Simple and Sustainable Forums: RumpledElf - Viewing Profile - Simple and Sustainable Forums

It was 2 or 3 years, time flies ...

Saw the plants they were using in the backyard for sale at Garden Grove for $399 each! And here's me buying plants in bulk for $1-2 a pop off eBay. Bought a lot of 20 like that for a hedge 6 months ago, now almost thigh high and looking lovely, not bad for $50 inc postage for a 25m long screening hedge.

I like my plants.

We took the first offer on our house. It was lower than we wanted but whatever, it beats sitting around doing upkeep on an empty house for an eternity.

Debt really is bad. Sit and look at your mortgage at minimum payments and it is depressing how your payments almost equal the interest, so its like putting $5 in a bank account every week. Personally I'd like to just get our house paid off and sit back and drink strongbow on the front verandah and watch the wizards in the stwawberry patch.

We've never had a lawn. Last two houses had dirt and gravel - this is so you can actually sit on it, otherwise I'd just pave the lot.

Not exactly any shortage of water here, our tank is already overflowing and we haven't even hooked up a pump to it to get water *out*!

Our new 22,000L tank will probably be full in 10 minutes the way its raining at the moment

Its not connected to anything though, need to go buy hoses and pumps and whatnot, but we've only had the house 3 months. Its a 'wet' system, which means the downpipes go under the ground rather than overhead, so the water won't be as clean as a regular one. The idea is to use it to water the garden and flush the toilets.

22KL tank cost us a whisker over $2000 so not too bad value. We're allowing $600 for all the paraphanalia to attach it to the house. Seems a bit dumb that a tank is compulsary but noone checks to see if you've actually connected it to anything.

There's a lot of people who are going to be in negative equity and simply won't sell. Trade in houses and new mortgages will slow down as people realise (as has been happening for a while) that they can't just keep tapping that equity ATM, or constantly upgrading the PPoR.

The lack of mobility is going to be interesting, if people can't sell without taking a loss, that's going to have a flow-on effect that might be hard to estimate.

There's not really much to say right now as the downturns are fractions of a percent or low single digits, there's still heaps of houses that are holding their value or going up so the tone is more about choosing well, adding value, *well located good quality* property always goes up. People who didn't buy houses in the last couple of years (and there's a lot of them) won't care if houses go down by 10-20% if they bought their house when it was 30-60% or even more cheaper than the new 'lowered' prices because they still get their profit and won't owe the bank when they sell.

The worm hasn't really turned yet ... people are in a bit of a holding pattern, look at all the news about less building starts, higher savings, people paying down debt. People are just waiting this out.