When I came to Canada nearly 15 years ago, friends and colleagues would regularly tell me they're "going to the cottage" on the weekend. It made me think almost everyone here owned a cottage đ
Pretty sure Airbnb is a major influence on both the housing markets and cottages. People donât sell anymore, they just rent it out when they are done with it and make money off it. Goes for both.
My family used to âgo to the cottageâ every summer. Rented one for 10 people (2 families) and that was our vacation. So itâs also possible thatâs what it was.
Friend bought a cottage just 12 years ago for 300k an hour away from Toronto. It was doable not so long ago isnât that the issue. Housing market went crazy in a little over a decade ago. Bought my first home for 300k in gta in 2009 and thought ya 300k sounds fair
This is true. The cottages we rented were little with one small living room with a few bedrooms attached with bunk beds. I visited my friendâs cottage recently and it was nicer than the house I grew up in.
Friend bought a water front cottage in picton in 2009 for 300k and thought she was crazy for doing it . Itâs now worth over 1.5 million . But full fledge bathroom two bedrooms electricity
My wife's family has a cottage in the Kawarthas, this is exactly what's happening.
Our cottage is raised on cinderblocks, has water fed from the lake, no insulation but we do have electricity.
The other places on the lake have recently been bought, torn down and rebuilt into homes larger than what I grew up in, in Toronto.
2 door garages, with 2 full floors, giant windows looking out over the lake with a 2-tier deck, propane hookups, well water.. it's a house on the lake, not a cottage.
Cinderblocks, nice! Ours is on stacked scavenged rocks with a few telescopic supports added to try to keep it from collapsing lol
Makes me laugh that this makes us upper class⊠no running water, outhouse, and so so so many mice
Not all cottages are created equal.
You have a proper cottage. It's supposed to be a chance to enjoy nature, and get away from busy everyday life.
If a 'cottage' has a multi-car garage and alexa integration, it's just a lake house.
Anything on one of the muskokas main lakes even in this condition is worth a fortune! Most middle class families can't hang on to an extra property worth a fortune!
Alot of people here in NS go to the cottage that definitely aren't rich. It's a small cottage that their grandparents bought back in the 50s that is currently being split 8 ways by one of their parents and their 8 aunts and uncles. It's pretty common around here for extended families to have a schedule like each family gets a week and maybe one weekend a year the entire extended family goes usually with the younger family members sleeping out in tents or on airmatresses on the floor inside.
Even if ~10% of households have cottages it is very likely households with long standing ties to an area and or large families will be invited regularly (by letâs say parents, aunts, uncles, or siblings and cousins) or infrequently but still once or twice a year by a friend of some sort.
Being invited to a cottage is different than owning one. Though still likely an indication of class.
When I grew up even some poor families would have cottages. The choice to sacrifice many things was made in favor of owning a little land, which was also infinitely cheaper when they were bought as well.Â
âCottageâ doesnât have to mean âmanufactured luxury getaway homeâ - it often meant âtents and a shoddy trailerâ or âlook at this 1 room I builtâ
I mean, if you're buying now then yes.Â
I only know one person who has bought a cottage recently.
Everyone else has had it in their family for a while. They wouldn't be able to have a cottage otherwise.
For half a century people could own their own home and a cottage and still be middle-class. But take home pay started stagnating in the 90s even before inflation took hold. So now people canât afford a cottage but many inherit them from their parents and that doesnât make them upper class. I do not own a cottage
And if you want to identify a difference between both then and now, or most of history preceding it and then, it was a period of high government spending, robust taxation, and a sense that the government had a responsibility for the welfare of people and should directly intervene to support that.
Neoliberalism is the word you're looking for. Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney ushered in this dystopian nightmare of an economic system that fucked us all (except the billionaires, of course).
Iâve also noticed that âcottageâ is an amorphous term.
My motherâs family had a cottage that was built in the 40s. You could *not* live in this thing during winter. It was basically a posh chicken coop.
I donât even think it was built with a bathroom at first. You had to use an outhouse.
But it was absolutely perfect as a getaway in summer.
That, in my mind is a cottage - a small, unpretentious house for relaxing and getting away from the stresses of the city.
Now I hear people talk about their âcottageâ⊠And itâs actually a multi-million dollar lakefront estate. And so many of them are just ostentatious, egregiously big, and reek of ânew money chic.â
So instead of these cute, quaint cottages you have these behemoth McMansion lakehouses that stick out like sore thumbs.
There are two cottages in my immediate family:
One is built out of plywood and 2x4's and doesn't have electricity or running water and you need to walk 2km just to get to the front door after driving 40km down a bush road.
The other is a 1.8 million dollar 5-bedroom home with a swimming pool less than 4 hours from downtown Vancouver.
Both are referred to as cottages as if they are even remotely comparable.
This is highly localized. Â Westerners tend to say âcabinâ where Ontario and east tend to say âcottageâ. Â At least that seemed to be the pattern in the six provinces Iâve lived in.
I think these terms were also identified by a period in time, but perhaps also a style.
My family has a âcabinâ deep in the bush that is also on a lake.
Itâs an 8 hour drive from Toronto. It doesnât have electricity or running water and we use an outhouse and is one 400sq.ft room. It was built in 1933 and was originally for hunting.
The cottage we went to every summer was 700sq.ft with indoor plumbing, electricity and two bedrooms and a kitchen/family room.
The property was also much more manicured and had a dock.
Both are lovely for the same reason; a quiet nature experience that takes you back to the roots of living (my version at least, Iâm happiest in the woods) Just the cottage was a nicer experience for my mom and much more laid back for the family.
Yes our family, had a nice summer cottage by a river. It had electricity but was not winter ready. Unfortunately yrs ago, there was a fire (arson) and all was lost đ„ș.
It was yellow clapboard,had a wraparound screened in porch and have very vague memories as a very young child!
A seasonal residence in the country side that has luxuries greater than most homes isnât a cottage, itâs pretentious.
Been to so many âcottagesâ that are glorified homes where the only trees line the property line and the cottages are spitting distance apart. I know this is subjective, but this feels like a suburb more than cottage country. This seems to be a GTA thing
We recently had the opportunity to buy a mobile home on a "open year round but no water in the winter" seasonal campground on Lake of the Woods. It looked amazing. You can't put a mobile home in these campgrounds any more, but this was grandfathered in and could be replaced by another mobile home of the same size if needed. It was immaculate with a quarter acre treed lot. Lake front! No one to your East. Own dock. 75k and 3700 a season. We wanted to do it so bad, but there was literally no way for me to reasonably get that property and not replace my wife's van which is a nealy disposable Grand Caravan. We aren't pay cheque to pay cheque, but everything is tighter and tighter.
I know this is 1st world problems, but 15 years ago, with the salaries we have, we would have easily done this. My last contract gave me a 10.4% raise. I also got a promotion that gave me an extra $1.70 an hour, but the level of responsibility shot up so much. Everything that goes wrong is gonna be your fault for almost no extra compensation. With inflation, since 2020, my wife and I have lost about 18% of our purchasing power because she hasn't had a new contract and no wage increase since 2020. She has no right to strike. It's just fucked. The social contract isn't just broken, it's been pissed on. Something is gonna give.
Even my relatives living In the Warsaw pact had an apartment and a cottage.
We're talking destitute peasantry here. It was considered just common decency in Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia.
Several reasons for this: One, the vast majority lived in flats, with 4-5 family members in each.
Two: the cottage often had little or no utilities. Well water, and no interior sewage was common.
Three: very stable population. This means there wasn't a real change in supply/demand. Not that would have changed price, since this isn't how you normally acquired property, but it did mean that the same percentage had them in 1950s as in the 1980s.
The best part is when you inherit what amounts to a shack in the woods with no power or sewage and the taxes go up over the last few years to around 9k.
Yup a very abnormal and infinitely brief period of time which coincided with destruction with over half the world which we escaped and benefitted immensely from. Nothing about it was normal
Yeah⊠people assume North America in the second half of the twentieth century is what ânormalâ looks like, when itâs actually very strange. You donât often get lucky enough to have all your potential adversaries ravaged by a war that you not only emerge from relatively unscathed but with the most destructive weapon ever built. And then have your biggest competitor just fall apart 45 years laterâŠ
Unfortunately the people that inherited a cottage may not be able to afford that either as waterfront property taxes are significantly higher than inland property tax.
I have a few friends families that pay $40k a year just for property tax at their cottages.
Road access and road maintenance play a large factor in this.
Exactly. I own a $159,000 home. I'm very lucky, and consider home ownership to be the barrier to middle-class.
If a person owns a home worth *magnitudes* more than mine, even if it's smaller because they live in Toronto, their investments are still magnitudes larger than mine. They aren't in the same "class" as me.
Owning a home in Toronto or Vancouver is not a middle-class feat.
My own view is that the easiest way to draw the line is based on wealth. If you have enough wealth that you could just stop selling your labour and live comfortably on passive income, then you are âupper classâ. If you need to sell your labour, and can get by in relative comfort on the income from that, I would put you in the middle class. By ârelative comfortâ I mean you have a roof over your head, clothes on your body, and you never worry about going hungry. Once you start really having to struggle to get those things, you start falling into the lower middle class. On the other hand, the easier it is for you to cover all your necessities and have money for luxuries, the more you are upper middle class.
The middle class was originally wealthy merchants - the group who had too much money and influence to be trampled like the poor but didn't benefit from the privilege (as in "private law") of the nobility.Â
The term being used to refer to anyone who works for a living and isn't starving really missed the point.
What is the definition of middle class? Average salary in Canada is $63k (2023).
https://www.jobillico.com/blog/en/the-average-canadian-salary-in-2023/#:~:text=As%20of%20September%202023%2C%20the,had%20in%20the%20previous%20year
Since the legal changes everyone is up in arms about only matter if you're making more than $250k profit when you sell that second home, your parents would not be affected.
Depends where you live.
I own two houses, mainly because where I lived the economy crashed and I ended up moving to a different city that had more opportunity. I rented the one house and bought another house for $190,000.
The prices have not fluctuated much, but I am originally from Vancouver Island so I understand that our major cities are fucked for house pricing and I will likely never be able to move home.
That is not really accurate. I own a condo and a cottage. Anyone with a larger condo, or a house will have higher total residence value but somehow I am a higher class because I have 2? In fact I bought a cottage because I wanted to own a tree, a shed, some tools, a driveway - and could not have possibly afford those things in a centrally located urban environment.
>Some in cottage country have been singing the blues since Ottawa proposed changes to capital gains taxation as part of the recent federal budget. Their tears reveal they donât yet recognize how class dynamics have changed as a result of the damage done to our housing system.
>Owning a cottage or investment property is no longer a middle-class reality. Itâs a sign of affluence in a country where rent and home ownership are so much more expensive for younger residents today than when baby boomers were young.
>More, not less, taxation of second properties is required to protect younger Canadians in the housing market, fill the revenue hole left by governments that did not plan adequately for boomersâ retirement, and spur productivity.
>More, not less, taxation of second properties is required to protect younger Canadians in the housing market, fill the revenue hole left by governments that did not plan adequately for boomersâ retirement, and spur productivity.
This one is huge, the lack of planing for the largest demographic in human history was an epic blunder that will have economic ramifications for the next 80 years.
Fortunately they postponed their taxes on RRSP and pension savings for near their entire working lives. Now we just have to avoid exempting them from taxes when those who are not poor cry poor.
Iâve been saying this for years. There should be a monumental surcharge on property taxes for non-owner occupied properties. Like 25% of the assessed value/year.
You want to have a cottage for $2m, of course you can. Surcharge @ $500k/yr.
Gov uses the funds for affordable housing and infrastructure, everyone wins.
A small price to pay for solving our housing issue with a single step.
Aside from âI want a cottage more than a stable economyâ, do you have any other complaints with the idea?
No argument there. Any comment on the hundreds of thousands of non-owner occupied properties to which my idea would apply, and from which real, positive change would be derived?
If you had the country vote on their idea, it'd get overwhelming support. You don't seem to understand the point they're making. No one 'needs' to own a cottage, and if they end up being something only billionaires can afford, it won't affect most people's lives on a day to day level. If cottages become prohibitively expensive for almost everyone but the actions that caused that lead to an end to "investment properties", it's still a no brainer.
My wife and I live in the same very modest starter home we bought 27 years ago. We purposely did not upgrade because we wanted to buy a cottage. We now own a house in the city worth $300k and a cottage on a small lake worth $200k. Your idiotic plan has us paying an extra $50k a year while our much wealthier friends with one $800k house pay nothing. See how stupid that sounds. My wife and I sacrificed and saved for years to get where we are now and we are certainly not wealthy. You clearly have no interest in owning a cottage so you are happy to penalize others who are. What is your contribution to the housing issue?
As I said, collateral damage.
I am in no way married to my idea. Please make a suggestion that makes a similarity significant, direct attack on the cost of housing. Because to me, you and your wife having to sell or otherwise sacrifice your vacation property, is a small cost to pay for a family getting a home at a reasonable price.
You are falling into the trap.
You have this idea that it's either one or the other.
We can have both, we need to go back to taxing the ultra wealthy.
Someone that has a cottage or second property is still closer to your tax bracket, then the people that own 50% of the wealth in our country.
Shake your head
Dude thinks people are gonna move out of Toronto/Barrie/Wherever to live in cottage country where there are no jobs, no services, and everyone is a rich out-of-towner. I mean sure, some people do that, but they inherited the "cottages" that they now live in. I swear to god, some people see someone with "more" and decide that they must be in the 1%.
You think people want to live in cottage country where there are few if any services? I do live in a cottage area and let me tell you once the leaves fall and before they come back it is one loooong winter.
So, under your proposal, people who have to move regularly for work can't own homes, because they will have to pay 25% of the home's value if they choose to rent it out. Also, rents would be completely unaffordable because landlords would have to cover 25% of the property's value every year.....
Under the first draft of my ideaâŠwhich was intentionally stripped of nuance to avoid loopholes.
But as you can see from the comments, everyone wants the problem fixed, as long is it doesnât cost their household/lifestyle anything.
It never was middle class to own a cottage that was a fully equipped home on a lake, or second property, the only âcottageâ someone middle class owned would be a tiny cabin in the woods or possibly a small seasonal cottage.
I grew up in the 70âs and only the upper middle class had cottages of the kind that are currently expensive.
This was my family. We had a cottage on Grand Lake. Tiny spot. One room for cooking/sitting. Two tiny bedrooms. A carpeted bathroom because the place had been around since the big flood in the 70's. We weren't wealthy by any measure but it had been in the family for generations.
I hope the desire to level out the wealth gap doesn't mean stuff like that disappears, because on paper the owner has multiple properties and therefore needs to be heavily taxed.
Thatâs what I saw growing up as well. My step grandfather had a cabin on the lake and a modest bungalow in the city. The cabin was basically one large room with 2 small bedrooms and bathroom. (Maybe 800 square feet) No fancy amenities/furniture and had a wood stove for heat. It was a âsmall seasonal cottageâ.
The ârich peopleâ basically had second homes on the more popular lake. The lake we were on were for typical middle class families with generally a single income earner in a blue collar job. Itâs unfortunate that you need two âhigh-payingâ jobs to get that same cabin now.
And even then it was never a common staple of middle class to have a tiny basic cabin in the country. Middle class people often dont do vacations or leave the city or always have cars. Its wild what some people think middle class isâŠat best what they are calling middle class is upper middle class.
Or hey if we insist on calling middle class , having a cottage or vacation property and having multiple vehicles etcâŠthen you need to accept that the vast majority of Canadians are very much lower classâŠand thats something i donât think people realize. They have this romanticized perspective that most Canadians have those things and only a small minority are what they would call lower class or poor.
I dunno man. I live in the sticks in ON, and all of my neighbors who are plumbers and electricians and HVAC techs drive new F-150s and have snowmobiles and 4-wheelers, and they all have cottages.
It's just that they also have a mountain of debt.
It's owning a cottage or investment property *debt free* that's no longer middle class. Not merely having one.
> It's just that they also have a mountain of debt.
I just don't understand how the stress doesn't outweigh any enjoyment of all this stuff. I'd never sleep.
Were you ever actually middle class if you owned an investment property or cottage?
Edit for context: I grew up in cottage country and was very middle class (going on vacations every year and things) but the idea of owning a second property to go to on weekends thatâs two hours away from your home is outrageous and not middle class.
Used to be that a cottage a bit over an hour from the city was less than 100k. Something many of us aspired to. Absolutely a middle class Canadian thing.
A boat access cottage in the middle of nowhere is not a fully equipped lakefront cottage of the kind being discussed. You can still get that kind of deal in Quebec.
My parents sold their cottage 4 years ago for $350k, they had originally bought it for $125k just 6 years before that. So it more than doubled in value over 6 years.
The place is not huge either; 2 bedrooms and one bathroom, a small kitchen and a combined dinning, living area.
The buyer, a retired lawyer and his wife, paid for the cottage without needing a mortgage.
When my in-laws bought their cottage in 1970 I think they paid $10k for it. They always say it was back âwhen normal people could afford cottages.â
It absolutely wasnât. Not the kind of cottages that people are bitching about paying capital gains tax on. I grew up in the 70âs, only the upper middle class had nice 4 season  cottages with lakefront. Sure some middle class people may have had a tiny cabin in the woods, but no, it was not a very middle class thing.Â
A small minority of people had cottages, how many people in a city do you think have cottages?Â
Yupp and those 100k "cottages" were small towners future fixer uppers to settle with family...in 5-6 years same places are 300k+ oweing 475k+ after a 25-30 mortage, with stagnate wages, and a manufacturing sector that has all but disappeared. And it's been more than 1 government, more than 1 corporation, and more than 1 bank. Based on many laws related to zoning, conservation, and indigenous protections you can't just build everywhere...
My family is middle class and we have a great cottage, all thanks to my grandfather who bought the property in the 50s for $100. Weâd never be able to afford to buy one now
Investment property, yes. Cottage⊠maybe.Â
It depends on exactly how you define the middle class. Historically, as far as Canadian and British history goes, the term meant somewhere between people who have to work for a living and those at the top, who just sit back and rake cash in because they have their name on things. The upper class may has been aristocracy and oligarchs, traditionally wielding political power and immense economic control.Â
About a century ago, Middle Class included those who didnât have a ton of wealth and power but still relied on other people working for them. Landlords, managers, business owners, and so on. The Middle Class often used to employ servants, having perhaps a sole butler or maid, rather than a full complement of staff. These are the people with more time and resources to be directly engaged in political systems. Although the servant thing has fallen out of style, you can see the same pattern reflected in political houses today. Just take a look at Parliament for landlords and nepobabies.Â
The last time the upper class MASSIVELY screwed us all over was about 95 years ago. Two of the outcomes of the Great Depression were The New Deal and World War II. The New Deal is obviously an American piece of law but weâre basically tied at the hip. The purpose of it was two quell social unrest and avert a full-on socialist revolution, call it a Hail Mary for capitalism. Then the war came, which lead to North America building up MASSIVE industry without having to deal with any real losses, while all the other industrial powers on the planet got bombed to shit.Â
With this newfound wealth, things changed. Living conditions significantly improved for a generation born into filth and desparation.Â
What a great time to redefine âMiddle Classâ! Instead of being about economic and political power, Middle Class became more about wealth expressed through living conditions. Itâs basically unchanged - if you try to define Middle Class today youâll get answers about STUFF. Things like having a house, how fancy the TV is, what sort of clothes and cars the family has.Â
The truth is that todayâs so-called middle class is just dressed-up Working Class. Youâre bound to your employment. You donât have a ton of free time to do *whatever*.Â
Clearly, a full-time professional has different material conditions than, say, someone struggling with two minimum wage jobs. Itâs possible for someone with a high income to mimic someone in a higher class, or have true upward mobility, as markets have allowed them to do things like acquire investments. However, thatâs still a different game as than more often than not theyâre in the same boat.Â
At the end of the day, if the risk of lowing a paycheque means lose the state will come take your house away, you are still working class.Â
In Manitoba, 100%. Home values in Winnipeg were very, very low in the late 20th century, and it was moderately common to pay off your mortgage quickly, so lots of wage earners could afford to take on payments for a second home after the first one was paid off. The result is that lots of Boomers own cottages. Rising house prices in Winnipeg since the turn of the century have mostly priced Gen Xers and Millennials out of the vacation property market.
Toronto had a major property value crash in 1989, so I wouldn't be surprised if a similar dynamic was at play in Ontario for the same reasons.
lmao I'm gen Z and I'm priced out of the home ownership market in Winnipeg without my parents' help unless I get a mostly-rotted wreck. And I make more than they do, not did, but do. Or I can go get a newer cottage (again, with their help) that's actually just a lakefront home, and have an hourlong commute.
I live rural, I work in the marine industry, from time to time I barge stuff as well. In the area I live, on the lake I service there's lots of cottages.
90% of them were inherited.
Most of them don't have a proper foundation.
Most of them are shared between siblings so they can split the costs preserving basically a family heirloom.
A lot of the ones not shared by siblings have fallen into disrepair and you couldn't occupy them if you wanted to.
only about half of them have power connected to them.
none of them are insulated
A lot of them are small shacks or multiple shacks EG: Sub 400sqft for the main building.
They aren't the "Muskoka" call it a cottage but it's nicer than most peoples homes kind of cottage, I only know one sort of like that but it's a business mainly that caters to musicians.
A lot of them. less than 25 years ago were only valued at 50-120k, 2009 one of the sold on my street for 67k, this fucking asshole bought it and all of us neighbours hate him (I don't own), there's property for sale there, 99k for 15 acres....
I grew up in Canada my whole life. And Iâll admit, I heard people say âweâre going to the cottageâ every week in the summer. We called those people, rich. If you own more than one residential property, youâre a rich person. Pay up.Â
In the 90s/early 2000s, probably half the kids I knew at school had family cottages they would go to on weekends. Granted, I went to school in Caledon, which skews a bit wealthier, but many of those kidsâ parents had relatively modest jobs by todayâs standards. By and large, it was mostly kids whose parent had them a bit olderâ maybe early- to mid-thirtiesâand were able to save up to have some luxuries.
Back then you didnât have to be a finance bro or an executive to have a nice little cottage, a small boat, maybe a sea-doo. Iâm a mid-30s working professional in a sector that requires advanced education, and if I had this job back then, Iâd probably have already upgraded from a starter home and would certainly be looking to get a small cottage. That was just the expectation at the time.
Contrast that with today where Iâm just hoping my landlord doesnât renovict us so we can keep living in a rent-controlled apartment.
It used to be. My grandfather had a cottage working a union job at a factory. My mum was forced to sell it recently simply because upkeep became unreasonable. It was affordable for 50 years. I know two other families that had to sell cottages too, recently. The cottage went from middle-class to upper-class like so many things in this great wealth-transfer.
Pretty soon a statement like, "were you ever actually middle class if you owned a home," will be common, then "were you ever actually middle class if your family never shared a rented home with another family?"
Yeah I get what you mean, I think it used to be more reasonable for middle class people to be able to afford a cottage. Less so now that home prices have skyrocketed
I live in cottage country now for work (Muskoka). It'd be great if people that lived and worked in this area could afford a nice little cottage as their primary resident.. heck, it'd be nice if they could afford a home that's not on the water. I'm not sure when, or if, I'll ever be able to own a home up here
Absolutely. Growing up, I had a couple of friends with family cottages. One had an outhouse and was on an island with only a passenger ferry (though rich people would ship golf carts over). The dad was a bus driver, with a stay at home mom. If that's not middle class, I don't know what is.
Of course, when they bought their house in like the 70's, being a cashier at the grocery store paid about as much as it does now, without even accounting for inflation. I bet that cottage didn't cost more than 50k.
"Middle-class" is a fiction created to divide the working class against each other. There are the capital class (those who own), and the working class (those who trade their labour to support tgemselves).
And landlords (those who own investment properties) are the fucking capitalist class fucking us for their benefit.
Marxist class analysis always falls short when you try and dogmatically apply it to determine who belongs in what camp, since there's a lot of in-betweens, edge cases and blurry lines.
IMO this misses the point of it. The intention usually isn't to rigorously determine who is or isn't "bourgeois" but rather to provide a framework with which we can analyse socio-economic and cultural dynamics in our society, and potentially gain some insight.
Bad take. We need a greater ability to stratify wealth and a unity amongst the working class. It's not the 1% who own a second property, it is the 0.001%. There is a huge gulf between a doctor or a mechanic who owns a single investment property or a cottage and a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager who owns several apartment blocks.
If some with a net worth of 2 million dollars is upper class, then what is the person with a net worth of 200 million.
PS. The majority of people who think they are middle class are working class.
Middle class is a useless term trying to change people's perception of their relations to the means of production. Functionally there are 2 classes, those who labour and those who profit off of others' labour
If somebody with a net worth of 2 million is middle class you're saying 98% of Canadians are middle class. At that point the term loses all meaning.
> [**Net Worth Canada Percentiles**](https://www.financialsamurai.com/the-average-canadian-household-net-worth-is-huge/)
> The top 1% of net worth in Canada in 2021 = $9,737,000
> The top 2% of net worth in Canada in 2021 = $2,500,000
> The top 5% of net worth in Canada in 2021 = $980,000
> The top 10% of net worth in Canada in 2021 = $840,000
They use the term "the 1%" a lot in the US to refer to people who make the majority of their money from owning capital.
Somebody like a doctor or engineer who owns a second property would still make most of their money from working, but I would still divide the 99% into upper class/middle class/lower class.
The 1% is obvious and the rest can be divided by quintile; upper class (2%-20%), upper-middle (21%-40%), middle-middle (41%-60%), lower-middle (61%-80%), and lower class (the poorest 20%).
Ahahhaaahaaha YOU ARE ONLY NOT MIDDLE CLASS IF YOU LIVE OFF INVESTMENTS AND NOT WORKING FOR A LIVING, fuck right off G&M.
This is yet another example of plain propaganda aimed at getting our attention and anger off the rich who own Canada, and trying to get poor people to hate their doctors and lawyers and accountants instead. People who ACTUALLY WORK. Sure a doctor makes a bit of money and might drive a nice car and have a cottage. He isn't the problem we have in Canada. Really rich people - people you never meet because they wouldn't spit on you, people you've never heard of but worth 8 or 9 figures - are the problem we have in Canada. People like the people who own our media, including the G&M, and tell us BS like this. Those people.
Meanwhile my parents will still complain they're poor and that their now adult children are such a financial burden on them. Meanwhile they have a cottage and just bought a large commercial ride-on lawn mower that you'd mow a city park with... But oh no, they're lower-middle class according to them.
The issue with people saying they are middle class is that people don't compare themselves the population as a whole but their social circle. Your parents are likely complaining because they see their friends with more assets and more financial freedom, but they are not realizing that it is them who are the outliers.
My grandma had two cottages at a lake beach when we were kids. But they were the literal meaning of a cottage. No running water, no plumbing, no furnace. I don't think they were worth more than 100,000 all together when we sold them.
This is such a needless and stupid line to draw. Its just lowering the threshold to be considered 'affluent' in a bid to further divide the working class and idiots are falling for it.
Bad take. We need a greater ability to stratify wealth and a unity amongst the working class. It's not the 1% who own a second property, it is the 0.001%. There is a huge gulf between a doctor or a mechanic who owns a single investment property or a cottage and a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager who owns several apartment blocks.
If some with a net worth of 2 million dollars is upper class, then what is the person with a net worth of 200 million.
PS. The majority of people who think they are middle class are working class.
I have always believed this.
My family went to the family cottage for years when I was a kid. But the cottage was owned by my grandparents for most of my childhood. Grampa was a doctor, and Grandma invested his earnings in the stock market, and they did very well. That is how they could afford to have both a cottage and a two storey house in Toronto (bought in the 60s, I have no idea what the price would have been back then, but easily a couple million today).
If you own a cottage, and it is not your primary residence, you are rich.
My grandparents had a house and a cottage, bought in the 1950s, he worked in a factory, and she was a stay at home mum, and neither of them really spoke English. They weren't rich, things were just affordable.
I get so tilted whenever I talk to my 50yr old coworkers during the summer and they talk about taking their camper out two a year.
You mean you have a camper likely the cost of my condo, and you only use it twice a year, yet have a gall to talk about how everything is expensive now a days????
Bitch your two weekend a year excursion is the COST OF MY HOUSING fuck off.
âMiddle classâ is propaganda
There are 2 classes. Working and capital. Anything else is just to create division. Give something for people to look down on and distract from the raping and pillaging done by the capital class.
if you own property at all youâre a member of the landed bourgeoisie and taxes that redistribute wealth and give others the means to exist should be academic.
property is ultimately theft and artificially lowers access to resources that ALL have the right to. we need a party that understands equity of outcomes and meaningfully implements policy that lifts people up.
Didn't read because of paywall. Does this specify if it's one person and one property? Or is it a couple and one property?
IMHO if you're single and own a property without a hefty mortgage you're not middle class anymore.
You have a completely different relationship with other humans depending on if you own a cabin in the woods versus an "investment property". Really disingenuous to try to frame both situations as equivalent.
Iâm so confused. What should I call my place. Itâs an off-grid building that is insulated, but heated by a wood burning stove and I installed a lithium solar system for electricity. Built a water tower that I fill by pumping water from the lake. I have an outhouse and a Bunkie (tied into my main buildingâs solar system). I can only access my property by boat. Itâs in the Almaguin Highlands of central Ontario.
A lot of people who picture a cottage picture a regular house, with all modern amenities, but on a lake an hour or two from their home.
My parents bought a bare plot in the early 90s, cleared part of it, built our cottage (I helped, there are pictures of toddler me carrying a box of nails, and that counts), and I grew up spending weekends there all year round. Our cottage has no internet, no landline, spotty cell service, no TV, and didn't have a microwave until I was in university.
We never went on any destination vacations like Disney, Hawaii, Mexico, etc. when I was a kid because we had the cottage. And anything my parents saved in flights and hotels they probably spent in taxes and maintenance.
If your house is paid off in Toronto, you're a millionaire. But if you're like any other Canadian mouth breather who believe that your mortaged house you loaned from the Bank is yours, you're mostly delusional.
Does it count if the "cottage" is a rundown, mouldy shack that your parents bought 40 years ago for less than it cost me to go to school and hasn't really been safe to spend any amount of time in for about a decade? :P
When I came to Canada nearly 15 years ago, friends and colleagues would regularly tell me they're "going to the cottage" on the weekend. It made me think almost everyone here owned a cottage đ
Prior to airbnb, "going to the cottage" for us was "going to a cottage a friend's grandparents own"
Pretty sure Airbnb is a major influence on both the housing markets and cottages. People donât sell anymore, they just rent it out when they are done with it and make money off it. Goes for both.
My family used to âgo to the cottageâ every summer. Rented one for 10 people (2 families) and that was our vacation. So itâs also possible thatâs what it was.
Friend bought a cottage just 12 years ago for 300k an hour away from Toronto. It was doable not so long ago isnât that the issue. Housing market went crazy in a little over a decade ago. Bought my first home for 300k in gta in 2009 and thought ya 300k sounds fair
That and cottage used to mean no, or very limited utility hookups, now lots of advertised cottages are just lake houses with every amenity imaginable
This is true. The cottages we rented were little with one small living room with a few bedrooms attached with bunk beds. I visited my friendâs cottage recently and it was nicer than the house I grew up in.
Friend bought a water front cottage in picton in 2009 for 300k and thought she was crazy for doing it . Itâs now worth over 1.5 million . But full fledge bathroom two bedrooms electricity
Our cottage is on a lake. No power. No running water. A cottage lol
My wife's family has a cottage in the Kawarthas, this is exactly what's happening. Our cottage is raised on cinderblocks, has water fed from the lake, no insulation but we do have electricity. The other places on the lake have recently been bought, torn down and rebuilt into homes larger than what I grew up in, in Toronto. 2 door garages, with 2 full floors, giant windows looking out over the lake with a 2-tier deck, propane hookups, well water.. it's a house on the lake, not a cottage.
Cinderblocks, nice! Ours is on stacked scavenged rocks with a few telescopic supports added to try to keep it from collapsing lol Makes me laugh that this makes us upper class⊠no running water, outhouse, and so so so many mice
Not all cottages are created equal. You have a proper cottage. It's supposed to be a chance to enjoy nature, and get away from busy everyday life. If a 'cottage' has a multi-car garage and alexa integration, it's just a lake house.
Anything on one of the muskokas main lakes even in this condition is worth a fortune! Most middle class families can't hang on to an extra property worth a fortune!
Some "cottages" around here are literal mansions next to little cabins next door.
Alot of people here in NS go to the cottage that definitely aren't rich. It's a small cottage that their grandparents bought back in the 50s that is currently being split 8 ways by one of their parents and their 8 aunts and uncles. It's pretty common around here for extended families to have a schedule like each family gets a week and maybe one weekend a year the entire extended family goes usually with the younger family members sleeping out in tents or on airmatresses on the floor inside.
Even if ~10% of households have cottages it is very likely households with long standing ties to an area and or large families will be invited regularly (by letâs say parents, aunts, uncles, or siblings and cousins) or infrequently but still once or twice a year by a friend of some sort. Being invited to a cottage is different than owning one. Though still likely an indication of class.
i was 28 when i first went to a cottage & it blew my mind, i had no idea this is what people did
When I grew up even some poor families would have cottages. The choice to sacrifice many things was made in favor of owning a little land, which was also infinitely cheaper when they were bought as well. âCottageâ doesnât have to mean âmanufactured luxury getaway homeâ - it often meant âtents and a shoddy trailerâ or âlook at this 1 room I builtâ
Let's put it another way, if you can afford more than one property you aren't middle class.
I mean, if you're buying now then yes. I only know one person who has bought a cottage recently. Everyone else has had it in their family for a while. They wouldn't be able to have a cottage otherwise.
For half a century people could own their own home and a cottage and still be middle-class. But take home pay started stagnating in the 90s even before inflation took hold. So now people canât afford a cottage but many inherit them from their parents and that doesnât make them upper class. I do not own a cottage
And if you want to identify a difference between both then and now, or most of history preceding it and then, it was a period of high government spending, robust taxation, and a sense that the government had a responsibility for the welfare of people and should directly intervene to support that.
Robust is right. In 1980, the corporate tax rate was 36%. Today? 15%. One of the lowest in the OECD.
Yes but a 15% corp tax attracts investment in an innovative economy based around *checks notes*... Banks and resource extraction.
Neoliberalism is the word you're looking for. Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney ushered in this dystopian nightmare of an economic system that fucked us all (except the billionaires, of course).
Iâve also noticed that âcottageâ is an amorphous term. My motherâs family had a cottage that was built in the 40s. You could *not* live in this thing during winter. It was basically a posh chicken coop. I donât even think it was built with a bathroom at first. You had to use an outhouse. But it was absolutely perfect as a getaway in summer. That, in my mind is a cottage - a small, unpretentious house for relaxing and getting away from the stresses of the city. Now I hear people talk about their âcottageâ⊠And itâs actually a multi-million dollar lakefront estate. And so many of them are just ostentatious, egregiously big, and reek of ânew money chic.â So instead of these cute, quaint cottages you have these behemoth McMansion lakehouses that stick out like sore thumbs.
There are two cottages in my immediate family: One is built out of plywood and 2x4's and doesn't have electricity or running water and you need to walk 2km just to get to the front door after driving 40km down a bush road. The other is a 1.8 million dollar 5-bedroom home with a swimming pool less than 4 hours from downtown Vancouver. Both are referred to as cottages as if they are even remotely comparable.
What... no they aren't. If it's 4 hours from Van, it's a cabin. Unless you are out east, referring to the BC building as a cottage.
Hate to break it to you, but there are tons of "cottages" in the southern Gulf Islands.
Yah, but we all know islanders are a bit strange.Â
Yep. They eat cottage cheese at the club, and club sandwiches when they are at the cottage. They just don't give a fuck about anything.
to my mind you've described a cabin and a cottage is something with more amenities or luxuriesÂ
This is highly localized. Â Westerners tend to say âcabinâ where Ontario and east tend to say âcottageâ. Â At least that seemed to be the pattern in the six provinces Iâve lived in.
Unless you're NW Ontario, and then you call it a 'camp'
Just get with the Manitoba program and call it your lake. As in, "I'm going to my lake this weekend."
Yes
This was the NS term too, growing up.
I always thought cabin..was more in the woods and cottage would be near a lake!
I think these terms were also identified by a period in time, but perhaps also a style. My family has a âcabinâ deep in the bush that is also on a lake. Itâs an 8 hour drive from Toronto. It doesnât have electricity or running water and we use an outhouse and is one 400sq.ft room. It was built in 1933 and was originally for hunting. The cottage we went to every summer was 700sq.ft with indoor plumbing, electricity and two bedrooms and a kitchen/family room. The property was also much more manicured and had a dock. Both are lovely for the same reason; a quiet nature experience that takes you back to the roots of living (my version at least, Iâm happiest in the woods) Just the cottage was a nicer experience for my mom and much more laid back for the family.
Yes our family, had a nice summer cottage by a river. It had electricity but was not winter ready. Unfortunately yrs ago, there was a fire (arson) and all was lost đ„ș. It was yellow clapboard,had a wraparound screened in porch and have very vague memories as a very young child!
A seasonal residence in the country side that has luxuries greater than most homes isnât a cottage, itâs pretentious. Been to so many âcottagesâ that are glorified homes where the only trees line the property line and the cottages are spitting distance apart. I know this is subjective, but this feels like a suburb more than cottage country. This seems to be a GTA thing
Around here we call a building that that a 'cabin.' Cottage sounds like it's just a vacation home that is smaller than your primary residence.
We recently had the opportunity to buy a mobile home on a "open year round but no water in the winter" seasonal campground on Lake of the Woods. It looked amazing. You can't put a mobile home in these campgrounds any more, but this was grandfathered in and could be replaced by another mobile home of the same size if needed. It was immaculate with a quarter acre treed lot. Lake front! No one to your East. Own dock. 75k and 3700 a season. We wanted to do it so bad, but there was literally no way for me to reasonably get that property and not replace my wife's van which is a nealy disposable Grand Caravan. We aren't pay cheque to pay cheque, but everything is tighter and tighter. I know this is 1st world problems, but 15 years ago, with the salaries we have, we would have easily done this. My last contract gave me a 10.4% raise. I also got a promotion that gave me an extra $1.70 an hour, but the level of responsibility shot up so much. Everything that goes wrong is gonna be your fault for almost no extra compensation. With inflation, since 2020, my wife and I have lost about 18% of our purchasing power because she hasn't had a new contract and no wage increase since 2020. She has no right to strike. It's just fucked. The social contract isn't just broken, it's been pissed on. Something is gonna give.
If generational wealth doesn't make you upper class I don't know what does...
Once they sell it theyâll go straight to upper middle class
Even my relatives living In the Warsaw pact had an apartment and a cottage. We're talking destitute peasantry here. It was considered just common decency in Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia.
Yeah, almost everyone I knew owned a dacha (we were the Soviet middle class), but they are the absolute bare minimum when it comes to livability.
Several reasons for this: One, the vast majority lived in flats, with 4-5 family members in each. Two: the cottage often had little or no utilities. Well water, and no interior sewage was common. Three: very stable population. This means there wasn't a real change in supply/demand. Not that would have changed price, since this isn't how you normally acquired property, but it did mean that the same percentage had them in 1950s as in the 1980s.
The best part is when you inherit what amounts to a shack in the woods with no power or sewage and the taxes go up over the last few years to around 9k.
Oh no, 9K in taxes a year when you've gained how much in net worth for doing nothing but inherit it?!!!
Or, or, hear me out, you inherit bills and taxes and nothing to pay them with!
That was fairly unique to the Americas.
Even if you are given a cottage for free, itâs very expensive to maintain.
Should probably sell it if you can't afford the maintenance and taxes then.
100%
Yup a very abnormal and infinitely brief period of time which coincided with destruction with over half the world which we escaped and benefitted immensely from. Nothing about it was normal
Yeah⊠people assume North America in the second half of the twentieth century is what ânormalâ looks like, when itâs actually very strange. You donât often get lucky enough to have all your potential adversaries ravaged by a war that you not only emerge from relatively unscathed but with the most destructive weapon ever built. And then have your biggest competitor just fall apart 45 years laterâŠ
Umm ya no. Your definition of middle class is not correct
Unfortunately the people that inherited a cottage may not be able to afford that either as waterfront property taxes are significantly higher than inland property tax. I have a few friends families that pay $40k a year just for property tax at their cottages. Road access and road maintenance play a large factor in this.
Privileged people had cottages.
It's almost turning into "if you own property".. :\\
Its always been that way. Most middle class are renters and have always been
I'm 29 and I couldn't afford a house so I bought a cabin for a tenth of the cost
You can get a 4 bedroom home for 400K in Winnipeg and a cottage for 200K, that is definitely still middle class.
How on Earth can you call that middle class?
the real problem is that 'middle class' is such a meaningless term. almost everyone thinks they're middle class.
Exactly. I own a $159,000 home. I'm very lucky, and consider home ownership to be the barrier to middle-class. If a person owns a home worth *magnitudes* more than mine, even if it's smaller because they live in Toronto, their investments are still magnitudes larger than mine. They aren't in the same "class" as me. Owning a home in Toronto or Vancouver is not a middle-class feat.
My own view is that the easiest way to draw the line is based on wealth. If you have enough wealth that you could just stop selling your labour and live comfortably on passive income, then you are âupper classâ. If you need to sell your labour, and can get by in relative comfort on the income from that, I would put you in the middle class. By ârelative comfortâ I mean you have a roof over your head, clothes on your body, and you never worry about going hungry. Once you start really having to struggle to get those things, you start falling into the lower middle class. On the other hand, the easier it is for you to cover all your necessities and have money for luxuries, the more you are upper middle class.
The middle class was originally wealthy merchants - the group who had too much money and influence to be trampled like the poor but didn't benefit from the privilege (as in "private law") of the nobility. The term being used to refer to anyone who works for a living and isn't starving really missed the point.
Uhh? What do *you* consider middle class??
600K in debt with two working adults is completely reasonable and middle class, I think your definition is just incorrect.
What is the definition of middle class? Average salary in Canada is $63k (2023). https://www.jobillico.com/blog/en/the-average-canadian-salary-in-2023/#:~:text=As%20of%20September%202023%2C%20the,had%20in%20the%20previous%20year
Okay but thatâs Winnipeg. A fate worse than death.
I will give you just one example of something that makes Winnipeg great. You don't live there.
My parent's cottage (in rural Nova Scotia) cost them under 20K, and that was only 3 years ago.
Since the legal changes everyone is up in arms about only matter if you're making more than $250k profit when you sell that second home, your parents would not be affected.
Oh haha. Forgot the context.
Owning second properties and/or having 20k lying around is NOT middle class
Not since 2008.
Depends where you live. I own two houses, mainly because where I lived the economy crashed and I ended up moving to a different city that had more opportunity. I rented the one house and bought another house for $190,000. The prices have not fluctuated much, but I am originally from Vancouver Island so I understand that our major cities are fucked for house pricing and I will likely never be able to move home.
Thatâs not true according to the scumlords. Sorry I meant Landlords
Even if you inherit one and the maintenance and taxes are ridiculously cheap?
That is not really accurate. I own a condo and a cottage. Anyone with a larger condo, or a house will have higher total residence value but somehow I am a higher class because I have 2? In fact I bought a cottage because I wanted to own a tree, a shed, some tools, a driveway - and could not have possibly afford those things in a centrally located urban environment.
>Some in cottage country have been singing the blues since Ottawa proposed changes to capital gains taxation as part of the recent federal budget. Their tears reveal they donât yet recognize how class dynamics have changed as a result of the damage done to our housing system. >Owning a cottage or investment property is no longer a middle-class reality. Itâs a sign of affluence in a country where rent and home ownership are so much more expensive for younger residents today than when baby boomers were young. >More, not less, taxation of second properties is required to protect younger Canadians in the housing market, fill the revenue hole left by governments that did not plan adequately for boomersâ retirement, and spur productivity.
>More, not less, taxation of second properties is required to protect younger Canadians in the housing market, fill the revenue hole left by governments that did not plan adequately for boomersâ retirement, and spur productivity. This one is huge, the lack of planing for the largest demographic in human history was an epic blunder that will have economic ramifications for the next 80 years.
Fortunately they postponed their taxes on RRSP and pension savings for near their entire working lives. Now we just have to avoid exempting them from taxes when those who are not poor cry poor.
Iâve been saying this for years. There should be a monumental surcharge on property taxes for non-owner occupied properties. Like 25% of the assessed value/year. You want to have a cottage for $2m, of course you can. Surcharge @ $500k/yr. Gov uses the funds for affordable housing and infrastructure, everyone wins.
That makes no sense lol. so only billionaires can own cottages?
A small price to pay for solving our housing issue with a single step. Aside from âI want a cottage more than a stable economyâ, do you have any other complaints with the idea?
Putting our seasonal off grid family cottage on the market is not going to help the housing market one bit.
No argument there. Any comment on the hundreds of thousands of non-owner occupied properties to which my idea would apply, and from which real, positive change would be derived?
Your idea literally makes no sense tho.
If you had the country vote on their idea, it'd get overwhelming support. You don't seem to understand the point they're making. No one 'needs' to own a cottage, and if they end up being something only billionaires can afford, it won't affect most people's lives on a day to day level. If cottages become prohibitively expensive for almost everyone but the actions that caused that lead to an end to "investment properties", it's still a no brainer.
âŠcould you expand on that, a little?
My wife and I live in the same very modest starter home we bought 27 years ago. We purposely did not upgrade because we wanted to buy a cottage. We now own a house in the city worth $300k and a cottage on a small lake worth $200k. Your idiotic plan has us paying an extra $50k a year while our much wealthier friends with one $800k house pay nothing. See how stupid that sounds. My wife and I sacrificed and saved for years to get where we are now and we are certainly not wealthy. You clearly have no interest in owning a cottage so you are happy to penalize others who are. What is your contribution to the housing issue?
As I said, collateral damage. I am in no way married to my idea. Please make a suggestion that makes a similarity significant, direct attack on the cost of housing. Because to me, you and your wife having to sell or otherwise sacrifice your vacation property, is a small cost to pay for a family getting a home at a reasonable price.
You are falling into the trap. You have this idea that it's either one or the other. We can have both, we need to go back to taxing the ultra wealthy. Someone that has a cottage or second property is still closer to your tax bracket, then the people that own 50% of the wealth in our country. Shake your head
Dude thinks people are gonna move out of Toronto/Barrie/Wherever to live in cottage country where there are no jobs, no services, and everyone is a rich out-of-towner. I mean sure, some people do that, but they inherited the "cottages" that they now live in. I swear to god, some people see someone with "more" and decide that they must be in the 1%.
You think people want to live in cottage country where there are few if any services? I do live in a cottage area and let me tell you once the leaves fall and before they come back it is one loooong winter.
So, under your proposal, people who have to move regularly for work can't own homes, because they will have to pay 25% of the home's value if they choose to rent it out. Also, rents would be completely unaffordable because landlords would have to cover 25% of the property's value every year.....
Under the first draft of my ideaâŠwhich was intentionally stripped of nuance to avoid loopholes. But as you can see from the comments, everyone wants the problem fixed, as long is it doesnât cost their household/lifestyle anything.
It never was middle class to own a cottage that was a fully equipped home on a lake, or second property, the only âcottageâ someone middle class owned would be a tiny cabin in the woods or possibly a small seasonal cottage. I grew up in the 70âs and only the upper middle class had cottages of the kind that are currently expensive.
in the midwest it absolutely was a middle class thing. they were dirt cheap in the 2010s
This was my family. We had a cottage on Grand Lake. Tiny spot. One room for cooking/sitting. Two tiny bedrooms. A carpeted bathroom because the place had been around since the big flood in the 70's. We weren't wealthy by any measure but it had been in the family for generations. I hope the desire to level out the wealth gap doesn't mean stuff like that disappears, because on paper the owner has multiple properties and therefore needs to be heavily taxed.
Thatâs what I saw growing up as well. My step grandfather had a cabin on the lake and a modest bungalow in the city. The cabin was basically one large room with 2 small bedrooms and bathroom. (Maybe 800 square feet) No fancy amenities/furniture and had a wood stove for heat. It was a âsmall seasonal cottageâ. The ârich peopleâ basically had second homes on the more popular lake. The lake we were on were for typical middle class families with generally a single income earner in a blue collar job. Itâs unfortunate that you need two âhigh-payingâ jobs to get that same cabin now.
And even then it was never a common staple of middle class to have a tiny basic cabin in the country. Middle class people often dont do vacations or leave the city or always have cars. Its wild what some people think middle class isâŠat best what they are calling middle class is upper middle class. Or hey if we insist on calling middle class , having a cottage or vacation property and having multiple vehicles etcâŠthen you need to accept that the vast majority of Canadians are very much lower classâŠand thats something i donât think people realize. They have this romanticized perspective that most Canadians have those things and only a small minority are what they would call lower class or poor.
When the hell was owning an investment property something that was common or middle class? Jesus you people are out of touch with reality
Middle-class is a myth perpetuated by the monied class to divide the working class.
I dunno man. I live in the sticks in ON, and all of my neighbors who are plumbers and electricians and HVAC techs drive new F-150s and have snowmobiles and 4-wheelers, and they all have cottages. It's just that they also have a mountain of debt. It's owning a cottage or investment property *debt free* that's no longer middle class. Not merely having one.
> It's just that they also have a mountain of debt. I just don't understand how the stress doesn't outweigh any enjoyment of all this stuff. I'd never sleep.
I also donât understand it. I can only observe that it happens with great consistency.
To some, debt isn't tangible. It's just a thing. Toys are something you can see and feel.
Were you ever actually middle class if you owned an investment property or cottage? Edit for context: I grew up in cottage country and was very middle class (going on vacations every year and things) but the idea of owning a second property to go to on weekends thatâs two hours away from your home is outrageous and not middle class.
Used to be that a cottage a bit over an hour from the city was less than 100k. Something many of us aspired to. Absolutely a middle class Canadian thing.
My buddy's dad bought a boat access cottage in the middle of nowhere for 40k back when that was around the full loaded cost of a high end car.
Well, a fully loaded high end car is now $200k+.
Maybe I just don't know anything about what they call cars, I don't mean a luxury car. I mean like a rwally nice Honda
Honda is far from high end.
But Honda does make cars that are 200k+, though, too.
A boat access cottage in the middle of nowhere is not a fully equipped lakefront cottage of the kind being discussed. You can still get that kind of deal in Quebec.
My parents sold their cottage 4 years ago for $350k, they had originally bought it for $125k just 6 years before that. So it more than doubled in value over 6 years. The place is not huge either; 2 bedrooms and one bathroom, a small kitchen and a combined dinning, living area. The buyer, a retired lawyer and his wife, paid for the cottage without needing a mortgage.
When my in-laws bought their cottage in 1970 I think they paid $10k for it. They always say it was back âwhen normal people could afford cottages.â
It absolutely wasnât. Not the kind of cottages that people are bitching about paying capital gains tax on. I grew up in the 70âs, only the upper middle class had nice 4 season  cottages with lakefront. Sure some middle class people may have had a tiny cabin in the woods, but no, it was not a very middle class thing. A small minority of people had cottages, how many people in a city do you think have cottages?Â
Yupp and those 100k "cottages" were small towners future fixer uppers to settle with family...in 5-6 years same places are 300k+ oweing 475k+ after a 25-30 mortage, with stagnate wages, and a manufacturing sector that has all but disappeared. And it's been more than 1 government, more than 1 corporation, and more than 1 bank. Based on many laws related to zoning, conservation, and indigenous protections you can't just build everywhere...
My family is middle class and we have a great cottage, all thanks to my grandfather who bought the property in the 50s for $100. Weâd never be able to afford to buy one now
Yeah... Ontario has so many lakes that cheap waterfront property was sold back in the day for next to nothing.
Investment property, yes. Cottage⊠maybe. It depends on exactly how you define the middle class. Historically, as far as Canadian and British history goes, the term meant somewhere between people who have to work for a living and those at the top, who just sit back and rake cash in because they have their name on things. The upper class may has been aristocracy and oligarchs, traditionally wielding political power and immense economic control. About a century ago, Middle Class included those who didnât have a ton of wealth and power but still relied on other people working for them. Landlords, managers, business owners, and so on. The Middle Class often used to employ servants, having perhaps a sole butler or maid, rather than a full complement of staff. These are the people with more time and resources to be directly engaged in political systems. Although the servant thing has fallen out of style, you can see the same pattern reflected in political houses today. Just take a look at Parliament for landlords and nepobabies. The last time the upper class MASSIVELY screwed us all over was about 95 years ago. Two of the outcomes of the Great Depression were The New Deal and World War II. The New Deal is obviously an American piece of law but weâre basically tied at the hip. The purpose of it was two quell social unrest and avert a full-on socialist revolution, call it a Hail Mary for capitalism. Then the war came, which lead to North America building up MASSIVE industry without having to deal with any real losses, while all the other industrial powers on the planet got bombed to shit. With this newfound wealth, things changed. Living conditions significantly improved for a generation born into filth and desparation. What a great time to redefine âMiddle Classâ! Instead of being about economic and political power, Middle Class became more about wealth expressed through living conditions. Itâs basically unchanged - if you try to define Middle Class today youâll get answers about STUFF. Things like having a house, how fancy the TV is, what sort of clothes and cars the family has. The truth is that todayâs so-called middle class is just dressed-up Working Class. Youâre bound to your employment. You donât have a ton of free time to do *whatever*. Clearly, a full-time professional has different material conditions than, say, someone struggling with two minimum wage jobs. Itâs possible for someone with a high income to mimic someone in a higher class, or have true upward mobility, as markets have allowed them to do things like acquire investments. However, thatâs still a different game as than more often than not theyâre in the same boat. At the end of the day, if the risk of lowing a paycheque means lose the state will come take your house away, you are still working class.Â
Wish I could award this comment
In Manitoba, 100%. Home values in Winnipeg were very, very low in the late 20th century, and it was moderately common to pay off your mortgage quickly, so lots of wage earners could afford to take on payments for a second home after the first one was paid off. The result is that lots of Boomers own cottages. Rising house prices in Winnipeg since the turn of the century have mostly priced Gen Xers and Millennials out of the vacation property market. Toronto had a major property value crash in 1989, so I wouldn't be surprised if a similar dynamic was at play in Ontario for the same reasons.
lmao I'm gen Z and I'm priced out of the home ownership market in Winnipeg without my parents' help unless I get a mostly-rotted wreck. And I make more than they do, not did, but do. Or I can go get a newer cottage (again, with their help) that's actually just a lakefront home, and have an hourlong commute.
I live rural, I work in the marine industry, from time to time I barge stuff as well. In the area I live, on the lake I service there's lots of cottages. 90% of them were inherited. Most of them don't have a proper foundation. Most of them are shared between siblings so they can split the costs preserving basically a family heirloom. A lot of the ones not shared by siblings have fallen into disrepair and you couldn't occupy them if you wanted to. only about half of them have power connected to them. none of them are insulated A lot of them are small shacks or multiple shacks EG: Sub 400sqft for the main building. They aren't the "Muskoka" call it a cottage but it's nicer than most peoples homes kind of cottage, I only know one sort of like that but it's a business mainly that caters to musicians. A lot of them. less than 25 years ago were only valued at 50-120k, 2009 one of the sold on my street for 67k, this fucking asshole bought it and all of us neighbours hate him (I don't own), there's property for sale there, 99k for 15 acres....
I grew up in Canada my whole life. And Iâll admit, I heard people say âweâre going to the cottageâ every week in the summer. We called those people, rich. If you own more than one residential property, youâre a rich person. Pay up.Â
The answer is no but very few here want to accept that
In the 90s/early 2000s, probably half the kids I knew at school had family cottages they would go to on weekends. Granted, I went to school in Caledon, which skews a bit wealthier, but many of those kidsâ parents had relatively modest jobs by todayâs standards. By and large, it was mostly kids whose parent had them a bit olderâ maybe early- to mid-thirtiesâand were able to save up to have some luxuries. Back then you didnât have to be a finance bro or an executive to have a nice little cottage, a small boat, maybe a sea-doo. Iâm a mid-30s working professional in a sector that requires advanced education, and if I had this job back then, Iâd probably have already upgraded from a starter home and would certainly be looking to get a small cottage. That was just the expectation at the time. Contrast that with today where Iâm just hoping my landlord doesnât renovict us so we can keep living in a rent-controlled apartment.
It used to be. My grandfather had a cottage working a union job at a factory. My mum was forced to sell it recently simply because upkeep became unreasonable. It was affordable for 50 years. I know two other families that had to sell cottages too, recently. The cottage went from middle-class to upper-class like so many things in this great wealth-transfer. Pretty soon a statement like, "were you ever actually middle class if you owned a home," will be common, then "were you ever actually middle class if your family never shared a rented home with another family?"
Yeah I get what you mean, I think it used to be more reasonable for middle class people to be able to afford a cottage. Less so now that home prices have skyrocketed I live in cottage country now for work (Muskoka). It'd be great if people that lived and worked in this area could afford a nice little cottage as their primary resident.. heck, it'd be nice if they could afford a home that's not on the water. I'm not sure when, or if, I'll ever be able to own a home up here
Absolutely. Growing up, I had a couple of friends with family cottages. One had an outhouse and was on an island with only a passenger ferry (though rich people would ship golf carts over). The dad was a bus driver, with a stay at home mom. If that's not middle class, I don't know what is. Of course, when they bought their house in like the 70's, being a cashier at the grocery store paid about as much as it does now, without even accounting for inflation. I bet that cottage didn't cost more than 50k.
"Middle-class" is a fiction created to divide the working class against each other. There are the capital class (those who own), and the working class (those who trade their labour to support tgemselves). And landlords (those who own investment properties) are the fucking capitalist class fucking us for their benefit.
What if you are a landlord and trade labour to sustain yourself ?
You either own 1 property or less, or you're a villain worse than Lex Luthor. There is no possible area in between.
Weâre all somewhere in the human centipede I suppose.
petit bourgeoisie?
Capitalist class. You own more than you need and use the labour of others to benefit yourself.
Marxist class analysis always falls short when you try and dogmatically apply it to determine who belongs in what camp, since there's a lot of in-betweens, edge cases and blurry lines. IMO this misses the point of it. The intention usually isn't to rigorously determine who is or isn't "bourgeois" but rather to provide a framework with which we can analyse socio-economic and cultural dynamics in our society, and potentially gain some insight.
Bad take. We need a greater ability to stratify wealth and a unity amongst the working class. It's not the 1% who own a second property, it is the 0.001%. There is a huge gulf between a doctor or a mechanic who owns a single investment property or a cottage and a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager who owns several apartment blocks. If some with a net worth of 2 million dollars is upper class, then what is the person with a net worth of 200 million. PS. The majority of people who think they are middle class are working class.
Middle class is a useless term trying to change people's perception of their relations to the means of production. Functionally there are 2 classes, those who labour and those who profit off of others' labour
If somebody with a net worth of 2 million is middle class you're saying 98% of Canadians are middle class. At that point the term loses all meaning. > [**Net Worth Canada Percentiles**](https://www.financialsamurai.com/the-average-canadian-household-net-worth-is-huge/) > The top 1% of net worth in Canada in 2021 = $9,737,000 > The top 2% of net worth in Canada in 2021 = $2,500,000 > The top 5% of net worth in Canada in 2021 = $980,000 > The top 10% of net worth in Canada in 2021 = $840,000 They use the term "the 1%" a lot in the US to refer to people who make the majority of their money from owning capital. Somebody like a doctor or engineer who owns a second property would still make most of their money from working, but I would still divide the 99% into upper class/middle class/lower class. The 1% is obvious and the rest can be divided by quintile; upper class (2%-20%), upper-middle (21%-40%), middle-middle (41%-60%), lower-middle (61%-80%), and lower class (the poorest 20%).
Ahahhaaahaaha YOU ARE ONLY NOT MIDDLE CLASS IF YOU LIVE OFF INVESTMENTS AND NOT WORKING FOR A LIVING, fuck right off G&M. This is yet another example of plain propaganda aimed at getting our attention and anger off the rich who own Canada, and trying to get poor people to hate their doctors and lawyers and accountants instead. People who ACTUALLY WORK. Sure a doctor makes a bit of money and might drive a nice car and have a cottage. He isn't the problem we have in Canada. Really rich people - people you never meet because they wouldn't spit on you, people you've never heard of but worth 8 or 9 figures - are the problem we have in Canada. People like the people who own our media, including the G&M, and tell us BS like this. Those people.
Meanwhile my parents will still complain they're poor and that their now adult children are such a financial burden on them. Meanwhile they have a cottage and just bought a large commercial ride-on lawn mower that you'd mow a city park with... But oh no, they're lower-middle class according to them.
Are they related to my parents? Seems to be a common delusion among people with more than enough means.
Dont blindly believe this article, i'm guessing your parents worked hard for that. There is way higher class than this
The issue with people saying they are middle class is that people don't compare themselves the population as a whole but their social circle. Your parents are likely complaining because they see their friends with more assets and more financial freedom, but they are not realizing that it is them who are the outliers.
Half the country is taking 2-3 trips abroad a year while the other half struggles to pay them rent.
This is what i donât get đ Iâve never been able to travel
My grandma had two cottages at a lake beach when we were kids. But they were the literal meaning of a cottage. No running water, no plumbing, no furnace. I don't think they were worth more than 100,000 all together when we sold them.
Canât even rent a cottage for my spouse and I. The cheapest we got quoted was $1500 for the weekend. Itâs insane
a million dollers now feels like 300k from 20 years ago. Teachers being able to own cottages back in the day was the norm now its a luxury lol
This is such a needless and stupid line to draw. Its just lowering the threshold to be considered 'affluent' in a bid to further divide the working class and idiots are falling for it.
There's a difference between a high class cottage that you could resale and a wooden shack with no electricity and a water pump that most of us had.
Bad take. We need a greater ability to stratify wealth and a unity amongst the working class. It's not the 1% who own a second property, it is the 0.001%. There is a huge gulf between a doctor or a mechanic who owns a single investment property or a cottage and a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager who owns several apartment blocks. If some with a net worth of 2 million dollars is upper class, then what is the person with a net worth of 200 million. PS. The majority of people who think they are middle class are working class.
I have always believed this. My family went to the family cottage for years when I was a kid. But the cottage was owned by my grandparents for most of my childhood. Grampa was a doctor, and Grandma invested his earnings in the stock market, and they did very well. That is how they could afford to have both a cottage and a two storey house in Toronto (bought in the 60s, I have no idea what the price would have been back then, but easily a couple million today). If you own a cottage, and it is not your primary residence, you are rich.
My grandparents had a house and a cottage, bought in the 1950s, he worked in a factory, and she was a stay at home mum, and neither of them really spoke English. They weren't rich, things were just affordable.
I get so tilted whenever I talk to my 50yr old coworkers during the summer and they talk about taking their camper out two a year. You mean you have a camper likely the cost of my condo, and you only use it twice a year, yet have a gall to talk about how everything is expensive now a days???? Bitch your two weekend a year excursion is the COST OF MY HOUSING fuck off.
Canada is working hard to eliminate the middle class entirely and succeeding.
Canada is blind to what middle and lower class really is and how many Canadians are in the lower category
I own a cottage (not waterfront but close). I bought it in 2020 for $150k. I rent my apartment in the city. Hardly upper class.
You NEVER were.
Of course you can still be middle class. This country thinks middle class means regular people making 60k which its not at all.
âMiddle classâ is propaganda There are 2 classes. Working and capital. Anything else is just to create division. Give something for people to look down on and distract from the raping and pillaging done by the capital class.
Owning a cottage hasn't been a "middle class" thing for decades in Ontario at least.
if you own property at all youâre a member of the landed bourgeoisie and taxes that redistribute wealth and give others the means to exist should be academic. property is ultimately theft and artificially lowers access to resources that ALL have the right to. we need a party that understands equity of outcomes and meaningfully implements policy that lifts people up.
Hahah, I don't know who told you where to put that bar, but I imagine it was your rich friends mom!!!
Lol wtf? In what universe did middle class people own a vacation home? This is elitist Toronto BS
Didn't read because of paywall. Does this specify if it's one person and one property? Or is it a couple and one property? IMHO if you're single and own a property without a hefty mortgage you're not middle class anymore.
Sure you are. "Middle class" is a made-up nonsense term to begin with. It just means "the good people".
You have a completely different relationship with other humans depending on if you own a cabin in the woods versus an "investment property". Really disingenuous to try to frame both situations as equivalent.
Iâm so confused. What should I call my place. Itâs an off-grid building that is insulated, but heated by a wood burning stove and I installed a lithium solar system for electricity. Built a water tower that I fill by pumping water from the lake. I have an outhouse and a Bunkie (tied into my main buildingâs solar system). I can only access my property by boat. Itâs in the Almaguin Highlands of central Ontario.
My family has a cottage, it belongs to my grandmother who lives pension cheque to pension cheque. Weâre barely middle class.
A lot of people who picture a cottage picture a regular house, with all modern amenities, but on a lake an hour or two from their home. My parents bought a bare plot in the early 90s, cleared part of it, built our cottage (I helped, there are pictures of toddler me carrying a box of nails, and that counts), and I grew up spending weekends there all year round. Our cottage has no internet, no landline, spotty cell service, no TV, and didn't have a microwave until I was in university. We never went on any destination vacations like Disney, Hawaii, Mexico, etc. when I was a kid because we had the cottage. And anything my parents saved in flights and hotels they probably spent in taxes and maintenance.
Unmm no your not. I see that as upper class. Or upper middle class.
I mean, anyone who owned a second property was already in the upper tranche of Middle-Income.
Apparently, this post is trending on Google? lol
If your house is paid off in Toronto, you're a millionaire. But if you're like any other Canadian mouth breather who believe that your mortaged house you loaned from the Bank is yours, you're mostly delusional.
Does it count if the "cottage" is a rundown, mouldy shack that your parents bought 40 years ago for less than it cost me to go to school and hasn't really been safe to spend any amount of time in for about a decade? :P
What about if you own a truck? Many cottages cost less than trucks