The Doom Room: ILF Edition

[samzadgan]

That's bonkers. London is expensive but as far as cost of living goes it's not substantially more expensive than New York or SF, in my experience (I would classify all three of those places as "not the cheapest living you can find")

All three are some of the most expensive, I would guess.

yeah they are probably up there on the list of most expensive...but Sydney is on a whole other level!

[Iommic Pope]

Sydney is fucking crazy.
What shits me the most is it has set the bar for the rest of the country, somehow.
Someone should have shot the real estate agents long ago.
They're not smart enough and lack the ethical integrity to set house pricing and as result, weball wearbthe knock on effect it has on the economy.
Whole industry should have been regulated from the start.

[samzadgan]

Sydney is fucking crazy.
What shits me the most is it has set the bar for the rest of the country, somehow.
Someone should have shot the real estate agents long ago.
They're not smart enough and lack the ethical integrity to set house pricing and as result, weball wearbthe knock on effect it has on the economy.
Whole industry should have been regulated from the start.

i hear you on the estate agent hate...but consider this...

we were really keen on a place in the eastern suburbs...it was a 2 bedroom flat, within a block of 4 flats...really nice flat. The estate agent and I talked about it, and he told me the price range was under $1m...and given some of issues, ie, no parking was one of them...he didn't see this flat going over that mark, by comparison to other stuff he had sold in the area.

so we turned up to the auction...we thought we had a good shot at this one...so they started it at $850k...so, we were like, yeah this seems like what the estate agent was telling us...but it kept going up...we bowed out...and there were 3 bidders...not fake, they were real bidders, 2 of them had a wife and a kid or two kids. The estate agent wasn't even going over to talk to them to bid higher.

the price got over the 1m mark..and these two family's kept outbidding each other...the place ended up selling for $1.2m.

my point is...its not all estate agents fault...its mainly the people who are prepared to pay so much money for post codes and a cultural tick box. The money they paid wasn't worth it...what they paid for was owning a property in a post code that will define them socially...and also to tick a box of owership which seems like one of the biggest goals in the Australian culture.

[Iommic Pope]

Basically yeah, it's market driven, but who drives the markets?
This shit all started with the renovate and auction fever that struck in the mid to late 90s.
Channel 9 went apeshit for it and all of a sudden we had celebrity agents, on tv, telling people what shit was worth instead of letting the market dictate, and driving up prices on properties in their books, hyping up did areas and creating demand where there was none.
They basically gentrified all of Sydney and Melbourne within five years and the spillover effect was that it forced migration out of that pricing bubble to the other cities, where the agents again saw the dollar signs and started driving up prices.
The mining boom has a lot to answer for, as does unregulated foreign investment.
But it started with their idiotic greed.
Most of them didn't even finish high school.
That's a concept that unsettled me when you talk about an index for cost of living.

[samzadgan]

yeah true...the effects of the 90's and early 2000's is probably what is still pushing the prices.

its funny to see how many developers actually made their fortunes back in that period...it was the golden age of developers...and estate agents.

These days the foreign investment is one the biggest problems...but i still think the society's pressure on ownership is fucking wrong. It drives people to pay so much more than they should, just to own something, regardless if they actually love the place or not. It seems like the thought process is..."You just buy something, and at least you own your own place"...which is so wrong...the first thing should be...can I afford a place and secondly, have I found something that i love enough to pay that much for and continue to pay for - investment property is different obviously. I think if the attitude changed you'd see a slow down on purchases and also prices.

But at the end of the day, its a runaway train...its not slowing down, and I dont think it will...sure you'll get a few hits on the areas outside the bubbles, but over time, like you say the gentrification will just take over, and the bubble will just get bigger...at which point Darwin will be come the new up-and-coming for all the young professionals!

[Iommic Pope]

The Far North is already underway with that shit.
The federal government wants to pump millions into Darwin and the NT to make it a playground for Asian tourists.

As for the golden age of developers, that shit never stopped, government loves all those extra rates and stamp duties they can nab.
Doesn't matter if the region they're developing can't support the population explosion because the dumb fuckers can't be arsed to build any infrastructure.

As for that mentality, when you get treated like a second class citizen for paying your rent, the idea of owning something just so you don't have to have your life judged by a 20 year old with no clue, it starts to sound really appealing.

[samzadgan]

As for that mentality, when you get treated like a second class citizen for paying your rent, the idea of owning something just so you don't have to have your life judged by a 20 year old with no clue, it starts to sound really appealing.

yeah this x1000000000...rent is such a bad word here...its like if you tell someone you're renting, they cringe...we are such a materialistic nation.

i truly miss London sometimes...over there when you meet for the first time, you dont even talk about what you do for a job or what you own etc...conversations are personal, and the questions people ask are more directed towards who you are as a person. In Sydney, in my adult-life, I am yet to meet someone, for the first time, where they dont ask what I do for a living within the first 3 questions.

Everything is aimed at establishing your material possessions and how much money you make. then they can judge whether you can be friends or not.

[t-rey]

Cool man.
Yeah home ownership, what the fuck were we thinking?
But, I'm glad I'm not renting anymore because, down here at least, it's like living with a knife to your throat and your assailant has been huffing glue.
As long as everyone is happy.

Yeah dude, it will be interesting to see what I think about renting again while we are looking for another house or building something. We already had one rental agency let us look at a house that was already booked and then charge us an application fee...so I'm not hopeful about it being the best experience But I found out that I can apparently leave a voicemail that sounds menacing enough that they won't even call back and just email me to say my fee had been refunded

I spend less on my monthly mortgage than I ever have in rent.

We definitely got a very nice deal on our house. It needed some serious updating. We've done most of that work ourselves.

Most people in America live immodestly. I don't need a huge house even though I could get a bank to approve me for a much higher loan. A lot of people look at what their parents or friends parents or whatever did with their money and their homes and think they need 5 bed/3 bath. I definitely didn't need that much. Found a house on the edge of the city. 5 min drive to downtown but also walkable.

But that's just what worked for me. Not gonna work for everybody.

Yep, ownership is definitely cheaper than renting. Until major repairs happen, and even then it's probably a wash in the long run. I wish I could do update work, but I always fuck it up, get ultra pissed off, then have to hire it out anyway.

We fell into the live at the top of your means Murican Dream situation for sure. We were 25 and bought a monster of a house because the market was at its lowest point, and because the bank said we could. Looking back it was a predatory loan - they actually said they would approve us for something stupid like 350k even though the mortgage would've been our entire paychecks. Fuckers. The upside is that we aren't dipshits so we didn't lose the house or anything, and now we get to cash in on that sweet, sweet equity now that the market is stronger again.

What it taught us though is that a big house in the burbs isn't all its cracked up to be, especially when you don't have the income to match the rest of the lifestyle that supposed to come along with it. So downsizing is a happy thing for us - I'm actually hoping for something a bit older that someone has updated. Something with some goddamn character. We're definitely suburban folks though - I grew up out in the sticks so I don't like living that close to folks, and my wife is from the Cincinnati suburbs, so she's afraid of just about everything that isn't the burbs.

We just sold our house, escrow closed yesterday. Our mortgage was way cheaper than rent here, the new owner's mortgage is twice what ours was, but it's gotten too expensive to live here now that we're having kids. Plus the schools suck and crime is nuts. In about a month we're moving out of state and buying a house outright with some savings left over.

Hell yeah dude - congrats on the sale! Sounds like you did great in terms of equity and shit. Where will you move?

the shred shed

Thanks, it was kind of a nerve wracking process and went really fast. We went into escrow 2 weeks after listing the house. It's almost as expensive here as the bay area and this area is a shit hole. We're in driving distance of Monterey, Carmel, Big Sur and all that, but our city is a wasteland culturally (no live music venues, no live music allowed in bars, no book stores, no record stores). Vice wrote an article called it the Youth Murder Capital of California. We had 8 murders on our block at work the 2 months before we moved to a new location.

We're heading to Ohio, looking around the northeast part of the state. We looked at houses online in about 10 different states, looking at all the ratings, statistics, etc. and seeing what we could find in our budget where we could get the most house in the best school district. We're going to rent and just start house hunting immediately (we've got a short list of like 20 houses that are listed right now). My wife and I decided if we didn't like the area we could just take weekend trips to other areas and if we find one good house, we'll just have our stuff in storage moved there.

Ohio is kind of a shithole in the same way that everywhere is kind of a shithole. The upside is that I've literally never seen such low cost of living in a place. In/around Cincinnati, you can work at fucking McDonalds and still have a 3 bedroom house with a full finished basement for jamming. And everyone is super nice because it's all white people who are terrified of everything

BUT if my mom didn't live close by, and I had the opportunity to buy some shit outright, you'd be seeing my ass somewhere in Ohio in a heartbeat.

[odontophobia]

When we went in to apply for a loan my wife was currently receiving workman's comp for tearing her ACL at work. They decided to run everything based off of my income alone. I was making good money at the time but despite that we had already looked at the house we were interested in and knew what we'd be willing to spend and as a result didn't let them offer us massive amounts to put down on a house.

It was important for us to make sure we could still save and that we could then use that savings cash for home improvement stuff. But we're fortunate. My wife and her dad and brother are handy so when it comes to home projects we're DIY for the most part. Our bathroom we paid for some things but that was due to the fact that with a little one on the way we wanted to ensure everything was done timely. A pregnant woman can only piss in a mason jar and dump it for so long...

[D.o.S.]

A pregnant woman can only piss in a mason jar and dump it for so long...

...As long as she damn well pleases!

[Kacey Y]

Ohio is kind of a shithole in the same way that everywhere is kind of a shithole. The upside is that I've literally never seen such low cost of living in a place. In/around Cincinnati, you can work at fucking McDonalds and still have a 3 bedroom house with a full finished basement for jamming. And everyone is super nice because it's all white people who are terrified of everything

BUT if my mom didn't live close by, and I had the opportunity to buy some shit outright, you'd be seeing my ass somewhere in Ohio in a heartbeat.

This pretty much sums up why we're moving lol. The place we live in now is such a shithole with absolutely nothing to do related to my interests, on a level that almost no one ever really believes me about, but it's crazy expensive in every regard. Living in a town/house that's no better or worse than where we are now, but with no mortgage or debt, a full basement that I can convert into a studio and higher rated schools would be a huge net gain.

[ShaolinLambKiller]

So we have like 2 weeks left in the year (give or take).

What doom records should I have been listening to that I missed -- outside of the really great DR releases from ILFriends that landed around us this year? Both Nadja records were phenomenal, and I really dug the Church of Misery record, but I am super awful at keeping up with the jams of the bevested.

\


all that matters:
https://kamikazepilot.bandcamp.com/albu ... an-failure

Best shameless plug ever.

That's how I roll.

[odontophobia]

A pregnant woman can only piss in a mason jar and dump it for so long...

...As long as she damn well pleases!

She's so it forever if it meant saving truck loads of money. She's frugal like that. Showering at the gym starts to grate on you though.

[ShaolinLambKiller]

I'd shower with a bro at the gym
share the water and soap

[fallen]

Verellen is making a Meatsmoke head with a 700w solid state power amp. I WANT ONE. That is all.