‘The only reason we were able to afford our dream home’: Sad reality behind 28yo’s home ownership
While attending auctions to try and buy her first home, a young Aussie kept noticing a brutal Baby Boomer habit that left her well and truly fed up.
A hardworking teacher has revealed how a family tragedy was her only chance at becoming a homeowner, proving Australia’s housing crisis is out of control.
Karly Lorie had already accepted that she and her partner would be long-term renters and buying a dream home wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
She’s been teaching full-time since 2020, but even with a solid wage – the average teacher in Australia earns between $90,000 and $100,000 – the idea of becoming a homeowner seemed out of reach.
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Then her dad died, and it was heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and the worst thing to ever happen to her, but it also changed their financial position overnight.
Ms Lorie and her partner bought a single-story home in Adelaide in late 2023, which they moved into in January 2024.
“Dad passing away was literally the only reason we were able to afford our dream home. We slummed it for so long with housemates to save money,” she said.
Ms Lorie maintains that she’d “never been able to buy into the housing market in the city” without her dad.
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Getting into the housing market has never been harder for young people.
The median house price nationally has ballooned to over $800,000 and the median rental price is over $600 a week.
Aussies are paying high rents, making it harder for them to save a deposit. Even if they do manage to scrape together a deposit, they’re facing a tough cash rate of 4.10 per cent.
Mortgage repayments are high, housing costs are expensive, and the average salary in Australia is around $100,000.
However, young people need to borrow so much to buy a house that even a six-figure wage sometimes isn’t enough to comfortably service a mortgage.
The maths doesn’t add up for most young people and, when Ms Lorie found out she could buy a home, it came at incredible cost.
The young teacher also felt “guilt, shame, and grief” spending her inheritance when she’d give everything to have her dad back.
Before her dad passed away, she and her partner were resigned to the fact that if they wanted to live near the city, they’d need to commit to renting for the foreseeable future.
The couple never even got their own place together and instead chose to rent a room in a share house because they wanted to save cash.
“My partner and I are both from country Victoria originally and both our families still live there,” she explained.
“We had no option to move in with family to save and have both been out of home since we were 18. So saving a big deposit while trying to live comfortably was a challenge.”
Over the years they had some pretty frank conversations about houses and realised they might have to “rent forever” if they wanted to continue living in the city.
They even considered moving back to the country, but since the pandemic, houses have become inflated.
In the end, they concluded that they weren’t prepared to “sacrifice” their lifestyles to become homeowners and had accepted their rental reality.
Then, Ms Lorie’s dad passed away, and their financial situation changed. She inherited over $100,000, which was enough for a deposit.
The 28-year-old has decided to be transparent about how she bought because she is not “ashamed” of the help she got from her dad.
“It is a gift from my dad, and he shared with me and his team of doctors that he wasn’t afraid of dying because he knew it would ‘set me up for life’,” she said.
“I think other people may quietly, unconsciously resent those who have had a leg up. It is so incredibly defeating trying to do it on your own, so this makes sense.”
Ms Lorie said what some people don’t understand is that she’d trade anything to have her dad back with her, and a house certainly hasn’t filled the void.
“There’s an element of others not understanding the guilt, pressure and emotion that comes with an inheritance until you have experienced that kind of loss for yourself,” she said.
Being able to buy has come with so much loss, but it has been nice to put down some roots as a couple and not be at the mercy of landlords.
“It is nerve-racking every year, waiting to see if your lease will be renewed. Quarterly inspections are a nightmare, especially when you live with housemates and cannot control the mess that others create,” she said.
“We are also from country Victoria, and grew up with dogs in our family. We were so desperate to have a pet in our lives again which you cannot have when renting.
“We feel much more settled and stable and Adelaide is finally our proper home now. We also have our two dogs now, which is very special.”
The 28-year-old said, even with the financial leg-up, they are still stressed by their mortgage like everyone else.
“We have a variable interest rate. We got our mortgage at its peak, so it hasn’t been higher than what it is now. I know I would have struggled if the mortgage repayments did change,” she said.
Ms Lorie argued that the fact she even needed an inheritance to buy speaks to how tough it is for young Aussies.
“Boomers bought homes when the price of a home was approximately four times the average salary,” she argued.
“Now homes cost around 10 times the average household income. When Boomers try to compare that they lived through high interest rates, it was again on a much smaller principle, and our generation is still worse off.”
The young homeowner said when they were looking to buy they constantly encountered cashed-up Boomers pricing them out.
“We attended multiple auctions where Boomers swooped in on the final few bids to outbid us all,” she said.
“Young people are stretching themselves to pay for houses, and Boomers are able to overpay for the same houses because they purchased houses 40 years ago for $100,000 and sold them for upwards of a million dollars in today’s market.”
Ms Lorie said her neighbour purchased their place for $200,000 three decades ago, which would now be over $1.5 million.
“Yes, you have to repurchase into an inflated market, but when you’re coming in with that kind of capital, it’s much more achievable for them,” she said.
Financial comparison website Finder said trillions of dollars in personal wealth and assets will be inherited over the coming 20 years, with millions of recipients preferring that their windfall would come now.
More than one in three Aussies - the equivalent of 7.5 million people - expect to receive an inheritance over the coming decades.
The research found that 1 in 10 Australians said they are expecting an inheritance in the next 10 years, while 13 per cent expect to wait up to twenty years to inherit their relative’s assets.
More than one in four people believe they will be beneficiaries expect a cash inheritance of more than $100,000.
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