It will most likely occur just after you’ve found the house of your dreams and you make your first mortgage payment. The housing market will crumble and you’ll be left thinking, if only I waited a bit longer I could have got away with paying half as much. You could be like me, locking in some of your debt at a high rate and then watch interest rates sink to their lowest levels in history. Either way Murphy’s law, you’ll never pick the right time, just the right time for you! In hindsight I wish I’d bought 15 years ago, before the prices got ridiculous, but then, what about all the life experience I gained overseas during that time – it was priceless. With average prices in Perth and Brisbane predicted to hit a million dollars by 2020 Sydney could have million dollar median house prices before December – THIS YEAR! That’s right 2015.
So is it time to start paddling your way across to France and get yourself a castle. Well, apart from difficulties with language, and learning to eat frogs and snails, it is still Australia, and still the best bloody country in the world that I’ve been to. Yes, we do have the biggest muppet in world politics since George W, yes we seem to think that supporting the fossil fuel industry and not investing in our manufacturing industries is a good idea, but it’s always darkest before the dawn and as Cog said, “change is constant.” The counter-balance to this growth in prices is the low interest rates, however it is when they can no longer be maintained and they start to rise that people are going to get caught out. Now I don’t want to be like my parents’ generation sometime in the future complaining about 18% interest rates (when in hindsight with their percentage of average earnings being minimal in comparison to what it is now) I’d like to think that someone out there has an idea to help ease the bubble, before it bursts. Every second person will tell you that you should rent for as long as you can, but there is something about buying your own home, that is truly special. We do need to do something in this country to make this dream possible for more first-home buyers and negative gearing needs to be given some attention. It’s not going to be an easy fix, and many of us will lose out in same way, but the way we are living in this country is not the way I’d like to think is in the best interests for our children.