ramblings of a wandering nerdan aimless amble on a winding road

Swine Flu, Recession, Interst Rates, Terrorism, Global Financial Crisis, Global Warming, Boat People….

Did I miss anything?

Honestly, how boring are we as a people. We’re not happy until we’re miserable. How seriously boring is that.

This morning as I grabbed a coffee (Yay I can still afford one!) I noticed the front page of the herald sun was about house prices crashing. argh! My house is going to be worth nothing. Oh no.. After the fear and panic subsided (well actually after I finished rolling my eyes) I gave the article a quick glance and realised that, well the problem wasn’t really that bad. If the price of your $2 million dollar mansion falls $100k do I really care? Well no I don’t. Do I care if my house price has fallen $10k.. Well no because I I’m currently using it for SHELTER.

So anyway, I found it very odd when I got home and did a quick scan of news.com.au (in case you don’t know, they’re both part of the News Ltd group). And what did I find? Hold on to your hat! A contradiction… The medium price actually rose 1.6% in the quarter.

So what the hell?

Apparently median house prices dropped $13k last quarter… apparently 15% in the past 15 months.

What the HELL!

Honestly, are these clowns actually reading what they are printing?

Two different papers, single owner, two completely different stores, SAME day!

news.com.au has Melb median house prices at $441k and the herald sun has us at $410k.

And a 15% drop from $450k at the height would see us around $390k so no matter which way you look at it, this is crap! Total and utter crap!

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES.

And some wisdom from the editorial section… Insightful

Lets not even look at this pretty graph.

It makes me dizzy just thinking about it.

Well it has been a crazy couple of weeks, and no lack of blogging isn’t lack of interest, but purely a lack of time!

The confirmation is in. Finalise the purchase of a block of land next Monday and are going through the paperwork for building a house on it. The dream double story house complete with garage (yay!) and drum room.

The other option was to do significant renovation on the current house. This was proving to be too expensive so we’ll rent this house out and move out to the country. Country you say? 40km from CBD in Whittlesea. Because it’s in the north, it’s actually closer to Melbourne CBD than the far eastern suburbs.

It was a big decision and something I wasn’t sure we’d make but having made it, it seems like the right one.

I think the biggest problem will be the commute to work. I of course hope to move to a work-from-home scenario one day and this is a push to get there sooner rather than later. Of course how practical this is, time will tell.

So that’s the update!

Stay tuned, I expect to blog heavily on the experience. Already its proving to be enormously more complex than the building of the first house 8 years ago in Darwin. I’m not sure if things have just gotten harder or we’ve gotten considerably more demanding. I suspect it’s a bit of both.