Photo: David Klein Actor David Klein has been paying as much as a typical Toronto rent on his student debt since moving back in with his parents. The pandemic derailed David Klein’s burgeoning career in New York, but the 26-year-old was lucky to be able to return to the comforts of his childhood home in downtown Toronto. But with the cost of almost everything on a steep upward trajectory and currencies and interest rates working against him, Klein doesn’t expect to return to a more independent life for several more years. “I don’t have the income right now to support both the payment of a huge amount of student debt and the rent, which is going up a lot,” said Klein, a dual citizen who borrowed nearly $100,000 to attend the four-year theater school program. and was preparing for his first off-Broadway play when the pandemic hit in 2020. Toronto’s long-standing high cost of living has been matched by broader inflation this year, with prices for food, fuel, transportation and a range of other essentials and discretionary goods driven up by pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and worker shortages . Younger people are feeling the pinch more than older people because of differences in their spending habits, according to Toronto-Dominion Bank, which in March took a closer look at the demographic breakdown of price pain in the United States. “The cost of clothing, the cost of haircuts, a lot of grooming and styling products, it’s definitely up,” Klein said. “For someone who’s trying to maintain my looks, I pay more attention to that element.” Central banks, including the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve, have raised interest rates sharply to try to tame price increases, but that’s also hurting people like Klein and thousands of other post-secondary graduates trying to pay off debt. Klein has so far managed to pay off about half of his US dollar debt since returning to Canada, but the interest rate he pays on it rose to 5.5 per cent recently after dropping as low as 3.1 per cent in past. Meanwhile, wages in his restaurant job haven’t risen nearly as fast as everything else, and the weaker Canadian dollar against the greenback is adding to the crisis. “I feel less free in a way,” Klein said. “A lot of the cheap ways to live and get around in your 20s don’t really exist in the same way.” Consumer inflation rose to 8.1 per cent year-on-year in June, Statistics Canada said, its biggest annual change since 1983. The acceleration from a 7.7 per cent rise in May was mainly due to higher prices in natural gas, although seven of the eight main components rose by at least three percent. Excluding gasoline, the Consumer Price Index rose 6.5 percent year-on-year in June, following a 6.3 percent gain in May. Rent relief in Montreal Spencer Hunt wasn’t exactly forced out of Toronto by the high cost of living, but he and his girlfriend will be making a lot more money when they move to Montreal next month after she was accepted as a graduate student at McGill University. After dual jobs from home became too much for their $1,450-a-month one-bedroom basement apartment in Bloordale, the couple moved into a nearby two-bedroom in early 2021 that cost $1,880 a month. Hunt can continue to do his job providing technical support for medical imaging software in Montreal, where the couple has found a larger place for less than $1,800 in the Plateau-Mont Royal neighborhood. “It’s a bigger apartment than it is. it’s also two bedrooms, but there’s a living room – we don’t have that here – in a nicer location, relatively closer to the center than where we live now,” he said. Hunt does most of his grocery shopping and has noticed the price hike, and also says it’s harder to justify going out to hang out with friends these days. “It’s kind of hard because after the pandemic you want to go out to restaurants, get takeout, see people and hang out with them again, and it all adds up,” he said.
