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We bought our house in 2013 in Bromley which is about 10 minutes from the Chch CBD, but since it's the eastern side of Chch, it's not a desireable part of town, so we got a 3 bedroom house and garage for $300,000. Kiwisaver and the first home grant for the deposit.
However, we have two full-time incomes and no children, so there's a big leg up, but also a biological ticking time bomb which may end up costing the taxpayer a packet for fertility treatment...
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@mariner4life said in Housing hornets' nest:
the old "stop eating at cafes so you can save for a house" argument probably looks pretty fucking unbelievable when it costs you $800K to buy a house, and the bank will only lend you 80% of that. $160K is a fuck load of lattes and smashed avo on toast. Especially given the rental market.
It's more the principle than the latte. If people buy a latte a day, they might waste their money on other things too. At the end of the day, most people have to make sacrifices. Most people can't have it all.
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I'm kind of in two minds on this argument.
FUCKING WHINERS ARGUMENT
I give @Virgil a thumbs up on the "fucking kids don't know how to sacrifice these days!" because I do see a lot of them paying stupid amounts of rent BUT still being able to afford an overseas holiday every year. Then bitching because they can't afford to live where they want i.e. Newtown in trendy boho inner-city Sydney.News flash, fuckers: there are houses you can afford, but not where you want to live. And especially if you're single.
SYMPATHETIC MIDDLE AGED GUY ARGUMENT
Real estate in Sydney is more mental than Donald Trump on bath salts. We bought our first house in late 2000 for under $270K. Put a second storey on it 6 years later for $95K and then sold in 2013 for $590K.Sounds great except the place we moved to was $790K. But its now in a suburb with a median price of about $1M, despite being an hour from the CBD by public transport, which is (as I said) mental.
IN SUMMARY
I'm jealous of those kids and their lifestyle and their trips overseas and whatnot. I have to wait until I'm retired for that shit, whereupon I'll be too old to enjoy a coke-fuelled trip through South American anyway.
BUT if you're going to go rack up some awesome experiences, they're going to cost money, and you can't have it all.
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@taniwharugby said in Housing hornets' nest:
@NTA apparently your kids are more than wealth, they complete your life, once you have them, you dont need anything else (least you cant afford it so you convince yourself thats the truth)
Says people with lots of kids and little money
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@taniwharugby said in Housing hornets' nest:
@NTA apparently your kids are more than wealth, they complete your life, once you have them, you dont need anything else (least you cant afford it so you convince yourself thats the truth)
Hahahaha oh yeah and they keep you young too apparently.
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Wait... that is all bullshit??!! fucks sake guys that would have been good to know 10 months ago!
I have sympathy for the uphill climb heaps of folks are facing if home ownership is a goal. That's a huge spectrum from folks who piss away their cash, to those that work smart and hard but can't quite pull it together for whatever reason, plus everything else in between.
Dad taught us to sort your bills first. If that's a struggle then you need to earn more or spend less. When it came to property time for us he was all about thinking about what size mortgage you could theoretically pay, versus the one you actually want to pay. Working in some basic math around rates going up or down etc.
That led us to buy in a suburb that isn't as salubrious as it's neighbours (Whitby is one). But we could afford the repayments, on what are high rates in today's market, on one income - that felt like a good safety net and covered us in case kids came earlier on in the piece.
Looking back (to mid 2000's) it's a bit crazy what the banks offered Mr and Mrs PBZ... over 600K with no deposit, when our combined income was ok but hardly what I'd be comfortable servicing a mortgage of that size on.
I do a bit of work around literacy and numeracy in tertiary training and workplaces. HUGE volumes of folks needing a better level of skills across the board. Financial literacy is chasing hard on the heels and obviously connects to maths skills. Makes things even tougher.
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@NTA said in Housing hornets' nest:
I'm kind of in two minds on this argument.
FUCKING WHINERS ARGUMENT
I give @Virgil a thumbs up on the "fucking kids don't know how to sacrifice these days!" because I do see a lot of them paying stupid amounts of rent BUT still being able to afford an overseas holiday every year. Then bitching because they can't afford to live where they want i.e. Newtown in trendy boho inner-city Sydney.News flash, fuckers: there are houses you can afford, but not where you want to live. And especially if you're single.
SYMPATHETIC MIDDLE AGED GUY ARGUMENT
Real estate in Sydney is more mental than Donald Trump on bath salts. We bought our first house in late 2000 for under $270K. Put a second storey on it 6 years later for $95K and then sold in 2013 for $590K.Sounds great except the place we moved to was $790K. But its now in a suburb with a median price of about $1M, despite being an hour from the CBD by public transport, which is (as I said) mental.
IN SUMMARY
I'm jealous of those kids and their lifestyle and their trips overseas and whatnot. I have to wait until I'm retired for that shit, whereupon I'll be too old to enjoy a coke-fuelled trip through South American anyway.
BUT if you're going to go rack up some awesome experiences, they're going to cost money, and you can't have it all.
Yeah I mean you can blame the lattรฉs and avocado all you like, but some people could live on noodles and water for decades and never be able to save for the shittiest little shack in a place like Sydney. 1 million bucks from the CBD? Unless it's a farking cattle ranch, that is farking insane.
Brisbane isn't too bad. Some parts are ridiculous, but there are some really good value places. Units close to the CBD are surprisingly affordable due to oversupply.
What is weird is that there is one suburb, 16km from the CBD, that the Chinese have zeroed in on and is going ape shit in terms of prices. The prices there are ridiculous for an area that is, to put it mildly, pretty shit.
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@Rancid-Schnitzel said in Housing hornets' nest:
What is weird is that there is one suburb, 16km from the CBD, that the Chinese have zeroed in on and is going ape shit in terms of prices. The prices there are ridiculous for an area that is, to put it mildly, pretty shit.
Sounds a bit like Eastwood (or "Eastwoong" as some lairs are calling it). Older, post-war builds on what was the edge of Sydney. Lovely trees and parks and whatnot, but some of that shit is just falling down.
And I don't get it either.
Brisvegas and Melbourne are in a bit of an oversupply crisis for apartments. Apparently there are some good prices to be had BUT you might struggle to rent them out.
I suppose I was extremely lucky to get in when I did. I worry a bit for the kids, but then the landscape will be totally fucking different when they're heading into the market, and I suppose at this point I'll be helping them in some fashion.
Maybe they can rent my investment property off me If I ever get one.
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@NTA said in Housing hornets' nest:
@Rancid-Schnitzel said in Housing hornets' nest:
What is weird is that there is one suburb, 16km from the CBD, that the Chinese have zeroed in on and is going ape shit in terms of prices. The prices there are ridiculous for an area that is, to put it mildly, pretty shit.
Sounds a bit like Eastwood (or "Eastwoong" as some lairs are calling it). Older, post-war builds on what was the edge of Sydney. Lovely trees and parks and whatnot, but some of that shit is just falling down.
And I don't get it either.
Brisvegas and Melbourne are in a bit of an oversupply crisis for apartments. Apparently there are some good prices to be had BUT you might struggle to rent them out.
I suppose I was extremely lucky to get in when I did. I worry a bit for the kids, but then the landscape will be totally fucking different when they're heading into the market, and I suppose at this point I'll be helping them in some fashion.
Maybe they can rent my investment property off me If I ever get one.
Yep, it is a very mixed market here at the moment. Some suburbs going off, others going to shit. And, yes finding tenants is a real concern. We sold our investment property late last year and I was very happy to get rid of the farking thing.
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One of the things that has struck me is the first 3 houses I lived in as a kid were fricking shitholes. Old drafty places that my old man spent every weekend working on, "gardens" that were old stumps, blackberry & so on. I was 25 before I lived in a house with 2 toilets. My neice is currrently house hunting with her boyfriend & every house they looked at is pretty much perfect, ensuites, landscaped lawns. Its basically finished.
A fucking ensuite in a "starter" house. One of our places "technically" had a second toilet. It was in the garage and had a curtain not a door.
On the flip side I'm not sure the current 20-30 year old generation have been taught the basic skills to replace a tap washer let alone re-do a house. So even if they bought a shit hole they'd have to pay for someone to do it. We did up all our houses & it was always just my old man & my mum painting & knocking out walls & wallpapering & so on. Its all good to tell young kids to do that, but its a learned skill, if they didn't learn it they aint got it. My grandad taught my dad a huge amount, he taught me a fair bit, I'll realistically pass down phoning a Polish bloke to my kids.
I think there's also a case that those shithole houses are bought up buy speculators & professionals, not 1st timers, you go try buy a meth house in NZ its not 20 young couples bidding against you, its 5 professional builders.
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@gollum that's houses now. They are all built big. All have ensuites. Those shitholes you lived in 30 years were done up and flipped years ago; or bulldozed. Building codes; compulsory building inspections; insurance requirements; bank lending criteria, council red tape, all of those things make what you talk about very very hard.
A woman who works for me bought a doer-upper just before christmas. It sounds like the worst thing in the world. They have spent every spare moment since then working on it. Tiling, painting etc. They are lucky her husband is a tradie, otherwise they could never do it. And the kids just have to suck it up, mum and dad need to work on the house.
There have been a few articles here on the dramatic slow-down in building approvals. It appears there is demand to build, but there are so many roadblocks. Council regulations get tighter every year (some of the hoops we have had to jump through, some resulting in major redesign). The guys building on either side of us had the same issues. We also ran in to issues with the bank, as they will lend on value, not price. So they employed a valuer to value a house that hadn't even been certified yet, let alone build. We were lucky that we could afford the gap between valuation and price. The guy next to us could not, so had to scrap his plans and start again. Apparently it is a significant issue here in Cairns, so either the build price, or the valuation model, is out of whack.
Housing is a fucking nightmare.
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my first home (bought in 2004 after I came back from England) had wooden window frames, shitty wallpaper and in need of a paint inside and out.
We got aluminium joinery throughout, this created another issue...a draughty house keeps fresh air so doesn't have much condensation, aluminium sealed her up tight, so we had to install a DVS to deal with that...we re-roofed, re-carpeted, stripped walls, painted, had insulation blown into the outer walls of bedrooms, new kitchen, added an office/small bedroom, heat pump and fenced the property...
What we sold it for, I reckon we only made $30k on it after taking into account what we spent over the 8 years we were there, but most of it needed sorting so we could live in a healthy home.
We built our next one, always spending money on the garden now!!
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Yep single glazed aluminium windows suck , if you can pay the extra go for thermally broken double glazed.
There is still a decent amount you can do on your house if you want to under Schedule 1 so it's worth a look if you do want to do some work to your house.Also I find the whole idea of McMansions bizarre, they cost more to heat , more to paint , more to maintain etc and studies have shown that people only use a small percentage of the space anyway . I'm enjoying the articles about tiny houses , some of them are very well thought out.
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we never considered double glazing when we did our old place, but have double glazing in our new house, for those 4 days of the year it gets that cold
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@jegga I won't say much, as the new one we are building is pretty big, but designed for in 8 years time when we have two teenage boys.
The ones i don't understand are where you buy a small section and fill it with house. And your neighbours do the same. And everyone is just jammed in.
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@mariner4life that is all to do with zoning under the council plans.
Properly in town they are allowed to build closer to the boundaries, less issues with daylight angles and stuff....but other designated areas may have other regulations around property sizes for sub-division and density.
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@mariner4life said in Housing hornets' nest:
@jegga I won't say much, as the new one we are building is pretty big, but designed for in 8 years time when we have two teenage boys.
The ones i don't understand are where you buy a small section and fill it with house. And your neighbours do the same. And everyone is just jammed in.
There's lots of new building where I work, I drive around and see the new empty sections for sale. They often have little sign posts showing the size of the section. Most average around 400sq mtrs, tho I have seen a few at 300 - 350 sqm.
Housing hornets' nest