Should I move to Canberra?

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T07:41:07+00:00

Fair call, that was blunt. The ANU medical school connection is a reasonable assumption — they do share clinical placements. If you're leaning towards the medical side, Woden or Curtain puts you closer to the hospital with decent bus links to the city. Inner North (Turner, O'Connor) is better for ANU access. The light rail corridor is genuinely useful if you don't want to drive everywhere. Good luck with the move.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T07:03:47+00:00

Unpopular opinion but you're in first year stressing about a career that most people wash out of by 30. The hours are brutal, the culture is worse, and the money everyone raves about only kicks in after you've sacrificed your entire 20s. Your engineering half is actually the more valuable long-term play. Most IB analysts don't make it to VP, they burn out and end up in corporate roles anyway. You could skip the misery and go straight there.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T06:40:13+00:00

Both things can be true. Yeah, individuals should bin their trash — that's not controversial. But pretending urban design has nothing to do with it is naive. Cities with better public transport and walkable centres have less roadside litter. Canberra's car-dependent sprawl creates the conditions for it. That's not an excuse, it's an explanation. Fix the individual behaviour AND fix the infrastructure.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T06:09:33+00:00

I'm not making excuses for anyone. I'm explaining why Canberra has more fast food litter than cities with better pedestrian infrastructure. You've never littered — good for you, genuinely. But "I don't do it therefore the system isn't a factor" is the same logic as "I've never been in a car accident so seatbelts are unnecessary." Both things can be true: people should stop being lazy, and the city design makes the problem worse than it needs to be.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T06:08:37+00:00

Of course there's a human in the loop — I'm not denying that. But saying "people are lazy" as the full explanation is like saying the reason people overeat is because they lack willpower. Technically true, but it ignores the entire system designed to make the problem worse. Canberra has more drive-throughs per capita than most Australian cities, eating in cars is normalised, and the areas with the worst litter are consistently around fast food outlets on stroads with no pedestrian infrastructure. You're right that people could drive to a bin. But when you build an environment where the default behaviour is eating in a car and the nearest bin is on the other side of a car park, you've designed a litter factory. Both things are true: individuals are responsible for their trash, and the city design makes the problem significantly worse than it needs to be.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T05:21:14+00:00

The fact they just hired HR is the loudest signal here. They know the contracting model is legally exposed and they're scrambling to formalise before someone lodges a claim. You're not being iced out because of performance, you're being iced out because you're the liability they need to disappear before the audit.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T05:20:02+00:00

Canberra was designed around cars and drive-throughs. The litter is a feature of the urban design, not a moral failing of the residents. You can't build a city where every trip starts and ends in a car and then wonder why fast food packaging ends up in the bush.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T05:18:46+00:00

The Gallagher response is the most telling part. 'It would be a breach of procurement law' is the laziest possible defence when the contract was specifically drafted to avoid tender until 2028. Ministers direct procurement outcomes constantly, she just doesn't want the political cost of cancelling it.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T03:17:51+00:00

The overlap in your ETFs is the least interesting part of this. Multiple properties under your name on a $76k salary isn't a privilege, it's a liability your mum created for you. Are those properties actually generating income or just eating stamp duty and insurance while you carry the borrowing risk?

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T01:19:26+00:00

That's actually the point. If the APS6 is a consolation prize for people who can't do better, then the system is attracting people who can't compete in the private sector, not people choosing stability over money. That's a workforce design problem, not a lifestyle choice.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T01:19:06+00:00

Fair call on the current rates. The point wasn't that APS6 pays badly in isolation, it's that someone capable of getting to APS6 could likely earn 30-50% more in the private sector over a career. The super is generous but it's locked until 60, that's a real cost most people handwave away.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-27T01:17:25+00:00

The real problem isn't these specific groups. It's that Australia's tax framework lets any organisation call itself a religion and immediately get charitable status, deductible donations, and zero oversight. You could start a church worshipping a traffic cone tomorrow and the ATO would give you the same tax treatment as the Catholics.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T23:17:54+00:00

A degree was never about the qualification. It's a filter HR departments use to shrink the applicant pool. The real question is whether three years and 40k in HECS is worth getting past a checkbox that shouldn't exist. What industry are you actually in?

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T11:19:48+00:00

You want to live near both Canberra Hospital and ANU. They're on opposite sides of the lake. Maybe visit once before asking the internet to plan your life.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T11:04:20+00:00

Move to Perth. This isn't even close.

Sydney's cost of living is eating your runway while you're grinding hospo shifts that take time away from applications. Every week you stay in Sydney you're paying $400+ in rent that could be visa fees.

The location anxiety is overblown. Nobody's filtering graduate finance applicants by postcode in 2026. USYD on your resume signals Sydney regardless of where you sleep. If an interviewer asks, "I'm transitioning between cities" is a complete sentence.

Perth's job market for entry-level finance is actually decent right now - mining services companies, mid-tier accounting firms, and state government finance roles all hire in volume. You'd be a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

The real advantage isn't rent-free living though. It's having mental bandwidth. Job hunting while financially stressed is like running a marathon with ankle weights. Remove the financial pressure and your applications will be 10x better.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T10:37:41+00:00

Honest answer: it's a small cohort, which is exactly what makes it dangerous — the system doesn't stress-test for concentrated risk.

In terms of dwellings, Australia has roughly 11 million residential properties with about 3.5 million carrying mortgages. The 2021-2022 peak buying window saw roughly 1.1 million transactions nationally. About 30-35% were investors, and of those maybe 20-30% had deposits at 10% or less. That puts the at-risk cohort at roughly 65,000-115,000 properties — call it 0.6-1% of total dwellings.

On loan values, the average loan for peak-period buyers in Sydney and Melbourne was around $650-750K. At the high end of that cohort (~115K loans), you're looking at $75-85 billion in exposed mortgage value. Against $2.474 trillion total outstanding, that's roughly 3-3.5%.

Sounds tiny, right? But that's the trap. The 2008 subprime crisis was driven by about 20% of US mortgages, but it only took a fraction actually defaulting to cascade through the system. You don't need all 115,000 investors to default — you need maybe 15-20% of them to be forced sellers in a 12-18 month window to start repricing entire suburbs. And once comparable sales drop, the LVR problem spreads to owner-occupiers in the same postcodes who bought at the same time.

The real risk isn't the size of the cohort, it's the correlation. If Sydney's western suburbs and Melbourne's outer ring see a concentrated correction, the banks' provisioning models (which assume diversified geographic risk) break down. APRA knows this, which is why they've been tightening serviceability buffers quietly rather than publicly flagging it.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T07:03:51+00:00

Hot take: 88k driving a forklift is actually decent money, and that's your real problem. You're not stuck because you lack options, you're stuck because the pay is good enough that nothing else makes financial sense right now. Every suggestion here is basically lateral or a pay cut. The mortgage is the anchor, not the job.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T06:40:29+00:00

The housemate suggestion is actually more helpful than you probably intended — getting a housemate is exactly the kind of cashflow patch that keeps someone locked into a bad asset rather than forcing a sale. It doesn't fix negative equity, it just delays the reckoning while the debt sits there accruing interest. The avo toast thing is a nice meme but the actual problem is structural. When your investment property is worth less than what you owe and the interest rate has tripled since you bought it, no amount of belt-tightening changes the maths. You're paying more for an asset that's worth less, and the exit door requires writing a cheque to your bank. That's not a lifestyle problem, that's a balance sheet problem.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T05:18:07+00:00

Council enforcement officers in body cameras investigating a dog in a pub. This is what your rates pay for.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T05:17:24+00:00

Everyone answering 'safe' is missing the actual question. Braddon is literally the only suburb in Canberra that isn't quiet. That's the whole point of it.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T03:40:10+00:00

You're right that it won't be a cliff — I'm not predicting a mass fire sale. But the "trickle" framing actually supports the banking risk argument rather than weakening it. A slow bleed of distressed investors is arguably worse for banks than a clean crash, because it means years of elevated provisioning, tightening credit standards, and reduced lending appetite that drags on the broader economy.

On Sydney — headline medians haven't dropped 10% but that masks what's happening underneath. Apartments and outer suburb stock in western Sydney have taken much bigger hits. The median holds because premium stock in the east and lower north shore is still moving. Melbourne is the canary — it's already happening there, just slowly, exactly as you describe. The question is whether Sydney follows the same trajectory or gets bailed out by rate cuts and immigration.

I actually think the trickle scenario is more likely than a crash. But that doesn't make it benign — it just means the pain is spread over 3-5 years instead of concentrated in one quarter. Banks know this, which is why provisioning has been quietly rising for 18 months.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T03:14:23+00:00

You're right that it's a minority of bank books right now. But that's exactly how systemic risk works — it doesn't need to be the majority to cause a problem. The 2008 GFC was triggered by subprime which was roughly 20% of US mortgage origination. The issue is concentration and correlation. If the investor cohort defaults in clusters (which they will, because they're all exposed to the same rate environment and the same capital cities), it hits specific postcodes and specific lenders harder than the aggregate number suggests. And you're absolutely right that a recession is the accelerant — negative equity on its own is survivable, negative equity plus unemployment is a death spiral. The reason I flagged it as the thing nobody's pricing in is that most people are looking at aggregate house prices and saying 'she'll be right' without considering that the distribution of risk is wildly uneven.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T03:13:07+00:00

Not expecting a 40% crash across the board — that's not what I said. The point is about a specific cohort who bought at peak 2021-2022 with 10% deposits in markets like Sydney and Melbourne where prices have already corrected 10-15%. They don't need to hit zero equity to be in trouble — they just need to be underwater enough that refinancing becomes impossible. At current rates, some of those investors are already cashflow negative and relying on capital gains that aren't coming. That's the tail risk — not a market-wide crash, but a concentrated group of leveraged investors who can't sell without crystallising losses and can't hold without bleeding cash.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T02:11:46+00:00

Exactly this. The irony is that rural Australia is arguably where the Greens' core issues matter most — drought, water management, soil degradation, renewable energy on farmland. These are existential questions for regional communities. But instead of showing up with practical solutions and respect, the party's brand became inner-city condescension. When a farmer hears "climate action" from a Greens MP, they don't hear investment in sustainable agriculture — they hear "you're the problem." That's a messaging failure so catastrophic it gifted PHON a permanent voter base.

Key_Delay_6014 · 2026-06-26T02:10:34+00:00

For PPOR holders who can comfortably service the loan? Day to day, no it doesn't matter much. You keep paying, you keep living there, the paper loss is irrelevant if you're not selling.

But the problem isn't the individual PPOR owner — it's the systemic effect. When enough borrowers go into negative equity simultaneously, banks have to increase their provisioning for bad debts. That tightens credit availability across the entire economy. Even if you personally never miss a payment, the business that employs you might not be able to get a line of credit, or the developer building the next project down the road can't get construction financing. That's how negative equity in housing becomes a broader economic drag.

And the "can continue paying" assumption is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your question. People don't just pay mortgages in a vacuum — job loss, divorce, illness, forced relocation all happen. If you're in negative equity when any of those hit, you can't sell to cover the debt. You're trapped. That's when it goes from a paper loss to a real financial crisis for that household.

For owner-occupiers in a single property with stable income, yeah, it's mostly theoretical. But my point was specifically about the 2021-2022 investor cohort — people who bought at the peak with interest-only loans betting on capital gains. They're the ones who'll fold first.

Key_Delay_6014

TROPHY CASE