Tag Archives: Real Estate

Mortgage Prepayment vs Non-Registered Investing: Where Should a Canadian Put Their Extra Money?

The first two articles in this series compared mortgage prepayment with investing inside a TFSA and an RRSP. The TFSA comparison was relatively clean because both sides could be considered largely on an after-tax basis: paying down a non-deductible mortgage avoids an after-tax borrowing cost, while investment growth inside a TFSA is generally tax-free. The RRSP complicated the comparison because the contribution can generate a valuable tax deduction today while withdrawals become taxable income later.

Non-registered investing creates a third version of the same decision, and in some ways it is the hardest one.

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Mortgage Prepayment vs RRSP: Where Should a Canadian Put Their Extra Money?

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The mortgage-versus-TFSA decision is relatively clean. If I have $25,000 available, I can use it to reduce a non-deductible mortgage or invest it inside an account where future growth is generally tax-free. The mortgage gives me something economically close to a guaranteed after-tax return equal to the interest I avoid. The TFSA gives me an uncertain investment return, but if that return materializes, I generally keep all of it.

Replace the TFSA with an RRSP and the comparison gets considerably more interesting.

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Buying a Business vs Buying Real Estate: Where Would I Put $500,000?

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If I had $500,000 sitting in cash today, where would I put it?

That question is more interesting to me than whether stocks beat real estate, or whether small businesses are a better asset class than rental property. Five hundred thousand dollars is enough capital to do something meaningful. It can be the down payment on a substantial piece of real estate. It can buy a small business outright. It can be the equity cheque on a much larger operating company. It can buy a foreign property, or several smaller ones, and put part of my net worth outside Canada.

But those are not remotely the same investment.

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Japan Real Estate for Canadians: Cheap Property, a Weak Yen, and a Housing Market That Breaks the Rules

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I started looking at Japanese property the way most Canadians probably do, which is by accident. I was reading about the weak yen, wandered onto a listing site, and found myself staring at a detached house an hour outside a major city priced at less than the annual property tax bill on some Toronto homes. Then I found an apartment in a real city, on a real train line, for the price of a parking space in Yorkville. My first reaction was the one the internet wants you to have: this has to be a mistake, or an opportunity, and either way I should keep scrolling.

The more I looked, the more I realized the cheap-property story was simultaneously true and misleading. Japan is not a poor country hiding a fire sale. It is one of the richest, safest, most functional places on earth. The trains run to the second. The rule of law is real. Foreigners can buy property with no residency or nationality requirement. Tourists arrive in record numbers. And yet large parts of the residential market behave in a way that would look like a malfunction to anyone raised on Canadian real estate, where the assumption that a house is a savings account that always goes up is baked so deep we forget it is an assumption at all.

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Bosnia Real Estate for Canadians: Cheap European Property – But Is It Actually Investable?

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I started looking at Bosnia and Herzegovina the way most Canadians probably do: by accident, while researching somewhere else. I was deep into Croatia, running the numbers on the Adriatic coast, and they were not friendly. Croatia joined the EU, adopted the euro, and spent fifteen years being discovered by German, Austrian, and Scandinavian buyers; coastal scarcity did the rest. What used to be a value play is now priced like the mature European tourism market it is.

Then I looked one border inland, and the prices fell off a cliff.

That is the entire reason Bosnia gets a Canadian investor’s attention. It is European, sits directly against Croatia, and has a real capital in Sarajevo, an established tourism town in Mostar, mountains, rivers, skiing, and EU candidate status. And an apartment there can cost a third of the equivalent an hour’s drive away on the coast. The instinct is immediate: this is Croatia before Croatia became Croatia.

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Homesteading or Digital Nomadism: Which Path Actually Buys You Sovereignty?

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One movement tells you to buy land, grow food, keep chickens, cut wood, and become harder to disrupt. The other tells you to sell everything, work from a laptop, cross borders at will, and never let a single place, employer, or currency own you. On the surface, these are opposites. One roots down. The other floats free. One measures freedom in acres and root cellars; the other measures it in visas and time zones.

And yet listen to the people building each life and you hear the same word over and over. Freedom. Optionality. Not being trapped. A refusal to let a landlord, a boss, a bank, or a bureaucracy hold the only set of keys.

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The Hidden Risks of Being House-Rich in Canada

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Canadians love watching the value of a home rise. Every increase feels like proof that things are working, that the plan is on track, that the family is quietly getting wealthier while it sleeps.

I feel it too. There is something deeply satisfying about a number on a real estate site climbing year after year, especially when you remember what you paid.

But there is an uncomfortable question sitting underneath all of it, and I have never been able to fully shake it.

If my house doubled in value while producing no additional cash flow, while demanding higher property taxes and insurance, while locking me into one city, and while quietly preventing me from buying almost anything else, did I actually become wealthier?

Or did I just become more concentrated?

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France Real Estate Investing for Canadians

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This is a country deep-dive in the Sovereign Canadian international real estate series. Like everything here, it is personal documentation of how I am working through my own portfolio decisions, not financial, tax, or legal advice. The Canadian-side machinery that sits above every country in this series – the CRA reporting, the financing reality, the four reasons any of us do this – lives in the foreign real estate investing pillar post. France also turned up in my offshore real estate survey as one of the countries Canadians consistently buy in, which is what earned it its own post. France has some of the highest carrying taxes and the most bureaucratic buying process in this entire series, so I verify the numbers before I write them down and I flag the ones that are moving right now.

France is the country everyone in this series has an opinion about before they have a spreadsheet. Mexico sells proximity. Portugal sells the easy on-ramp to Europe. Italy sells romance you have to renovate. France sells something more complicated: the single most-visited country on earth, world-class healthcare and rail, a rule-of-law system that has protected private property through revolutions and republics, and a lifestyle so specific that people build entire retirements around a village they visited once. It is not a value play and not a yield play. And for the right Canadian, it can still be one of the best places on the planet to own a home.

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REITs vs Direct Real Estate Investing for Canadians

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If I have $250,000 available for real estate, why would I buy a building at all?

That is the honest version of this question, and almost nobody asks it that way. The usual framing is “REITs vs rental property,” which quietly assumes the two are the same thing delivered through different pipes. They are not. One is a security I can buy before lunch and sell before dinner. The other is a business I operate, or an asset I hold in a country that is not mine to be pushed out of. Treating them as interchangeable is the first mistake.

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United States Real Estate Investing for Canadians

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Every country in this series has forced me to answer one uncomfortable question before I would put my own money into it.

Mexico made me ask whether a foreigner can really own coastal property, or whether the fideicomiso is a polite fiction. Spain made me ask whether regulation itself has quietly become the largest line item in the risk column. Italy made me ask whether quality of life can be booked as an investment return, or whether that is just a story people tell themselves to justify a purchase they made with their hearts.

The United States asks a stranger question, and it is a question about the buyer rather than the country.

Why do so many Canadians assume American real estate is easy, and are they right to?

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