Brendan Coates
speaker
226 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2022
last heard Apr 2022
Brendan Coates’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
To save the average income earner in, say, Melbourne and Sydney, to save to buy the average house, you're talking about saving 15%, 20% of your income for a decade.
And by then, often, housing prices have jumped further away from you.
So, that's why housing affordability, home ownership, has actually fallen off a cliff for younger, particularly poor Australians, particularly the poorest 40%.
So if you go back 30 years, regardless of your income, if you were younger, you tended to be able to buy a house irrespective of whether you're a high income or low income.
But it has just crashed for the bottom 40%.
And the problem there is, of course, that if you don't own your own home by the time you say 35, 40, then you're getting to the point where you're going to struggle to pay off the mortgage by the time you hopefully plan to retire.
It's sort of 65, 70.
And that cohort, if we don't get them into homeownership, then they're probably going to be renters in retirement.
And we know that if you rent in retirement, you're actually at severe risk of financial stress.
If you're a homeowner in retirement, even if you're a full-age pensioner, you're not receiving, you don't have a lot of superannuation or other savings, you tend to do okay.
But if you're a renter, you're in a lot of trouble.
I think that's right.
And I think the outcome of that is people will probably take on fewer risks.
So, if you're sitting there with a large mortgage, you know, as we now are, it naturally makes you more risk adverse than what you otherwise would be.
Because if the business does fail and you lose your home, then you're right, you will struggle to rebuild that equity and be able to have a home that you've broadly paid off by the time you retire, even if you use a little bit of your superannuation to do it.
And so I suspect a really understudied problem with worsening housing affordability in Australia and elsewhere is that fewer people will take those risks to start businesses to take on a new idea.
And that I think leaves us all poorer.
The other way it really plays out, and we've seen this in looking for houses recently, is almost every house that we went to buy was a separation because we're looking for a family home.
The time when people sell those, particularly in, say, Melbourne, is either normally when you downsize.
And the only time you sell it beforehand is if something often goes wrong.
Showing 181–200 of 226 · page 10 of 12
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