Suburban Sprawl

“The annual cost of owning an extra car for 35 years could buy more than $570,000 of RRSPs — more than the vast majority of Canadians in their 50s have saved for retirement,” Suburban Sprawl: Exposing Hidden Costs, Identifying Innovations. 
Dave Thomas, a University of Ottawa-based 
research network and author of a

new report called Sustainable Prosperity writes about the big move to the suburbs becoming increasingly more expensive for reasons such as the amount it costs to run your car, not only to get to work, but to reach other necessary destinations such as the grocery store.
There are some interesting facts and figures in this report which describes a point of view many don't consider. 
 

Happy Thanksgiving!

La Guía Entrevista- feberero 2012

En febrero 2012, Antonio Guerrero fue destacado prominentemente en la revista La Guía en Toronto. Aquí se encuentra la entrevista donde habla de como llego a abrir su propio bufete jurídico.

Pulse en los imágenes o visita La Guía para poder leer la entrevista.

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In February 2012, Antonio Guerrero was prominently featured in the La Guía magazine in Toronto. Here is the interview (in Spanish) where he talks about how he came about opening his own legal firm.

Click on an image or visit La Guía to read the interview.

Happy Valentines Day / Feliz Día de San Valentín

Is this a good time to refinance your mortgage?- The Toronto Star

The Toronto Star's Robb Engen writes:

 

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The Bank of Montreal made headlines last week, announcing a special 5-year fixed rate of 2.99 per cent.  Other banks  followed with their own special offers, as the competition for mortgages heats-up across the country.

This might be a good time to consider refinancing your mortgage.  Here’s why: 

When interest rates are low, many people refinance in order to save thousands of dollars over the life of their mortgage.  However, it’s important to determine what the pre-payment charge will be before refinancing your mortgage.

A pre-payment charge is the amount you will need to pay for breaking the terms initially negotiated on your mortgage.  This can be a large amount, meaning you won’t actually be saving money in the long run.

It doesn’t always make sense to break your mortgage, but a good rule of thumb is if interest rates are at least 0.5 per cent lower than your current mortgage rate, it’s worth looking at refinancing.

Consider a scenario where you locked-in at a discounted 5-year fixed mortgage rate of 3.99 percent in January, 2010.  The balance on your mortgage is $250,000.

Even though variable rates are lower, you’re still concerned about rising interest rates in the future.  Your bank is now offering a 5-year fixed rate of 3.49 per cent.  

In order to break your current mortgage after two years of payments, and with three years remaining on your term, you will be charged an interest rate differential (IRD) penalty of $3,750*.

The penalty sounds pretty stiff, and that’s what scares people and prevents them from taking action.  By refinancing with the new interest rate of 3.49 per cent for the remaining 36 months, you will save $128 per month in mortgage payments, and save more than $6,775 in interest.

As consumers, we spend a lot of time shopping around for the best grocery prices, or looking for the cheapest gas station, yet we can’t be bothered to review our mortgage at least once a year for the opportunity to save thousands of dollars.
Before refinancing, consider how long you plan to stay in your home, how you plan to use any extra cash flow, and how refinancing can support your overall financial goals.

* contact your lender directly for an exact penalty quote

Toronto house prices dip slightly in December- The Toronto Star

An article by The Toronto Star's Susan Pigg:

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House sales — and doom-defying price increases — are slowing, easing concerns that the lowest interest rates in history could cause the Canadian housing market to overheat.

Buyers are becoming “increasingly cautious,” but house sales are expected to continue making a “significant contribution to Canadian economic activity” this year, says the Canadian Real Estate Association.
A total of 456,749 houses changed hands via Canada’s MLS system in 2011, up 2.2 per cent from 2010, CREA reported in its monthly assessment of the market released Monday.
While Toronto house prices were actually down in December over November when adjusted for seasonal fluctuations — they dipped about 2.4 per cent putting the average house at $466,540 — prices were up overall some four per cent from Dec. 0f 2010.
The average Canadian house price was $358,480 when adjusted for seasonal fluctuations, up less than one per cent from a year ago.

Merry Christmas! ¡Feliz Navidad!

Artículo sobre Antonio Guerrero en la revista La Guía en Toronto

Antonio Guerrero de Guerrero Law se encuentra otra vez en una de las revistas de Toronto. Esta vez es La Guía que tiene una edición especial sobre México este mes para celebrar la Independencia de México y es ahí donde encontrarán la entrevista con Antonio.

Haz click en cada foto para hacerlo más grande.

 

Antonio Guerrero- Guerrero Law

Julio Muzlera- Royal LePage

Patricio Roman- CENTUM One Financial Group Inc.

Grabación del programa de Entre Amigos en su Casa- 25 de julio, 2011

Hoy, Antonio Guerrero tuvo la oportnidad otra vez de ser parte de una platica an AM1610 Voces Latinas, con los Agentes de Bienes Raíces Julio Muzlera y Wendy Gallegos y el Mortgage Broker Patricio Roman. 

Aquí se encuentrán las 4 partes del programa para que no pierden de lo que han hablado.

Parte 1

Parte 2

Parte 3

Parte 4

AM1610: Entre Amigos en su Casa

Antonio Guerrero de Guerrero Law será en la radio hablando con Julio Muzlera en el programa Entre Amigos en su Casa, lunes el 25 de julio a la una de la tarde.

Thermal imaging- Find out where you are losing heat in your house

Below is an article by Ian Harvey written for the Toronto Star about thermal imaging, an interesting heat-loss detection system that has been around for a number of years and has now become quite affordable. 

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What’s behind your walls? What you don’t see can hurt your home — but a simple and inexpensive service could be just the tool for peaking into the hidden recesses of your biggest investment.
Thermal imaging technology — taking pictures of objects with a special camera which sees minute variations in temperature and displays them in a corresponding colour scheme — has been around for decades but has only recently become affordable for the residential market.
“These cameras used to cost tens of thousands of dollars,” says Toronto electrical engineer turned thermal imaging specialist Gabriel Gal. “Even more recently, they were $10,000 but now you can get them for around $2,500.”

The same economics that has driven down the cost of your computer, laptop, big screen TV and digital camera, is also at play on these scientific devices. The real trick is being certified in how to read the  thermal images.
But for homeowners, it also means that for between $200 and $300, depending on the size of your house and how detailed a report you need, services like Gal’s Atlantis Thermal Imaging can identify issues such as faulty wiring, termite damage, uneven insulation, air leaks, moisture or condensation penetration, and where your in-floor radiant heating system has sprung a leak or whether it was installed properly.
“Even in my own house, I’ve found things I didn’t know about,” he says. “I renovated and had a new roof put on but the water and ice shield wasn’t laid properly. I found where the ice had started to push under the shingles.”
For home buyers and builders alike, it’s a small investment and could pay for itself since a standard home inspection may not catch hidden issues.
“With energy costs today, people want to know if they have a problem,” he says. “If they feel ‘ghosts’ or drafts in their rooms, they want to know where that leak is coming from and a camera allows you to find those things.”
For home buyers, he says, a thermal imaging scan can find problems they can demand be fixed or reflected in a better price; for builders it’s a way to ensure their sub-trades have done their job.
“I’m a certified home inspector as well,” says Gal, who also builds houses through his company Atlantis Homes. “And even with my experience, you don’t always see everything. There are some 80,000 homes sold each year in the GTA and only 70 per cent are inspected. Even fewer are thermally scanned.”
While the thermal imaging can’t “see” mould, for example, it can see moisture which shows up as a different temperature.
“It feeds on paper and the sugars in wood,” he said. “We can see the moisture which usually means mould, too.”
As a custom home builder, Gal knows the value of thermal imaging — and so does Claude Spethmann, who is also a custom builder
“We’ve had problems in the past with radiant floor heating which we put oak flooring over,” says Spethmann of Spethmann Works Ltd. “Sometimes they (the sub-trades) nail right through the pipes and cause a leak, which causes all kinds of problems.”
He hired Gal to image the floor to ensure there were no leaks.
“You energize the heating system and before it really heats up you can clearly see the lines,” Gal says. “If there’s a leak, you’ll see it start to pool.”
In other inspections, Spethmann was able to see insulation was not installed properly and was able to address the problem before turning the finished home over to his clients. “These are custom homes and people expect a level of quality,” he said.
Any tool that gives buyers an insight is invaluable, says realtor Don Gault of Royal LePage/Johnston & Daniel.
While a good home inspector is worth every penny, it can be hit or miss depending on the inspector’s skills and level of experience.
“I take my own advice,” he says. “With imaging, you can see things the naked eye would miss. It can also confirm suspicions.”
Home inspectors aren’t allowed to drill into walls or pull things apart to investigate forensically, he notes, but the thermal imaging can get to the heart of things.
“Nothing takes the shine off a new home purchase like discovering something you wish you’d known about before the offer. It’s rare, mercifully, but I wouldn’t buy from the older housing stock in Toronto without this kind of investigation.”

Choosing a Real Estate Agent

You see so many different For Sale, Sold and For Lease signs with so many different Realtor names. You browse the listings on MLS and see so many more. With so many agents out there, how do you choose? Do you go by their picture? Do you look at how many listings they have? What's a home buyer to do?

Here are a few recommendations when beginning your search:

1) Get referrals from family, friends and co-workers.  

2) Meet with a few agents to conduct mini interviews.

3) Check the online search of The Real Estate Council of Ontario to see if the agent is registered. RECO regulates the activity of trading in real estate in the public interest and has been put in place to protect your best interests.

4) If you are a seller, find out how much their commission is.

5) Normally, it is helpful if the agent is familiar with the area you are looking in. 

6) Choose someone who displays professionalism and a willingness to work for your needs.

7) Should you want, your agent should be able to assist you with other necessary real estate related services, for example, arranging a house inspection, arranging a mortgage and finding a real estate lawyer.

8) If you are selling your home, does the agent have a plan of attack for marketing your house. MLS, ads, open houses?

9) Not all agents work the same schedule. If you are only available to view properties on Sundays, make sure your agent works weekends. Communicate your availability during your interview with them.

10) This isn't a deal breaker, but if your sales representative has a website, that is a very good way of gathering even more information about them and seeing what affiliations they have.

Did you know our children are struggling in school?

Latino students are struggling in our schools, but nothing is being done! As parents, we must support our children as they make their way through school and do everything we can to empower them during this time in order to succeed. 

Below is an article from Fox News Latino describing a study done of 60 Latino students in various Toronto high schools and the struggles they face.

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Pedro, a 10th grader whose family emigrated from Colombia a few years ago, was labeled a slow learner because he didn’t speak English. Rita, a high school student, said that when she arrived from Mexico, she was shunned and berated by her peers for not knowing English.

Both are students in the Toronto school district, which, with over 250,000 students and 600 schools, is both the largest in Canada and the one with the most Latin American students. And both were part of a study released last month which examined Toronto’s high Latino drop-out rate: About 40 percent of these students—nearly double the number of the overall population—fail to finish high school.

Compared to generations of Latin American migration to the U.S., large numbers of Hispanics started settling in Canada relatively recently. The first wave came in the 1970s, as political asylum seekers fled South American dictatorships. The largest wave, however, came after 2000, when the immigration debate in the U.S. became most heated.

About 350,000 Latin Americans are now in Canada, where the overall population is about 32 million. The largest concentration – a little more than a third – have settled in Toronto. But some say that the Canadian school system was not prepared for a sudden influx of Spanish speakers – which now total about 5,200 – and the young Latinos who migrated there have paid the consequences.

Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández, an education professor who headed up the University of Toronto’s years-long study, said many students told researchers scarce resources for Spanish speakers and economic stress impacted their performance.

They also said teachers and their peers had such negative stereotypes about them, that it bred low expectations.

“In the U.S., depending on where you live, all the stereotypes about Latinos tend to be bad, but at least there are a lot of stereotypes,” said Gaztambide-Fernández, whose final report, released this month, was 103 pages long. “What we found in Canada was that everyone assumes that because you are Latin American, you are Mexican. And because you are Mexican, you are poor, lazy and you belong to a gang. That was it.”

Gaztambide-Fernández believes the narrow view may be due to Latinos’ relatively recent arrival. “The only images many Canadians consume of Latin Americans are those that come from Hollywood movies,” he said.

A Puerto Rican Harvard University graduate, Gaztambide-Fernández moved to Toronto from Boston in 2006, around the time the Toronto school district began collecting demographic information about its students.

It was the first time the city was able to look into student success based on race and ethnicity, which turned out to be a long and arduous task. But when the results came in, the school district realized Latin Americans were dropping out at double of rate of the rest of the student population. No one knew why, so a group of Hispanic Torontonians decided to find out.

Sixty students from six Toronto high schools filled out surveys and were interviewed in focus groups or alone. Over and over again, Gaztambide-Fernández said, the students complained about not having enough Spanish-speaking support or ESL classes. Many reported they had to work to help their families, and said juggling those hours with school was affecting their class work. They also said the negative stereotypes sapped them of academic motivation.

“It is like a little burlap sack, you throw in discrimination, you throw in work, you throw in that you have no money, you throw in that, well, you don’t like school, you throw in this and you throw in that, and the burlap sack gets heavy,” said Mercedes, a 12th grader who was interviewed for the study, which published only first names. “It is not just one factor that leads you leave school.”

The 250,000-student Toronto school district, the largest in Canada, acknowledges that Latino students have struggled there. Members of the school board say they have tried to address the group’s problems in the past but nothing has worked. But now, following the University of Toronto study, the school board plans to launch a more far-reaching program.

The school board will adopt a series of recommendations in the study and has already reached out to the community, universities – and even school officials in New York – to address the issue.

“It is very clear to us that in order to help specific students improve their achievement we have to have innovative approaches,” said Jim Spyropoulos, Coordinating Superintendent for Inclusive Schools at the Toronto District School Board. “If we keep doing the same things, we are going to keep getting the same results.”

As part of its efforts, the district will kick off a pilot program in February that will offer cultural sensitivity classes to teachers so they could understand the Latin American culture, offer support programs for newcomers, and give low-income students part-time jobs at the school. Latin American history courses will also be part of the curriculum.

If the pilot program is successful, it will expand to all schools.

“What our kids keep telling us is, 'they don’t get us',” said Spyropoulos of the school board. “This is our best attempt to try and support them.”

To reach the writer, email carolyn.salazar@foxnewslatino.com

Entrevista del 23 de febrero en AM1610 Voces Latinas

Aquí se encuentra la entrevista del 23 de febrero de Antonio Guerrero con Silvia Mendez en radio AM1610 Voces Latinas.

Haz click en el logo para escuchar la entrevista grabada.

Antonio Guerrero será en la radio hoy

Escuchen al programa en Voces Latinas 1610AM a las 7:15pm donde Antonio hablará otra vez de temas relacionados con la Ley Familiar.


Haga click sobre el logo de Voces Latinas para escuchar.

       en     

Mastercard commercial

This is somewhat out of character, however this video caught our interest, because of the Spanish of course!


We sat mesmerized, not knowing what the commercial was for. We threw out a string of guesses, and were then surprised to see that it was for Mastercard!


For those who haven't seen this, check it out.

Will you be participating in Earth Hour 2011?

Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million individuals and more than 2,000 businesses turned their lights off for one hour to take a stand against climate change. 

Last year on March 27, 2010, a record 128 countries and territories  united across the globe making it the largest voluntary action ever witnessed.

Earth Hour is a worldwide event started by the World Wildlife Fund that rallies millions of people to show support for action on climate change. This year, after the lights come back on, residents are being challenged to think about what else they can do to make a difference and be part of a solution.

Last year, Hydro One Brampton reported a five per cent drop in power usage in Brampton, which is equal to 21.7 megawatts, or enough electricity to power 18,000 homes.

Climate change is the biggest environmental threat to life on Earth wreaking havoc with the natural systems that

regulate the earth’s climate: 

• Melting glaciers and ice caps on every continent, creating heat waves, and dehydrating forests and

wetlands

• Affecting the lives and communities of everyone on the planet

On average, every person in the world is making a footprint 50% more than what the planet actually produces per person, per year. In other words, it takes 1.5 Earths of productivity to support humanity each year, but we have

only 1 Earth!

Half our footprint is carbon from fossil fuel emissions. Canada is one of the top 10 nations contributing to global climate change. While other leading countries of the world are pioneering green energy technologies and solutions, we are holding on to an old strategy based on developing increasingly carbon-intensive forms of energy in the Arctic and the tar sands. We must value carbon more, consume less, insulate better, and hasten the switch to alternative fuels like wind, solar, tidal and hydropower. WWF-Canada is calling on business and political leaders to drive this fundamental shift. Our success will ensure that Canada is on the right path for future generations, our economy and the planet.

Guerrero Law’s employees will be participating by switching off their lights for Earth Hour at home. Antonio Guerrero has prepared his guitar to play music by candlelight for his family during that hour.

What will you be doing during Earth Hour?

If you need ideas, visit the Earth Hour website to find out how you can participate.

Guerrero Law in Mexico City / Guerrero Law en la Ciudad de México D.F.

Guerrero Law is very excited to announce the expansion of its office to Mexico City.


We are pleased to welcome Gabriela Guerrero to our team, and look forward to working with her.

Our office in Mexico City can be found at the following address:

División del Norte 1167
2o. Piso, Colonia del Valle
C.P. 03100, México D.F.

To reach us by phone from within Mexico, contact: 5350-6592
From outside Mexico, we can be reached at: +1 (416) 840-5807

Guerrero Law tiene el placer de anunciar la expansión de su oficina a la Ciudad de México D.F. 


Damos la bienvenida a Gabriela Guerrero a nuestro equipo quien será nuestra representante en México.


Nuestra oficina en México, D.F. se encuentra a la siguiente dirección:

División del Norte 1167
2o. Piso, Colonia del Valle
C.P. 03100, México D.F.

Para contactarnos por teléfono desde México: 5350-6592

De fuera de México, nos pueden contactar al: +1 (416) 840-5807