Owning stuff

So, my latest hair-brained idea is to buy an investment property in Caloundra.

Actually, this is just the latest instalment of a hair-brained idea that keeps popping up in various guises and then disappearing again under a mountain of "Oh, maaaaan - even thinking about this seriously is too much effort."

I am now in my mid-30s, and I don't own anything.

Well, I own a car.  Technically, a van.  Theoretically, I could put a bed and some curtains in that van and call it my "home", and then I would own my own home.  This does not seem like something people who actually have jobs should do.

I live with family, or I house sit.  I have rented and probably will again.  I just don't own my own place - I never have - and every now and then a little voice tells me I should.

For years now I have toyed with the idea of buying a unit or a house or something.  I have even gone so far as to actually inspect a couple of units in the past.  The problem is that I have deep philosophical issues with the current property ownership environment.

Housing prices are based not on what you can conceivably afford by saving up your money for, say, five years.  They are calculated on what you can borrow.  No one is going to ask for what you can reasonably afford if they know that they can ask for an extra $100,000 or $400,000 - and you'll just borrow that from a bank because that's what people do nowadays.

Have you ever read a property lift-out from a news paper?  Perfectly ordinary houses are now being sold for over a million dollars - not because the house is worth that much, but just because people have asked for that, and people have been willing to borrow the money necessary to pay it, and now there's a precedent.  It's crazy stuff, man.

Even if you save aggressively and aimed modestly, the whole housing loans things will forever push the prices just a few hundred thousand dollars beyond what you could save for.  There's no option other than taking out a loan - and then you don't really own a house so much as a bank owns you.

I can't possibly save up enough money to buy a place without going into debt.  I don't want to owe anyone more than I can pay back in a couple of years.

This basically puts me out of the housing market.

But, on the other hand, I've played enough Monopoly in my time to know that owning property is a good and useful thing.  Not as useful as owning the waterworks, the electrical company and all of the train stations - but that's not as easy to arrange in the non-Monopoly environment.

Part of the trouble is I currently live in the same town as two other family members, and it just seems weird to buy my own place when that means there will be exactly three of us, and we will each be living in three separate abodes paying three separate lots of rates.  It's actually practical and sensible for me to live with my family and split the "running costs" and house-work duties.  It's what used to be considered "normal" before our Western concept of a nuclear family decided splitting the atoms was the way to go.

So, owning my own place here just seems silly (as well as expensive and debt magnetic).

But, the other day I read an article about people who rent the house/unit/whatever where they live, but still own investment properties.  Apparently, renting your house out to someone else while you rent yourself makes things like property maintenance a tax-deductible thingy-whatnot.  And there's all that negative gearing stuff that people talk about as if those were words describing real things.

And it occurs to me that, while I'm paying board rather than rent, I'm in a pretty good position to take advantage of this.  It could be that buying my own home makes more sense if I'm not living in it.

Since my grand plan is to try to shift the family down Caloundra/Buderim way in the future, it makes sense to try to buy something in that area so I've got property at Caloundra prices to sell when the time comes to buy a house in that area...

So, yeah.  I'm currently toying with the idea of buying an investment property in Caloundra, even though I don't live in Caloundra and I still won't own my own home.

Although, there is always the van...