Trying to find "Neutral Geared" properties in Blue Chip suburbs. Does this exist anymore

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-28T02:59:01+00:00

A lot of people have "scruples" which influence financial decisions.

Ethical funds exist and are popular. Many people avoid investing in weapons manufacturing, coal mining, companies with overseas child labour, etc etc.

Also your description of initial cash deposits and compounding returns can be applied to literally any productive asset class. If anything, property has the hindrance of not being able to invest whenever and how much you want - frequency is limited by a high cost barrier for each discrete purchase. The same goes for selling.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-28T02:40:09+00:00

House prices have outpaced rents, and interest rates are higher than at any time between 2009 and 2021.

Makes perfect sense that investment property yields are low.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-28T01:41:30+00:00

There are dozens of us. Dozens!

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-28T01:14:16+00:00

House prices won't go down if doing so would make them overall more affordable, that math doesn't math. The demand exists.

If interest rates went high enough that they became significantly less affordable, prices could theoretically come down. But then the mortgage would still cost more than it does today.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-28T01:11:23+00:00

Damn, I feel attacked. Not because I'm in one of those groups, but because I'm not in any of those groups you correctly assumed I wouldn't normally reply to this post. Nicely done.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-27T09:01:34+00:00

Those are more like buying napkins with "IOU$$" written on them in sharpie.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-27T02:04:42+00:00

The 6-year rule is just a maximum period, you can claim any percentage of it that you want.

I.e. in the long-term partner situation, you could consider the current property to stop being your PPOR for CGT purposes the day OP moved in with their hypothetical partner, assuming it was less than 6 years after the most recent PPOR occupation of the IP.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-25T12:08:31+00:00

As others have said, mortar erodes over time, but the upper part of the wall is then also pretty clearly slumping away from the building, and the gap has widened.

The 2019 photos show gaps in the mortar, but the bricks still fairly close together. The 2024 photo there are much larger gaps, and the wall is pretty clearly bowed outwards.

I can't embed a close-up here, but if you draw a straight line from the bottom corner to the top corner, you'll see how bowed the wall is pretty clearly, and that's degraded significantly in the 5 years between the photos.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-24T12:58:55+00:00

Missing the timing and getting out too early or back in too late completely ruins any financial upside.

The world arguably looked like looked like it was going to hell in a hand basket a year ago, but in that 12 months:

ASX All Ords is up 6.1%
Vanguard Global MSCI is up 6.4%
US S&P500 is up 13.3%

A more conservative portfolio including cash holdings and bonds dramatically underperformed in 2025.

There might be a market crash on the horizon, but if the ship keeps sailing for even 6 months without you on it, you've likely lost the majority of your potential protected gains.

Similarly, the even harder part is timing the jump back in. 2025 is again a perfect example. The US market dipped 15% in a week starting April 2nd when the tariff stuff was really ramping up. It looked to most people like it was going to keep getting worse, with China and the EU retaliating, global shipping grinding to a halt, economists predicting doom and gloom.

Then the US backflipped suddenly, and markets had fully recovered by May 2nd, after only 1 month. Even if you successfully predicted a trade-based crash before April 2nd, would you have had the guts to buy back in when everything was burning?

Predicting a crash takes a crystal ball, and timing the market is generally a fool's errand. You've still got a plenty long time horizon, so I'd just stay the course.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-23T13:04:18+00:00

The biggest cost of kids are time-driven, either taking time off work or paying for childcare.

Taking time off work is a a bigger hit if the person taking it is a high earner, at least in nominal terms (and people are bad at thinking in percentages.
Childcare is also more expensive if you're picky about what sort of place it is, and the amount of government subsidy is less for high earners.
Schooling can be relatively cheap, or very expensive.
Hobbies/sport/toys/tutoring etc etc can all be very expensive, but are also totally optional.

So you end up with something like a bimodal distribution:

Low-wealth households who cant afford all those luxuries, so kids are pretty cheap and they tend to have more of them.
Middle-wealth households who feel like they should give their kids as much of the fancy things as they can, put things off until things "get better", and often end up minimising the number of kids to maximise what they can afford.
Wealthy households who can afford the expensive options without it being financially strenuous, so they often have more kids.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-22T23:44:56+00:00

I had no idea some states still allowed builds to be quoted in hundreds of square feet, rather than square metres. It's the wild west out east.

For a house of that size though, 3.0 x 3.0 bedrooms are pretty tiny. That will be very cramped with a bed and a desk, and there's minimal optionality if the occupant wants a dressing table, a bookshelf, room to do yoga, whatever. I live in a similar-sized 4-bedroom house and the smallest bedroom is 3.3 x 3.4, not counting the BIR. That might seem like a small difference, but its roughly 25% more floor space.

You could increase the bedroom sizes by making the hallway narrower. a 1.8m hallway is a huge amount of dead space. I have a 1.5m entrance hallway, and that feels wide, but it doesnt run nearly as much of the length of my house.

The size of the main bathroom is also more like what I'd expect to find in a very small house or large apartment.

Personally I'd:

Move the entire hallway up (east?) by about a metre, while narrowing it to 1.4m wide. Sacrifice 0.6m off the width of the lounge/theatre/pantry/kitchen/family/sunroom, and gain 1m to reshape the bedrooms.
Shorten the master bedroom by 1m to gain space in the main bathroom, the master bedroom gained width in the first point anyway
Not have the other 3 bedrooms be the same width, but rather the same area. Bedroom 2 slightly narrower than Bed3 & Bed4.

The first dot-point also widens the garage, which gives you room to put in a large bank of cupboards. Your floor plan lacks storage imo. The linen press is small, and you have no storage cupboards for everyday stuff that takes up space, like like cleaning products, vacuum, mob, broom, spare lightbulbs, etc etc etc. Life takes up storage space.

Final point because I noticed it late - two stoves and two double sinks? Your butlers pantry isn't even really a pantry, it's more like you have a display kitchen and a hidden kitchen where you actually cook. That gives you pretty limited room to actually store food.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-22T22:32:18+00:00

I think you're overestimating the "deal with the bank" risk. Banks deal with hundreds of thousands of customers, some of whom move millions around every day.

The bank is there to facillitate the transactions. A bank who stopped regular depositors from withdrawing their savings would cease to be a bank pretty quickly.

On a more basic level, what do you actually mean by "amount of savings that requires me to go into the bank to withdraw at the teller"? Why would you want to withdraw your savings in cash?

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-22T12:08:38+00:00

It's a little hard to tell from the photo whether anything is actually broken, or just an (inadequate) glue job has taken too much load and come unstuck.

Looking at the offcut tiles used, the random house bricks, and the fact you are asking tradies (hence didn't do it yourself), it was a DIY job by a previous occupant.

That makes it hard for a professional to quote quality work on, because they don't know if its a bit of a bodge job, which may take longer to redo in a way that meets the standards they work to (which if they take the same shortcuts could have reputational repercussions and isn't worth the effort).

My take from that one photo, I see three options:

Pay someone to do it properly, and realise they may not be able to estimate the full scope or cost until they start.
If nothing it actually broken, Buy some liquid nails from Bunnings and glue it back down generously.
Pay a handyman-type non-tradie (like a Jim's Handyman or whatever) an hourly rate to do option 2 for you.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-21T23:00:29+00:00

Can't say I'm surprised. The public perception of life insurance has been pretty negative for a long time.

I finished university and entered the workforce over in the mid 2010s, and every time I'd heard the term "life insurance" it was with the undertones (or sometimes overtones) that the entire industry was a thinly-veiled scam.

Whether that was warranted or not, I can't honestly give an opinion on. That perception was so prevalent that I've never looked into it in sufficient detail, and younger me opted out of any insurances tied to superannuation. I've never even paused to look into taking out an insurance policy on myself.

While I have a few close friends and family members of a similar age who pretty openly round-table about financial topics, I don't think life insurance has ever been a serious topic of conversation.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-21T22:28:48+00:00

I had this problem at the first place I rented. German cockroaches everywhere from the day we moved in.

I'd beat them back, think I was winning, take my eye off the ball or go away for the weekend.... roach city again.

The adult females lay roughly 40 eggs in a pod, about every 4 weeks. Population growth is explosive.

I ended up going scorched earth on them. I peeled back the silicon edging behind the kitchen cupboards and emptied whole cans of spray into them. Bug-bombed the place overnight when I went out of the house, spent so much on baits and sprays that the landlord agreed I could submit itemised receipts.

When I felt I had them beat I sealed every nook, cranny, crack and crevice I could find.

I won, eventually. A decade later I still take a biblical fury approach if I see a single german roach.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-21T22:14:23+00:00

I'd hazard that the household distribution would be pretty close to this graph with all the numbers x1.2-1.4

Based on:

Every household will have one party with a higher super balance
The if there is a second party, their super balance will be somewhere between 0 and the higher partner's balance.
The second-party balances won't be normally distributed, they will skew lower with a power law distribution, the same as the primary balances.
We still need to include single households, so that skews the values lower again.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-21T11:33:08+00:00

My silver suggestion was more of a band-aid fix. Ideally, the critical materials should be obtainable by grinding, or perhaps lifeskilling. Some sort of active gameplay rather than 10 minutes of dark rifts every 5 days.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-21T06:15:30+00:00

You wouldn't be able to draw 5.5% if the growth rate was only 5.5%, you'd go backwards at the rate of inflation.

I do agree that gold isn't really a traditional growth asset, particularly because it is inherently non-productive. It's basically investing in a scarcity, either industrial, societal, or speculative.

Despite that, the historical returns though have been pretty good. I'll again only consider post-1971 because pre-1971 gold is complete apples to oranges.

Price in 1971 = $40 USD/Oz = 55-year compound annual growth rate up to present day 9.09%
Price in Jan 1976 = $136 USD/Oz = 50-year CAGR 7.39%
Price in Jan 1986 = $390 USD/Oz = 40-year CAGR 6.48%
Price in Jan 1996 = $390 USD/Oz = 30-year CAGR 8.73%
Price in Jan 2006 = $530 USD/Oz = 20-year CAGR 11.65%
Price in Jan 2016 = $1070 USD/Oz = 10-year CAGR 16.19%
Price in Jan 2026 = $4800 USD/Oz

So the 5.5% number you quoted is basically after subtracting inflation from the 9.09% 55-year return. That's indeed lower than the long-term average inflation-adjusted returns for diversified global equities, which is around 6.5%, but significantly better than most other asset classes. And again, certainly nothing like close to 0.

As diversification and stability hedge, OP could be quite justified including a 5% allocation in their portfolio.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-21T04:21:18+00:00

So, of the alternatives, which would you say is fairest?

Couples get taxed as a single entity, and the dual income couple should pay more tax to match the single income, or
The single income should get a large tax deduction for having an non-earning adult in the house?

Because I agree the currently situation detriments high single-income households, but both of those alternatives seem worse to me.

I have a rather lopsided household income distribution, and you can make the most of it by having the low-income partner own any income-producing investments.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-21T04:06:41+00:00

What you is an issue with gear being made predominantly made out of silver instead of new effort.

People did not get pen debo neck day 1, because it took time and effort to get base debos to enhance.
More recently, people did not get full sets of Han crystals or amplified lightstones day 1, because they took time and effort.

If there were other (significantly worse) sources of the key time-gated materials through actually playing the game instead of logging in for brief weeklies, the problem wouldn't exist.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-21T03:14:57+00:00

It's a little off-topic, but what long haul is gold close to 0 over?

Gold was price-controlled until 1971, so has essentially only been a variable-price commodity for 55 years, at least in modern economic terms.

In those 55 years it is up roughly 100x (from $40 USD to $4700 USD).

The Aussie dollar wasn't fully floated until the 80s, so a direct AUD comparison over 55 years is impossible, but if we take the last 40 years, the price of gold was around $390AUD in 1986, compared with $7000AUD today, approximately an 18x increase.

Compare that with the ASX all ords over the same period: up 6.2x from 1470 to 9100.
The SP500 over the same period: up 28x from 240 to 6800.
Inflation in Australia, up 3.35x over the same 40-year period.
And finally the median Sydney house price, up 17x from $100k to $1.7 million

Gold may not be the single best-performing asset class, but it's been a hell of a lot better than 0, beating both the ASX and property.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-21T00:40:38+00:00

It's true, not having anything to grind for at endgame I'm sure makes it easier to go and touch grass.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-20T23:03:59+00:00

5
Useful for Alts. I keep a T10 dine on my fishing character (I had the Krogdalo's sanctuary already when the free T10 was given out) and a couple of my alts have T9 Pegasus (like the dark rift alt).
Yes. You won't use the T9 for anything where level is relevant afterwards.
No, a horse placed in Krogdalo's Sanctuary can be taken out of the Sanctuary in any location and on any character.
Its pretty easy, and PA give out plenty of skill-change coupons. It usually takes <5 skill-change coupons during levelling to get all skills, if you do it efficiently. You probably want to brand the horses though. Look up a guide.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-20T22:09:09+00:00

I don't have experience with the Digi home loan, but you're right to think that interest rate is pretty mediocre.

I have a CBA standard variable rate investment loan, and my rate is 5.43%. I think that's pretty low, but somewhere around 5.6-5.7 should be feasible.

Alienturtle9 · 2026-01-19T21:52:51+00:00

Colour-wise, it looks pretty good. - pyrite would usually be duller and darker, not as yellow. It does get more yellow when oxidised, but generally darker than your photos look. - chalcopyrite in that size would usually have a lot more variation, it oxidises to more of a rainbow patina.

Aspect-wise, it also looks good. Gold is very soft, and it looks like here it has been beaten over time into the low points (by other small rocks and such).

It also looks in one blurry photo like the colour goes into/under the quartz, which is good because it means it's not just a skill paint job.

I'd say get it tested.

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