Housing

We decided to buy a house 4 years ago because we were tired of paying so much money in rent. We did not want to pay someone else for our home when we could buy one ourselves. The first thing we did was to start saving money. Every two weeks put money into a Tax-Free savings Account (TFSA) for 4 years. When we had enough money for a 15% down payment, we looked around for a real estate agent and broker. We asked friends for recommendations and found an agent that worked in our community who spoke Tigrinya. She recommended a broker, and we got all our paperwork in order. We had to give them a lot of documents: income statements for 2 years, proof of employment, identification forms and more! Once we had all the paperwork done, we started looking for houses. We looked a A LOT of houses. Some of them were more than we could afford, and some we could afford but didn’t like, Finally, we put an offer for a semi-detached house. It wasn’t exactly what we wanted, but we were happy with it. We put in an offer, and it was accepted. After three months, we moved to the new house in Kitchener. We were so happy to finally be home, but it was very tough to buy a house!