I'm in my late 20's. And a good deal of advice in this post is pretty good.
>>Everyone I know has repeatedly lost loads of money in the stock market, but not one person I know has lost money buying real estate in large urban centres in Canada.
Actually if you look at it real estate is the best deal you can get. No one, not one single person who bought lots of real estate I know has ever repented buying it. Fortunes have been multiplied by 10, some times even 20 only because some one bought a great deal of real estate in the city outskirts and watch prices multiply in multiples of 10's when the city grew. Same with rent. Rent is the best and safest form of passive income. Here in India, there are people who get obscene amounts of rents, then use the same rents to generate more of it.
In most Indian cities, real estate crashes rarely happen. Even if they do, they turn out to be local minima's and within 2-3 years the rush for property accumulation starts again.
Next, comes Gold of course. Of the things that I learned from people who buy real estate is- Buying Gold is buying real estate in trickles. The trick is to keep a proper balance of gold investment. And a real estate loan which you can afford to pay and is not beyond your means. The reason you need the loan is the inflation here is close to 9%. While your property value will appreciate your loan will only lose its value due to inflation, plus when you have enough gold you can dispose it off to pay of the real estate loan and move to buy the next property.
>Rent is the best and safest form of passive income.
HAHAHAHAHHAHHAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No it isn't. Renting it a LOT of work and it isn't for everyone. You have to find good tenants, but that is a crapshoot. Everytime someone moves out you gotta spend time getting the place ready for the next people, advertising it, then showing it. If your tenant stops paying you have to evict them, but that takes time and you lose money in the meantime. Then when you finally get them out of there, you can sue them for back rent and win a judgment, but if they don't have any money to pay you with, you aren't getting it. Once in a while you got a tenant who leave the place a BIG HUGE MESS that you can't even imagine, that's a few week job. Then you gotta deal with things like being woken up in the middle of the night when people have locked themselves out. If something breaks, it might costs thousands of dollars to fix. If you don't have DIY skills and time, then the cost of labor is going to kill you.
If you are renting to more wealthy people, these things might not come up as often.
If you had LOTS of money, a property manager, staff, then it might be different, but not in any way risk free.
I have family who were doing a REAL lot of work just to break even at property rentals. Then ran into the above issues.
So you think the average indian home price in india which at present is much more than US or Canada is going to be 10x more in the next decade?… Go read about Japan, their investing/saving culture is similar to India and their home prices are still recovering from the crash in 1991
>>Everyone I know has repeatedly lost loads of money in the stock market, but not one person I know has lost money buying real estate in large urban centres in Canada.
Actually if you look at it real estate is the best deal you can get. No one, not one single person who bought lots of real estate I know has ever repented buying it. Fortunes have been multiplied by 10, some times even 20 only because some one bought a great deal of real estate in the city outskirts and watch prices multiply in multiples of 10's when the city grew. Same with rent. Rent is the best and safest form of passive income. Here in India, there are people who get obscene amounts of rents, then use the same rents to generate more of it.
In most Indian cities, real estate crashes rarely happen. Even if they do, they turn out to be local minima's and within 2-3 years the rush for property accumulation starts again.
Next, comes Gold of course. Of the things that I learned from people who buy real estate is- Buying Gold is buying real estate in trickles. The trick is to keep a proper balance of gold investment. And a real estate loan which you can afford to pay and is not beyond your means. The reason you need the loan is the inflation here is close to 9%. While your property value will appreciate your loan will only lose its value due to inflation, plus when you have enough gold you can dispose it off to pay of the real estate loan and move to buy the next property.