Australian Interest Rates and me...

The thing about living in Australia is that - it is the great Australian Dream to own your own home. Its the mentality of "why should I pay for someone else's mortgage when I can pay my own". But then again, BF had this mentality as well so perhaps its a Caucasian thing. It is not normal in Asia to own your own property until you are well in your 30's whereelse over here, you see ppl as young as 21 getting onto the property ladder, something that still amazes me as lets be honest, at 21, I was still in uni and definitely not equipped with the tools to manage my own money ..what else thinking of getting into such a big debt to my name. Saying that though, the Gen-Y's and Gen-X's in Australia are complaining that it is getting harder to get onto the market. The median house price is Melbourne is currently around $500,000 and gets more expensive as you get closer to the CBD. I currently live 18km's from the CBD and this is actually considered close considering that any suburb within 90km's from the CBD is still considered Melbourne these days.

Yes, buying a home is no piece of cake in Melbourne.

The Australian property market unlike the other developed countries namely US and UK had a slight property dip in late 2008, early 2009 before it picked up again and then just went from strength to strength. It is the only country where the interest rate never went down lower than 2% and the official RBA rate is currently is at 4.5% and the Bank rates is anywhere between 6.5% to 7.2%! Talk about being slugged and there are talks of at least 3 to 4 more rate hikes within the next few months. On top of that, we've got really exorbitant stamp duty taxes (both Govt and state) on top. *Ouch*!

I mean, living in the city, buying OR renting really means you have the smaller apartment or less space (unless of course you are right loaded which means there would not be a problem buying into the property market in the 1st place!). At the end of the day, it is a lifestyle choice.

More on my chain of thoughts when it comes to property buying later.