| fordy said: Ahh wow. My place was $300k (I live in Albury) and I had about 18% of the loan, so I only ended up paying about $5000 mortgage lender's insurance. I didn't realise it became much steeper for higher amounts. All I can say is hang in there. The market is starting to look better each day. There will be at least one more interest rate cut before end of year, and it should stay pretty low by then. In my situation, I live 300km away from Melbourne (closest city) and am in a profession that is more suited to city life (software engineers aren't paid much in the country). That's why I'm really looking forward to either the NBN, which will allow my personal business to grow and take on more work remotely or internationally, or the Very fast rail, which will enable city work to be less than an hour's commute away, and forcing employers in the regional areas to compete with wages of the cities if they wish to employ professionals. I think there will ultimately be a revolt here over electricity. People still remember the days when electricity was government owned, and (here at least), all this talk about privatisation of electricity being a good thing is only getting people worked up, ever since electricity prices have jumped threefold in the past few years. |
Yep watching the market weekly to see what is going on. Still don't knwo Melb that well, so people give me mixed reviews on areas to live in. It is sad that there are places within 50kms of the CBD that don't even have adsl2+.SO I too am a big fan of the NBN, even though when it is rolled out it will only be 100mbit and outdated. However all they will need to upgrade is the terminal boxes on the street to get the speed up to 1gbit in the future. I knwo in Tassie they decided that each house will be automatically conencted to the NBN (the service fibre that is) then people can choose if they want to take up an NBN plan. They are also installing i think 8 ports (i think divid by two for Rx and Tx) to each house @ 100mbit. Meaning that other ports can be used for other services, such as cable tv, additional internet and commnication to the smart meters in the future etc..
Electricity prices would have gone up anyway (probably not as much) as the networks in Australia (like every other infastructure) is reacking its age. Major upgrades have started to happen in the last 5 years to catch up for the lack of anything being done in the last 50 years (except for new developments offcourse). Bush fires don't help us either, as some states had majority of their power lines go down in one fire, meaning everything was replaced at the same time so it will all roughly fail at the same time.The good thing about it being governemnt owned meant that governments got money returned from profits at the same time they had the power to decide not to take that money if their was urgent upgrades needed, which meant a slower rise in price.
Once Electirc vehicles become main stream, this will have a huge impact on electricity prices as generation and power lines will need to be upgraded. It will become a nightmare with millions of car charges connected.
