Cars, houses, Facebook and stagnant incomes – why you’re so stressed about money GlobeMoney
Mr. El Mawed, the engineering intern in Thunder Bay, came to Canada from Lebanon in 2006 and managed to graduate without student debt thanks to help from his parents. But he found himself relying on credit cards and a line of credit to afford other costs, including a car., Mr. El Mawed was able to draft a plan to pay his debts in two years. Now, he worries about a lack of savings for emergencies and long-term goals such as owning a house.
“In the old days, people came in to see me and they had a bunch of credit-card debt,” said Doug Hoyes, a licensed insolvency trustee with Hoyes Michalos. “Now, they still have credit-card debt, but they also have a line of credit.”Mr. Hoyes also sees many more people using debt to cover living expenses than he did 10 years ago.
“I earn almost the same now at age 45 as at 30 because pay in my industry hasn’t risen and the work I do is basically the same as 15 years ago,” he said by e-mail. “The only way to boost earnings is to work more, but obviously that isn’t sustainable.” A demonstration of the SUV-car price gap: J.D. Power said the cost of a Honda CRV is a $10,000 step up from a Honda Civic, which is built on the same platform as the CRV. This price gap helps explains why the monthly payments on new vehicle loans are higher and last longer than they used to.
To start with, people are seeing more ads than they did before. David Soberman, a professor of marketing at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said the number of ads people see each day was as many as 200 back when he started teaching in the 1990s. Today, various studies estimate people see 1,500 or 2,000 a day.
Ms. Simmons, the financial planner, says she and her husband consciously chose to control their spending by living in a small two-bedroom home in Toronto and, until recently, driving a 2008 Jetta with more than 200,000 kilometres on the odometer. They now own a used minivan.
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