Find a Partner and Stay Married | Best Financial Move

Hey everybody, welcome back to the cabin. A beautiful but cold evening. Sun's just going down. I think you can see the reflection in the window here. I haven't shot a video on this angle since probably summer, like a year and a half ago. Used to like filming right here because it was kind of out of the wind. Come here, pup. Here, girl. Come here. Callie, come. So I was just working on the front porch, making spindles for the railing. And I was talking about going into town and the songs I was hearing on the radio, but an advertisement came on and it was from a mortgage broker in somewhere in central Ontario. And she was talking about divorce, basically, and how she can arrange mortgages for one partner to buy out the other so that the one person can stay in the house. And I thought that's where we're at with society, that divorce is so common and successful marriage is so uncommon that we now have to plan, pre-plan, and have financial products specifically for divorced people. And it's true. The divorce rate's over 50% now. The younger generation, I know my girls, they talk in frustration about how the guys don't want to settle down and have deeper relationships at all, which is extremely disturbing, especially as a father of two pretty young girls, young daughters, and they're 20-ish, so not that young, but they're dating, and it's the kind of dating scene that they're entering. I've got people, guys, and the girls, too, of course, just not as interested in forming long-term relationships, and I can see why. They're watching their parents and the previous generations, their marriages fail, and of course, all the emotional heartbreak, but also now financial destruction of these families. It's extremely unfortunate and disturbing. So I hope that changes. I hope people go back to having, making love a bigger, more important part of their life, and commitment. I guess it's the commitment that's mostly lacking, and the commitment is really what I want to talk about in this video. So I haven't really looked at the demographics on this channel to see what the average age is of people, or the majority of the people watching this channel, but one of the main reasons I started it was really to help younger people and younger men in particular, because that's, from my perspective, I can speak from a young man's perspective better than a young woman's, obviously. But I wanted to be able to help guys at a younger age avoid the mistakes that I made, and also to learn from some of the successes that I had as well, and hope that it can help to make their lives easier, or your lives easier, if you're in that demographic. So when I look at what's been particularly good in my life, and what I consider the most successful part of my life, I have to say that my marriage is right at the very top, maybe number one, and not only from a happiness perspective, and a fulfillment perspective, but also from a financial perspective. It's difficult. If you look at the housing prices, and I'm paying more attention to housing prices because we're getting ready to put the family home on the market this spring, finally sell off that and set my kids up with something different. So we're paying attention to the real estate market, and it's becoming more and more difficult for younger people to afford houses. My wife just read me a statistic this morning about the smaller home segment of the market becoming stressed. There's more buyers than there's sellers because people, seniors, are starting to downsize to, let's say, a 1,500 square foot bungalow or something, but that's also the ideal house for a young family. So you get these two demographics at opposite ends of the spectrum competing for the same house, and then probably the middle to higher end houses are probably much more sellers than buyers. So it's a buyer's market in that case. Point being that the prices already were very difficult for younger people to enter the market, but now they're competing against seniors that actually have the money because they're selling off bigger, more expensive homes to downsize, and they've had a lifetime to build up their wealth. So I'm very frustrated or worried about my daughter's ability to enter the real estate market, not only because I think it's good to be able to own your own home and build up equity and have an asset as you get older in life that you can maybe draw from or sell and downsize or whatever. It's getting that cold that the trees are starting to crack. But it also means that you're spending more of your money on rent and that money you never get back, not building up any equity. So that's very difficult. Trying to pay high rents. I know in central Ontario, some of the highest rents in the country because it's such an attractive place to live. Where I raised my family, down in the Barrie area, the real estate market there, the rental market was like the worst or the highest rental rates in Canada. I think it's dropped down to fifth or sixth now. But that's hard. So if you're renting in that area, it's not like the jobs pay like they do in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, bigger cities. So you're making sort of mid-level income, yet the rental rates are so high that you can, a lot of your income's going towards paying your rent, which means that you can never save a down payment in order to buy a house or even invest or do anything. A lot of people are just making enough to survive. And I'm sure that's typical all around the world and all around North America. So what's my point? How did it get from relationships and love to the real estate market? Well, the financial stability that you get from a stable relationship is probably the number one financial tool that I can suggest utilizing, and that's to stay together. Not only just stay together, but also to have a partner. So just watch young single people or older single people. Actually, I've got two sisters that are single right now, and they're struggling too. They're making it, but it's a struggle for one person to try to survive, pay all of the bills. Any time in life that you can take advantage of shared costs, so fixed costs that you can split between a couple of people or a family rather than one person, the better you should take advantage of those opportunities because it's rent, for example. So you can pay $1,500 for a one-bedroom apartment in the Barrie area, Central Ontario, or you can get a two-bedroom for like $1,700 and split it between two people. As just an example, if you're the type of person who can live with a roommate, it's not your partner, your spouse. But of course, if you have two people working towards one goal, then you're going to be better off automatically immediately but the long-term benefit of staying together cannot be stressed enough. That commercial is just a perfect example. So there's a divorced couple maybe in their 30s or 40s. They've built up equity in this home together. One person has to leave. If one person's staying or maybe you're both leaving, they would have to get a mortgage to pay the other person out, which means that one person is now covering not only their portion of the mortgage but now a higher mortgage or a longer term because they have to pay out the partner, the ex-spouse, the ex-partner. So that's impossible. And then, of course, there's all the other things besides real estate that go along with divorce. So splitting your assets 50-50, for example. If you're the higher income earner and you're giving up half your assets or a future payment or child support beyond the fact that it's horrible for kids to grow up in broken homes, that financial stress of that separation, some people never recover from that and at the very least it's gonna set you back significantly. Bottom line is relationships. You know, I hate to ever say this but in a lot of cases, maybe the partner that you're with or the partner that you're considering for a lifetime partner is the wrong person. I mean, it's not my place to give relationship advice but strictly from a financial standpoint and probably a happiness standpoint, finding the right person to spend your life with is probably the number one most important thing you can do with your life at any stage, really. And the fulfillment of being in a loving relationship is priceless and the financial cost of not being in a successful relationship is staggering. So I encourage, if you're young and at that point we're trying to make decisions for your future, I'd suggest doing that, searching for the right partner. And if you're not attracting a good partner, then first of all, don't be so hard on yourself. There's somebody for everybody and there's somebody good for everybody. If you work on yourself during that period where you're looking for a partner, if you make sure that you're the most desirable person that you can be given your circumstances and what's been given to you as far as looks and intelligence and stuff and personality. I went through that period when my girlfriend cheated on me when I was, was I 19? Starting to forget the facts now. I think I was 19 and it took me four years to meet my wife. I went through a period where a couple of not serious girlfriends or not girlfriends that I was considering somebody I wanted to marry. And I was struggling personally, I was struggling emotionally and didn't know if I was ever gonna meet the right person. Fortunately, I did. And my life has been amazing because of that. So it was worthwhile, but I know what it was like to be going through that period where I didn't think there was, I was ever gonna meet anybody, meet anybody that was right for me. And starting to feel like I didn't have the, I wasn't worth anything. During that period, I did things. I built the first cabin that I lived in. I acquired that property and paid for that property. I took a trade so I got a better job, educated myself, read all kinds of self-help books and financial books and real estate books. So I took that period to make myself a better person so that when I did meet the right person, the right, what ended up being my wife, I was in a better place. I was in a place that I could, I was more attractive to the opposite sex. And that was invaluable that I was, it was unintentional, but it was invaluable that that's what ended up happening, ended up becoming a better person that my wife could find attractive enough on all levels to want to spend the rest of her life with. And here we are today in a position where early 40s, I'm able to retire because I didn't have to start over. I had a supportive spouse, supportive partner. She became my wife, business partner, mother of my children, and a supporter, somebody who really believes in me and believes in what I want to do with my life and is behind me 100%. And man, that is priceless. So I'm hoping that you guys can find that as well. Anyway, that's pretty sappy, isn't it? Kelly's staring at me here. She knows what I'm doing when I'm talking to the camera, but she's waiting for me to keep playing with her. So I'll throw that a couple more times and then get inside and make dinner. So thanks for watching this one, everybody. Appreciate it. Look forward to seeing you up here at the cabin next time. Take care.