When you move to Canada and need to rent an apartment, the company or person you are renting from may ask you for advance rent. This is a common practice and usually 1 month rent is taken in advance. This is then adjusted when you leave.

But don’t end up paying more than what is necessary. Some landlords may try and take advantage of your lack of knowledge and may ask you to pay more. There have been cases of some newcomers paying even 12 months advance rent. This may be illegal, like in Ontario you are not allowed to do this.

If you are asked to pay a high amount, ask the landlord whether this is legal. You can also research it online and seek advice from government offices. You can even try to approach an immigrant serving agency to ask for their opinion. If the landlord can legally ask for more advance rent, then negotiate – you can negotiate with everyone in Canada to get a better deal. And there will always be other options that have better terms and conditions.

When choosing the place where you should immigrate in Canada, make sure you do your research well. Don’t just think that the best place is the big metros like Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal. Other smaller cities may offer you a good job that uses your talents, education and experience.

The best way to choose the ideal place to immigrate to is to find out where the jobs are in your targeted industry. You can do your research on the government website.

Also look at this research done by moneysense magazine. The research ranks the various cities in Canada on various parameters. The top 3 cities are Ottawa, followed by Burlington and then Kingston. The big metros unfortunately rank much lower.

Immigrating to Canada is a challenging task. There are so many things you need to take care of, you don’t know where to begin. And when you finally move to Canada, you feel like a fish out of water. To top it all there is so much competition to succeed with all the newcomers coming to Canada everyday, let alone the people that already here. To put this in perspective, when I arrived in Canada, more than 10,000 new immigrants entered with me in that month.

Learning from the experiences of other can hopefully give you a solution to your problems. At the minimum, you can use it as a starting point to build on. I have put down in this website my experiences and the experiences of other immigrants that I know. Many things I talk about are in hindsight as I also did not do it right when the first time.  So I hope you find this advice helpful, and if you know a better way please don’t hesitate to share it with me. I would add it to this website so that we all get ‘Success in Canada’.