In the beginning...
I've wanted to start detailing this for a long while now but finding the right outlet has been the trick and now, I've already amassed so much, bottled up so much, that I'm at that frightening point of wondering if it's too late to start and where to begin.
So let's start at the beginning...
At the very end of 2021, while sitting with my wife in a very nice historic resort property near the heart of Paris (yes, that Paris, the France one, not the Ontario one), a sense of dread came over me. Neither one of us were in a bad place, work, home or otherwise in our lives, we frequently comment on just how blessed we are, but the longer the pandemic dragged on the more it felt like we were just treading water, on all fronts, not just because of pandemic restrictions for indeed very few of those were limitations if you were willing to leap the hurdles, and in fact the pandemic was more a gift to us, reminding us that time was the fire in which we burned and forcing us to both purge the clutter of busy lives and truly understand and appreciate what really matters.
The dread was because it felt like the clock was ticking down on our ability to really get a handle on our future and control where it was going. That things needed a shake up. That it was time to DO something. The problem with the initial sense of dread though is the vagueness of it. Dread is not an epiphany. It's lingering, slow moving and ambiguous.
But even as we watched the countdown to 2022 on the TV screen, even as we readied the bottle of champagne for the ringing in of another new year, even as we consumed the rich, dark chocolate treats we set to consume each hour on the hour preceding midnight as our own decadent countdown, even as we bathed in the rich luxury of a very expensive hotel room in a building that once housed Royalty, even as all that was being taken in there was a sense that the last decade of joyful bliss needed a shake up.
We both felt that tension building before something springs to action. Not anticipation, just the anxious building of energy. I would presume something akin to a pre-manic attack. Something had to start happening. We both knew it. We just didn't know what.
Fast forward to March 2022. The feeling hasn't gone away, in fact a languid melancholy has set in because all of our discussions on what we want the future to be are thwarted by the realities of long term finances or lack thereof. It's not that we expected to retire in luxury, but we knew we needed basic convenience and comfort or the future would be miserable.
Basic Maslow Hierarchy stuff. Obviously we needed a play to satisfy the Physiological needs at the base of the hierarchy: the biological components for human survival but also the Safety needs. While physical safety wasn't so much an issue the trouble with our current comfortable life, even stripped to its basics, is that we couldn't meet the Economical Safety needs without either moving or both of us continuing to work. Suburban Toronto was simply too expensive for us to remain in if we weren't both earning a decent wage.
But there weren't many alternatives. The East Coast was always more expensive in basics but even housing there had become expensive with many remote working Torontonians moving East during the pandemic so they could have yards and such.
And Quebec could work from a retirement perspective, but only if we were far removed from major cities and the qualify of life and convenience we've come to expect from that. Then there was the language issue. While I've been trying to learn French for the last 5 years, in an non-immersive capacity it's been painfully slow and what I've learned has been frustratingly too easy to forget when I needed it. I've also come to appreciate the sound landscape of Parisian French and from that recognize the crassness of the sounds that is Quebec French.
For a while we'd been investigating Elliott Lake. A remote small town seemingly centered around attracting retirees to it. The rentals were certainly well priced, with two bedrooms coming in around half what we were currently paying for a much smaller space, but again the remoteness of the town, even to just moderately larger cities, was a depressing thought.
What to do, what to do. Then around the third week of March I came across an article in the Globe and Mail about the "Affordability Index of Canadian Cities". Looking through the list I saw that Hamilton, which at one point was the fall back for people in the Greater Toronto Area looking to live cheaper, had skyrocketed beyond even Toronto to top the list at 78 points against affordability. Toronto wasn't much behind it, and then I moved to the opposite end of the list expecting to see Winnipeg and instead saw Edmonton.
Now I'd lived in Calgary for five years. The winters there are brutal. I also found the people generally cold and superficial. Even the seemingly complex ones didn't seem to have much beyond the surface, but by and large it's a corporate town. People don't move to Calgary for any reason other than to make money. The problem is few of my memories of Calgary were positive. Edmonton however was an nearly blank slate to me. I didn't even visit it once during my time in Calgary, and since the only time I was there was a single night layover before heading to Jasper.
So I called up a realty site for Edmonton and put in a very low end price range for two-bedroom condos, $75,000 to $150,000. About what a cheap condo cost in Mississauga some twenty five years ago. I didn't expect much. Over 200 entries came up. I narrowed the range, $75k to $100k and over 100 entries came up. Now I was curious. I began googling various conveniences and found almost all of the ones I currently relied on represented there. And I found many additional ones that I hadn't had since I last lived out west.
Focusing on the top end of that range I saw dozens of good two-bedroom apartments in various parts of town. More googling eliminated the older dodgier areas, a bit more research eliminated the downtown since we weren't interested in congestion. Focusing on those near enough to their LRT system to make that viable left us with still more than a dozen meaning even if we stopped driving - which we likely would in our old age - we would still have moderate easy and affordable access to most conveniences.
We even found a building that just hit it with us. Edmonton? Edmonton. Obviously we'd need to go out to it and check it out first. More obviously I'd need to confirm that my job would let me work remotely while we aggressively paid it off - because if they let me then the prices meant we could buy a condo to live in and my wife could retire a couple years earlier, and with a little effort we'd still be able to pay off the entire mortgage in a few years. And with just the condo fees and taxes to pay, our first level of Maslow would be reached at a third the cost it currently was, even cheaper than Elliott Lake, while having the equity for later.
And that takes us to the trip out, which I'll get into next time, because the whole purpose of this blog is to get to the third level of Maslow, the one I'm already struggling with,
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