Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Urgent philosophical query for blog readers

Applying "Beginners' Mind" to the apparently insoluble question of why a wealthy country like Australia can't afford to house its citizens so that they can put down some roots and get their lives into some kind of order, DH realises that she doesn't even understand the basics.
 
So please help her to get a grip on first principles 
 
Can anyone remind DH why it is that such a huge deposit is required to climb up the slippery slope to home ownership in the first place?.
 
Is there a genuine economic reason for this,  inscribed in the Laws of Nature, or is this simply some kind of moral hurdle / rationing device dreamed up by the same miserable wretches who brought us the Protestant Work Ethic and its horrible corollary, John Howard? 
 
Why can't everyone simply stake out a claim on a property, promise faithfully to love, honour and be responsible for it for ever and ever amen, and then start paying the builders.  
 
Is this a way of saying that only people with inherited property, (and in the case of White Australia, we know exactly the lofty morality with which they acquired their property in the first place),  or those with a capacity for self-denial during the best years of their lives, deserve a home?
 
AHA!!! Is it because builders require some capital to start with, which the banks must provide?
 
Why can't our taxes provide this startup capital?
 
AHA!!! (2).  That's called Public Housing!!! Now DH gets it!
 
Yeah but,...  Public Housing is when the Government hires so-called architects deliberately selected on the basis of their loathing of humanity and their lack of a sense of design and beauty to go out of their way to create housing of such ugliness and disutility that it won't upset miserable wretches  who think the only way to a moral life is through self-flagellation and parsimony.
 
To be continued - DH is off to her one-stop self-flagellation shop aka "The Job" to save up for next months bus fare to "The Job"
 
 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have a better question: Can anyone tell me why we have such an obsession with striving to own things we can only purchase with someone else's money?

Suggestion: Don't buy a home when you're young. It'll just weigh you down, both with debt and responsibility. Instead of borrowing someone else's money, only to pay through the nose for the privilege, pile every cent you can muster into the bank and 'safe' investments, but most importantly, into a good super fund.

We usually do things altogether the wrong way around. We use our wages to service an extravagant mortgage, and we rely on our super for our retirement nest egg (cash). It's insanity to pay someone for the privilege of using their money!

Pile money into your super and when it ripens, you will have all the cash you need to buy the home you need for your retirement, and your savings becomes your nest egg. Either way you achieve the same end result, but one way you do it with your own money, upfront, with no interest going to anyone except from the bank to you.

And remember, when you retire you won't want to live in Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane et al. You'll want to move to the country, where you will not need a wheelbarrow full of loot to buy a comfortable home, on acreage even!

Not owning a home while you're young is a great way to keep your employment options as broad as possible. The freedom is also an incentive to move about more, taking your kids with you, to explore new places and lifestyles, without the hassle of worrying about employing an agent to manage that house you're trying to pay off, all the while dreading those words "...new tenants are moving in to your house..!" This is gut wrenching stuff, as you wait in Melbourne for the report from your property manager in Tasmania, hoping the tenants don't turn out to be the "tenants from hell" that demolish all the housed Today-Tonight features with monotonous regularity.

And guess what...the only reason we have a dearth of available and competitively priced rental properties available, if because everyone wants to buy, not rent. Some idiot once said, "rent is dead money" and the fools around him believed the line and ran with it! Dead money is the money you pay a third party for the use of their money....that's dead money!

In Europe and Scandinavia their is no shortage of rental properties, simply because the culture among the young is a rental culture. There will be no increase in rental availability until we create the demand, and there will be no solution to the rental affordability crisis until we create a climate of competition based on demand and sufficient supply.

Sapere aude

Garry