ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
The suburbs of North Betoota Heights have got two new residents this week after young go-getters Paul Krist and Denise Ribbert settled on their first home.
It’s a 3-bedroom, 1-bathroom home that was built in 1999 and sits on the northern boundary of the Soul Prolapse Village, just a 45-minute drive from the Betoota Heights Trolley Bus Terminus.
The engaged couple paid close to a million dollars for the house. Paul’s parents down the road paid less than a quarter of that ten years ago.
Over the past decade, the Soul Prolapse Village in Betoota Heights has been on the coalface of the national property price increases. That’s despite every home looking almost exactly the same and being close to an hour away from even the most basic of services.
That didn’t stop Paul and Denise from taking the plunge, they say, because now they’re in.
“We’ve done it,” said Paul, who works in town with a computer that’s on a cheap MDF desk in return for a pathetic salary that keeps him financially chained to the desk.
“We used to think it was unfair that young people couldn’t buy in. But now we have our own place, we think people who can’t buy a house can get fucked,”
“We did it all on our own so everyone else can.”
By doing it on their own, Paul says, he means they lived with his parents for three years once Denise and he started earning a decent enough salary to save money if they weren’t paying rent.
When asked about this, Denise said they were only playing the hand they were dealt.
“So what do you want us to do? Paul to get a ‘Daddy’s Little Boy’ tattoo on his forehead? Will that make you feel better? I don’t think the problem is with people who can afford to help their children buy a home. Anyone would do what they could if they were in the same position,” she said.
“Hating someone because they have something you have just because they got better results in the birth lottery is a waste of time. So is being jealous. The game is just harder for you. My parents and I didn’t set the rules,”
“The government did. We’re just playing the game. Now that we’ve both paid a million dollars for a classically-designed Olympics era home in the Soul Prolapse Village, why in Green Christ would we want the price to go down? We’d be financially ruined for life. You’d have to have rocks in your head, as a recent home buyer, to want to make houses more affordable for other people to buy. I’m sorry but Paul’s right, you can go and get fucked. We have ours.”
More to come.
