ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A Betoota Heights couple that sacrificed and saved to buy their first home in our town’s aspirational suburbs are now about to “do their collective arse” as interest rates are set to jump tomorrow.
They bought during the pandemic housing frenzy because Doug and Nadine Cartwright thought it’d be their last opportunity to do so before even the most basic of Meriton shitboxes became out of reach.
They didn’t want to be the ones left renting when the music stopped, said Doug.
For a time, they felt lucky. Doug’s parents have no money, neither do Nadine’s. They have no access to family capital. They couldn’t tuck their knees under their parent’s dining table and live there to save a deposit up. They did it all on their own.
Spurred on by the government and the Reserve Bank telling the nation that the good times would keep on rolling forever, they felt confident that they couldn’t lose. As it turns out, they bought right at the top of the market and the fiscal handjob the Reserve Bank was giving to the Morrison Government was about to end.
“So we are in mortgage prison as they say on the news,” said Doug.
“At this point, I’d prefer to be in an actual prison. Not a bad one like Arthur Gorrie or Goulburn. Ones where they send the white colour crooks. Because I don’t know what to do,”
“The repayments are getting tighter, we should be OK but we’ll just be living to pay the bills and that’s it. There’s people worse off out there but it’s no life for an Australian, is it? We are supposed to have the best quality of life in the world. My life sucks,”
“But I guess I should’ve seen it coming. We have a lazy economy that’s underpinned by thing getting dug up in Western Australia and shipped to China and property. Where else in the world can some well-to-do foreigner buy property in Australia and extract rent from it? But, it’s not going to change so I guess I just have to keep on going?”
More to come.
