We Got There!

We just bought our first home *insert smiley face*!

Amazing!....  hard to believe we made it and since we seem to have had a lot of curious people in our life wondering how we managed it, I decided to write a blog about our journey.

I know to most people it seems like an everyday, normal thing to do...  Not overly hard, or anything to crow about...  Well they don't have to read my blog do they ;)

I have noticed that we are an older couple in the first home market.  I never wanted to buy a house.  I saw it as only being a gigantic debt and not 'your biggest asset', as realty agents tend to spruik.

I do still view it as a massive debt, because ultimately the bank owns it and I now just effectively pay them rent (Rent to Own), instead of a private landlord.  There are however several benefits or 'assets' if you like to living in our own home.

I have waited a long time to get to a mental place where it seemed like a good idea.  This is mostly because of the changing real estate market in Australia, Brisbane in particular.

It used to be a lot cheaper to rent, than to buy!  You could live in a very nice house and pay less on a weekly basis, than a mortgage repayment for the privilege.  You were only locked into a short term contract and could move whenever you wanted, with minimal fuss, or cost to you personally.  Originally you did not have to pay for water, or rates etc.  It was a good option.

I first started thinking about buying my own home for real in 2006 but I did not really do anything about it for several years....  I had an epiphany one day as I watched our new neighbours move in.  It was an old lady and she moved all her pot plants and just all her accumulated 'stuff' and filled the yard of the house and made a temporary structure in the back of the house to be able to fit everything.  It just struck me as being really sad, that you would still have to think about moving house and dealing with real estates and temporary contracts, when you were in your 70's.  I thought about my Parents and I imagined how stressful it would be for them and us, if they had to do the same!

The Global Economic Crisis hit the housing market and consumer confidence went down.  The home loan interest rates started to go down as incentive for people to enter the housing market.  House prices started to decrease or at the very least stall....  The rents started just climbing and climbing because more people wanted to rent and less people wanted to buy.  Well that is my own understanding, interpretation and basic summary of the situation, I am sure economic gurus have a fancy way of saying all this?!

Then in the rental situation, they started to charge you for any extra water usage as well.  The tide had started to turn, the costs of renting were adding up!

I realised that it was getting close to a point where I might as well think about buying my own home because rents were approaching a point where they were higher than the cost of mortgage repayments!

How did this affect us as renters?!  We were living in a Brisbane suburb but then moved out to the inner edge of Ipswich and then moved again a bit further out each time.  This is because you could rent a bigger and relatively newer house in Ipswich for the same price, or cheaper than a smaller, older and with less mod cons in Brisbane.  The closer to the Brisbane CBD, the higher the rents, no matter how crap the housing.

To directly compare, we could rent an 8 yr old single level brick house in Ipswich: 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2 toilets, 2 living spaces plus kitchen, nice kitchen with modern appliances and dishwasher, built-in cupboards, double lock up garage with powered roller door, covered pergola area, with good insulation, air-conditioning, fans, security screens, heat pump hot water system for $310/ week.  You would pay almost exactly the same price for a small 20-40 yr old wooden house, in a not so desirable (interpretation 'cheaper') suburb of Brisbane: 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 toilet, 1 open plan small living space with kitchen, no built-in cupboards, basic kitchen, no lock up garage, no air-conditioning, no fans, no security screens.

However even that situation started changing in the end and I was glad that I had already started my plan to buy our own home and ramped it up over the 3 years we lived there.

At our last rental house, they were raising the rent by $10 every 6 months.  They were also charging us for all water costs.  The landlord paid only the standard rate for sewerage and water connection to the property each water bill.

In addition to this, the managing real estate agent was just a constant pain in the backside.  The minimum time frame between rental inspections set by the Rental Tenancy Authority is 3 months and our real estate would set their inspections for every 3 months on the dot.  They were not pleasant about it either, giving you a time frame of between 9 am and 12 pm that they may visit your property.  They also had the nasty habit of not giving you the minimum notice about pending inspections.  They always posted a letter about the upcoming inspection, on the start day of the notice period and I often did not receive it until the day before the inspection and sometimes, the morning of said inspection....  I notified them of this many times but was ignored....

I always liked to be present at these inspections and I had always been an excellent tenant.  One time I asked if they could set a specific time to come to my home so that I could ensure I was there and I got the 3rd degree....  "Why are you complaining about this?", "Should we be worried, have you done something to the property?", "If you are not there when we arrive we will just let ourselves in with our own key, we are legally allowed to do this and we will notify the authorities if the property is damaged"...  Huh?!  I just wanted to be in my home when a stranger came to visit!!!!

They did let themselves in too, they did not even knock, just used their own key.  One time, I was in the garage/ laundry (at the front of the home) waiting for the inspection and then when I went into the house, I was surprised to find a stranger standing in our lounge room.  No apology was given.  They also took pictures of our kitchen sink and all our living spaces every time they conducted an inspection and regardless of how clean it was!  A total invasion of privacy.

Add to this all the other 'maintenance inspections' that they organised several times throughout the year.  These kinds of inspections only require 1 days notice..  They had to inspect the smoke alarms and for termites, not to mention other little bits and pieces they decided needed to be checked throughout the year and also when stuff broke down etc.....

I was totally fed up with this constant intrusion in the end... I was living in a nice house with security screens, window locks and deadlocks and it was all obsolete because strangers had their own keys and could let themselves in whenever they bloody liked!!!

So this is supposed to be a blog about our first home but it seems to have turned into an "I hate real estate property managers" blog :)...  I guess it is relevant because it was a big part of why we decided to buy our own home!

When we did move forward with our dream it had reached a point with rents once again rising where we lived, so that we had to make the following decision:

1. Buy our own home around the suburb we were currently renting in that would have us paying roughly the same, or less weekly mortgage repayments than our previous rent.

2. Move further away from where we worked and closer to Ipswich, in order to rent a cheaper nice house.

3. Consider accepting a more basic home to rent around the suburb we currently lived in, without any nice mod cons and this would bring extra costs in itself (ie. buy wardrobes etc.).

We were amazed and very proud to be able to pull off option 1.