The State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane.
Australia is one of only three countries in the world that allow speculators to negative gear:
Deduction of negative gearing losses on property against income from other sources for the purpose of reducing income tax is illegal in the vast majority of countries, the exceptions being Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
“Amy and Wes Rogers are 32-year-old parents of two young boys and the owners of four investment properties, one of which they are selling because they are frightened the government may abandon negative gearing on investment properties.”
This cry-poor article in the Australian newspaper about a family with four investment properties made me feel sick. Seriously, there are struggling Australian families that can’t even afford one drastically overpriced dwelling to house their own family, let alone four as investments, or five if you count their own house.
At least there is a little schadenfreude thrown in for good measure.
But the market is working against the Rogers. The house has been on the market for more than 180 days and, although there have been many viewers, there have been no real offers and the agent has already persuaded them to drop the price by $20,000 to $290,000.
“And now they want us to drop it by another $35,000,” she says. “This house we are trying to sell is tied to another in the way we financed it, and, if we sell Oakdale at this low price, the bank will require a valuation on the other property that’s tied in, and then, if negative gearing laws change, we believe it will drop the value of that second property.” If that happened, they would be left with the much higher original debt to service.
My family’s rottweiler Rommel recently passed away with cancer, aged 8. He was a beautiful natured dog who will be dearly missed by all.
If you’re looking to rent a place in Australia, REFind is your best friend. It aggregates places to rent off all the major real estate sites, but it also shows you price reductions (by how much and when) and the length of time advertised. These are great pieces of information as you’ll get a much better deal if you can find a place that has been advertised for a long time as the landlord will be (even more) desperate to get someone in.
On the topic of renting, I still stand by my view that Australian real estate is grossly overpriced, which has been continually confirmed by The Economist Magazine, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, and Chairman of one of the world’s largest funds managers Jeremy Grantham.
It’s easy to observe the craziness when you compare total cost of renting to total cost of buying.
For example, there are four brand new townhouses around the corner from us at South Brisbane. They plan on selling them one-by-one, but in over three months, they haven’t had any luck even selling the first! They reduced the price of the first townhouse from $2.85 million to $2.79 million, or $60,000 less, but still can’t sell it.
They’ve recently listed it to rent, and in a month have dropped the weekly rent from $2200 to $1600. To put the $1600 weekly rent into perspective, at current rates the repayments on $2.79 million are just under $5000 per week. If interest rates rise 1% over the next 12 months, the weekly repayment rises to just under $5500 per week. Plus there would be other costs involved in owning such as rates, water and property maintenance.
Renting this place for $1600 per week is well over 3 times cheaper, just on repayments, and taking into account other expenses and interest rate increases, would more likely be 5-6 times cheaper! And people still think we don’t have a house price bubble. Crazy.
Not that much has been going on since I last wrote here, not that much good stuff anyway.
Quite a few months ago, when Kitty first announced she was prego with Space Prawn, I told a guy at work who for story’s sake, we’ll call old matey. I told quite a few people at work, but old matey’s response was the most odd. He happens to be very much into astrology & numerology, so he quickly asked the due date and told me Space Prawn will be a Scorpio.
At this point, being slightly skeptical, I didn’t really know what to expect from a Scorpio, but what he told me next was when it got weird. “There will soon be a death in your family” he said, “it always happens before or after a scorpio is born”.
I didn’t think too much about it again until my Grandma died last month, aged 96. What makes it a little strange was that Grandma was still quite healthy, a doctor even recently gave her the all clear to make 100. But she suddenly died.
So it sorta stuck in my mind a bit. I have since done a bit more research about Scorpios, and what makes them what they are. I have a brother (of three) that is a Scorpio, and he is exactly how they are described. To completely honest, it’s a little scary, if Space Prawn is like my brother then we’re in for a treat! </sarcasm>
I spoke to old matey at work after my Grandma’s funeral to find out a bit more detail. Apparently Scorpios are very fascinated by death, and that the intensity of a Scorpio’s mind means that a family member must pass for them to be born.
The strange thing is my Scorpio brother is fascinated by death.
Odd times.
I went all out dot com style last night and purchased juicedpixels.com for this site. You can still kick it old skool with juiced.wordpress.com, it’s just that the new domain name is a tad more tidy, plus a bit more 2009.
On a separate note, I plan to start frequently updating my tumblelog which is available at juiced.tumblr.com, or you can just read the feed. Tumblr rocks!!!
One of the problems I have with modern life is how fast we grow up. We are told to make so many crucial decisions at a very young age that determine what we can do with our lives.
For example, I was making decisions about my life when I was twelve years old. I was quite young in high school and so in Year Eight I was choosing Year Nine/Ten electives that would impact on my Year Eleven/Twelve electives that determine what course I could do at University. Quite obviously, what you do at Uni dictates what you do when you finish Uni. So effectively I was choosing a job in IT when I was twelve years old at school because I liked computers and I was the ‘smart kid’.
A problem arises after you’ve been in the workforce for a few years and realise you don’t actually like doing what you thought you would like doing when you were twelve. Enter the quarter-life crisis:
From wikipedia:
Characteristics of quarter-life crisis may include:
- feeling “not good enough” because one can’t find a job that is at one’s academic/intellectual level
- frustration with relationships, the working world, and finding a suitable job or career
- confusion of identity
- insecurity regarding the near future
- insecurity concerning long-term plans, life goals
- insecurity regarding present accomplishments
- re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships
- disappointment with one’s job
- nostalgia for university, college, high school or elementary school life
- tendency to hold stronger opinions
- boredom with social interactions
- loss of closeness to high school and college friends
- financially-rooted stress (overwhelming college loans, unanticipatedly high cost of living, etc.)
- loneliness
- desire to have children
- a sense that everyone is, somehow, doing better than you.
I am not an expert but I thought this shit normally happened when you were going bald and approaching forty, but now it’s happening when you’re in your mid to late twenties. See what I mean about growing up quickly? They’ll soon redefine ‘over the hill’ to be over twenty-five.
One of the things that I didn’t learn until recently is that is healthy to change your mind. It’s one of the things that growing up quickly makes us forget. When I was young it was okay to change your favourite colour from one day to the next, but now its hard to admit that you changed your mind about what you want to do in life.
It’s hard to tell someone close to you that you’ve changed your mind, especially when you’ve been vocal about your opinion/decision in the first place. Back in the days I told Kitty I would never own a mobile phone and that I hated them (with passion!). But I changed my mind, and I still remember meekly having to explain why to her when I bought my first Nokia. I felt like a hyprocrite.
So maybe its better to take life slow and change your mind regularly. That way, hopefully when you get to a particular place in your life it is where you want to be, not where you wanted to be.
Introducing junior pixels…
These pixels show the inside of Kitty’s belly. They also sorta show what junior pixels, also known as space prawn, will look like when he/she arrives. It’s apt that all we know about junior pixels is what we can see in these pixels: pixels really have come to represent the very first stages of life.
We’re both crazy excited. The arrival of junior pixels will be a big milestone for our relationship, and will be the beginning of many adventures and good times ahead. I just need to ensure I don’t bore people too much with talk about babies.
We fly to Los Angeles on Friday morning. I just hope we don’t get swine flu when we’re there 
