The thing no one tells you is if you buy an established house, everything breaks within the first 12 months. Oven, heater, hot water, it’s a never ending money pit. Being a renter sucks no doubt, but you can always breach a landlord if they refuse to fix shit.
The other thing they don’t mention is that even if you buy a new house or do a full renovation, all the big things like kitchen and bathroom renovations and replacing decks, roofs etc - they all need doing about the time you want to retire. So just planning to pay off your house before then is not enough, you need to plan to also have enough to do some major work on it.
The timing is something that worked fine when you could buy a house by 30 and take 20 years to pay it off, you had plenty of time to then pay for extra work on the house etc. after the mortgage was paid, but when you push back the age you can purchase and extend the loan period it makes it a lot more difficult.
it’s actually been interesting looking at stuff. There were some places that the sellers should have been shot for their asking price - talking cracks to the outside you could fit a small child into, rampant mould, fire hazards. Then there were the places that were basically “set and forget” and obviously hadn’t been updated since the owners got their retirement payout. Our place is old, but the hot water was replaced with instant at some point, the kitchen hasn’t been done since the 80’s except the stovetop and oven, which are models from the early 2000’s. The ducted heater died, but we were expecting that, it was from 1979 and we were replacing it with reverse cycle to give us aircon. It lasted our first winter, so win there.
Meanwhile a place we rented for 16 years literally had the side rotting off in something we’d been warning the owner about since 2008. Cunt.
The thing no one tells you is if you buy an established house, everything breaks within the first 12 months. Oven, heater, hot water, it’s a never ending money pit. Being a renter sucks no doubt, but you can always breach a landlord if they refuse to fix shit.
The other thing they don’t mention is that even if you buy a new house or do a full renovation, all the big things like kitchen and bathroom renovations and replacing decks, roofs etc - they all need doing about the time you want to retire. So just planning to pay off your house before then is not enough, you need to plan to also have enough to do some major work on it.
The timing is something that worked fine when you could buy a house by 30 and take 20 years to pay it off, you had plenty of time to then pay for extra work on the house etc. after the mortgage was paid, but when you push back the age you can purchase and extend the loan period it makes it a lot more difficult.
…no? And our house was built in 1962. Also getting a landlord to fix anything is increasingly an exercise in futility
You got lucky by the sounds of it, almost all of my mates had a similar experience spread out in the outer east/southeast.
Moorabbin here, so stolidly SE
Guessing they bought new builds? We deliberately avoided those for very good reasons
Mine’s early 2000’s. A mates was 80’s I think. Another was 90’s.
it’s actually been interesting looking at stuff. There were some places that the sellers should have been shot for their asking price - talking cracks to the outside you could fit a small child into, rampant mould, fire hazards. Then there were the places that were basically “set and forget” and obviously hadn’t been updated since the owners got their retirement payout. Our place is old, but the hot water was replaced with instant at some point, the kitchen hasn’t been done since the 80’s except the stovetop and oven, which are models from the early 2000’s. The ducted heater died, but we were expecting that, it was from 1979 and we were replacing it with reverse cycle to give us aircon. It lasted our first winter, so win there.
Meanwhile a place we rented for 16 years literally had the side rotting off in something we’d been warning the owner about since 2008. Cunt.
I’d rather that and call it mine, than feel like I’m a roach in someone else’s house haha
I’d trade roaches for my rodents. Probably.