and retire by the time he is 55 – with an income of $150,000 a year after tax.
Back down on earth, George is 23, recently graduated from university and has just landed his first “real” job earning $35,000 a year plus bonus and other benefits. He lives with his mother in a townhouse in the Guelph area that they plan to flip for a $60,000 profit. He wonders how best to use his share of the anticipated gain.
George’s big dream is to open his own wine bar. He aims to save $70,000 over the next 10 years as a down payment and wonders whether that will be enough to enable him to get the financing he will need. To get a leg up given his modest income, he is looking to speculate in real estate.
“Since I want to open a wine bar one day, I figured house-flipping was one way to jump-start a savings plan at the beginning of my career, when the money is still tight,” he writes in an e-mail. Mind you, that $60,000 profit he and his mother expect has yet to be realized, and they’d need at least half of it as a down payment to buy a bigger, better home.”
…
“We asked Kurt Rosentreter, a senior financial adviser at Manulife Securities Inc. in Toronto and author of Wealthbuilding, to look at George’s situation. /… As for house-flipping as a way of making money, “Be careful. A real estate correction in the future could leave this ending badly for a young guy with not a lot of wiggle room.”
Mr. Rosentreter says George would need to accumulate $2.5-million by the time he is 55, excluding his home. Assuming a 5-per-cent rate of return on his investments and a 32-year time horizon, he would have to save $33,000 a year to achieve his goal, so he may want to set his sights a little lower. Mr. Rosentreter’s suggestion: “Save what you can.”
…
– from ‘Champagne dreams with a chaser of realism’, Dianne Malley, Globe and Mail, 2 Mar 2012
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See how the distorted economic playing field that results from the speculative mania in housing has perverted the thinking of the young?
It’s all very distracting.
– vreaa