Was Burying a Home Now a Mistake?

 Well thanks for the input, guys, I'm very happy to read it all.  And my apologies for my typo on the title of this thread – 'burying' a home? Must have a raised a few eyebrows here and there.  I would change it but I don't believe there's any way for me to do so, perhaps the moderator can/will.  Perhaps it was some kind of Freudian slip. 

 We are trying to do as has been suggested:  improve the home and pay more into the loan as we go.  I'm in the process of pouring a slab for the little garden shed we bought and erected and then we plan a twin carport and then perhaps a serious shed that can be used as a workshop for all of us,  me, mum and the kids.

The home was in excellent condition having been repainted by the housing trust – and repaired, I'd say, everywhere inside – before we got it.  And we'll try to keep it that way.

But the whole thing has been and still is an eye opener and a wake-up call to me.

I had no idea so many Australians lived in such poor conditions.   You don't get much for $130,000.   It's okay.  We are adequately housed. It is clean, modern, comfortable, it's nice, it's okay, don't get me wrong, I'm not pleading that we're in  inadequate substandard housing, no.

But it is a tiny semi-detached place. I didn't even realise semi-detached existed in this country. Excuse my incredible blind ignorance.  We are using two of the rooms, until the shed is ready, to store stuff we brough with us that we'd no place to put – and we didn't have a mile of stuff.  Two of the bedrooms are just like sections of wide passage – no wider than the old wooden Queensland house verandah sleepout.   Well, one of them is precisely that, I'd say, the back verandah boarded in and made into a 'bedroom' so it becomes a 'three bedroom' house. An invalid description, properly, I'd say. 

And what it is made of I don't know.  Cardboard is what I call it.  I suspect it may be Gyprock because of what a tradie said in a shop when I was buying a tv cable socket thing  'This goes through your Gyprock'.    But the interior walls are a couple of sheets of it. Flimsy, thin, sound carries everywhere.  The exterior walls are 'clinker built' is the nautical way of saying it.  Planks overlaying each other.  Planks of a thicker Gyprock I think.

It's like a tiny jigsaw puzzle cardboard box.

We knew, of course, what it was before we bought it and bought it because it was in excellent condition and the block was large enough and this and that and the other….

But I was thinking we were one of the tiny minority at the bottom of the whole heap.

So surprised to find whole suburbs built this way.  We're not in a tiny minority at all.  We seem to be part of the lower end of mainstream Australia.  At least in this part of the world.

That's my first kind of 'social awareness' awakening that it has given me.

But then I thought about the economics as prompted this thread in the beginning.  And I thought about the current 'financial crisis' and I learned about the 1990 17% interest rates and it began to dawn on me that buying a house and settling down in your tame, timid, polite, law abiding, ungreedy, docile, hard working proletarian way to years of drudgery in some whacker job and devoting decades to rearing kids and paying off the mortgage was not the grim, grey half-life made bearable by the knowledge of the value of child rearing and the certainty of success that I'd thought it was. Or is.

No.  More like you're a cannon fodder soldier in the front line. Liable to lose everything after years of vain attempts to keep up with rising interest rates.   Just like a soldier eventually dying after numerous wounds.

How many people in this country have suffered this? How many foreclosures were there in 1990?  How many foreclosures are there per year as a national average?  What is the human suffering involved in this?  How can we say we have a government and a caring society when this is the base line situation?

The vast difference between ourselves and the aboriginal population that never gets bridged and never gets talked about and that gives rise to all the strain and tension between the two groups is that the aboriginal always has a home, a right to live and exist, from birth.  Yes, okay, it is laughable you might say, when you look at the humpy he calls a home.  Or the tree he sleeps under that he calls a home tonight.

But it is not laughable at all.  It is a mindset we're talking about.  He has a right to sleep under that tree. He has a right to build that humpy. He has a right, if he wished, to build a palace.  He is always on his own land.  He always has land. He is always 'possessed' of his land, his birthright.

But we? What do we have?  Nothing.  Our birthright is to have nothing.  There is no tree you have a right to sleep under. There is nowhere you have the right to build a humpy.  There is definitely no place you have the right to build a palace.

We are part owners, joint owners, of this land just as the aboriginal is joint owner of his land.  We think.  But in our case it is not true. We have to buy our own land from ourselves.  At  ridiculous prices.  $100,000 per quarter acre would be cheap  I'd guess.

And having done that and  borrowed money to do it and having built a house or  bought one then we're at the mercy of the vagaries of the money market, etc.   We can be blown out of the water at any time and made homeless again, dispossessed  people again.

That's not to mention the ongoing rates and taxes.

It seems to me to be a no-brainer that we should have available to us from birth the right to a piece of land to call our own and if that can't or won't be done then we should at the very least be able to purchase something at a guaranteed fixed low rate of interest, or set percentage of our different income streams or somesuch.  i.e. we should have some tenure security as owners, possessors, inheritors, guardians and parts of this land.

Excuse my naivete. I had not thought that any Australian was ever foreclosed on.  If pushed I would have surmised that greedy buggers buying way beyond their means may get foreclosed on and so they should, I would have said, serve them right.  But I hadn't lumped them in with the common ruck.

Belatedly I realise it is the common ruck that bears the weight of all these tides of foreclosure.  How could I have been so dumb? I know full well the world exists on the shoulders of the poor.  My clothing is made by the peasant poor of China, most of my tools, and so on…  we all know how it is.

But somehow I hadn't thought this vicious truth pertained here in the lucky country. What a fool I am.

I'll do some Googling.  I'll do some research.  I'll try and gauge the extent of the pain and harm brought by rising interest rates and foreclosures to the ordinary people.

It is like the black Saturday tragedies.  They are ongoing.  Immeasurable pain, brought to ordinary people, an never a hint of it effects my life. It is ongoing but I know nothing of it.   So also this economic housing thing.  It must be all around.  How about all these people losing their jobs in this current crisis?  How many of them are finding they can't pay their mortgages?

What about the house prices? I saw something yesterday quoting $400,000 and $500,000 as ordinary house prices in some cities! Is that true? Is that right?  How can an ordinary family possibly service debts like that once interest rates begin to rise?

You know where I'm from? I'm from the bush.  I've got a little block – house block – in the bush with a shed on it where I live and work in my batchelor days, happily getting up to greet the sun and the trees and the birdsong and thank god I'm in this great country without a care in the world. 

But  what did I know?  It is not for most Australian like that at all, is it?  They're waking to a concrete jungle with the ceaseless roar of traffic all around, cheek by jowl with their neighbours,  the constant pressure to meet mortgages and rates and taxes,  the endless road hassle with police lurking like highwaymen around every corner….

I didn't know, mate.  I didn't know.

I'll do what I must do and then I'll get myself and my kids out of it as soon as I can.  I think it is deplorable.

That's a bit of a rave, guys,  even a rage perhaps….   sorry,  it wasn't planned.  It just sort of spilled out.  It is 7.00 a.m. and the first crack of dawn is in the sky.  It's making me nostalgic for my bush home I guess.

All the best to you all.

regards,,

 ab