For six years, Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung had been laser-focused on saving up for a home. “We wanted to be like everyone else–buy a house, work until you’re 65, and go the normal route,” Shen says. But after cobbling together C$500,000 in savings, the couple felt disillusioned by the housing market in Toronto. “Every time we went to an open house, it would just turn into a bidding war,” she says. “I started to think, ‘Is this really a good idea?’ People seemed to have gone nuts and were throwing everything they had at a mortgage.” When a coworker collapsed at his desk due to a grueling work schedule, Shen and Leung decided it was time to carve out a new path. “It took that to open my eyes,” Shen says. “I was like, this is not worth it. I don’t want to be dying at my desk just to pay off a mortgage.”
Image: Bharath Mohan/Unsplash
