Income Levels - How much to live on?

[gil]

Hi Moppet,
We live in Bucklands Beach and bought our house through Bayleys, specifically Kevin Barber, who was excellent. Be aware that currently, each person who acts under the umbrella name of a realty group is acting as a self-employed individual. My understanding is that there is legislation in the pipeline that means estate agencies will only be allowed to employ people, not act as umbrellas for the self-employed. That will be a different kettle of fish! So, just because we had a good experience with Bayleys via Kevin Barber, doesn't mean that ALL Bayleys guys are of the same ilk.

We know an estate agent here (NOT from Bayleys, I hasten to add!) who, when we were viewing a property through an agent from the same group (OK, it was Ray White's) that was not listed with her, appeared with one of her clients and came up to us, took us aside and said "If you're interested, don't ring XX who it's listed with, ring me". Even if we had been interested, we would not have rung her!!

Point being the one that has been made many times on this forum: it's the individual, not the company.

Howick is a great place to live, so happy hunting,

Gil

[Silverwing86]

I agree with you Willsken that although you definitely need to go see for yourself, it doesn't necessarily have to take 6 months to get to know an area. There is much research you can do before getting here so that once you are here, you're well informed on most of the non-emotional things. From there you check it out for yourself to get a 'feel' of a place and talk to as many people as you can. It can be done.

Now I won't suggest doing what we did (although it wasn't in any way our plan, believe me !!), which is to buy within the first three weeks of arriving ! However, due to the research we had done beforehand, we knew most of the important things we needed to and didn't need much time to add the missing pieces that could not be found out from afar.

And yes, the vendor did try to pressure us into paying his asking price (wouldn't budge initially), so we walked away from it (twice !). We knew how much we were prepared to pay as we didn't want to overstretch ourselves in any way (never a good idea IMO as you can never look into the future and we felt the strong need to have contingency plans in place), and stuck to that religiously.

In fact, since the vendor was so reluctant to 'play the game' that is called 'negotiation', we actually ended up offering him less than we had initially decided upon, just out of frustration with him ! If he had played the game nicely, he would have gotten a better deal from us !

As it happens we were lucky, the vendor eventually changed his tune, I guess he really had to sell, and we managed to agree on the (lower than planned) price. For all his macho attitude of not wanting to budge on his asking price, in the end we managed to negotiate $ 22.500 off of that !

Point of all this being of course, that if you've done the research and know the value of a property in relation to the current market, location, school zones etc. (if you know your stuff, you're also less likely to be bowled over by an agent), and what it's worth to you, decide on your maximum price and stick to it, no matter what ! There are plenty of houses out there, if it's meant to be, it will happen. If not, there's always another one around the corner...

And if you get a feeling that an agent is not being straight with you, there's no reason not to say something about it and walk away, is there ?? It's not like they have the power, after all they want the sale to get their commission and you have the money in your pocket to make the deal happen, so IMO that puts the power with you !

By the way, we actually had very good experiences with our agents. They were very accommodating and ended up sacrificing a substantial percentage of their commission just to make the deal work. There were also other costs involved because the vendor didn't play nice (he behaved abominably in fact !), but they took those upon themselves as well, without us having to ask for it ! We were suitably impressed !

Silver

[Silverwing86]

By the way Alex, I just went back to your original post and realised that we've digressed considerably from you original question . Oh the intricacies and intrigue of housebuying, sooo distracting !

To answer that original question; we are a couple with no children, a sizeable mortgage (> 400K) and a joint income of just over $ 100K. The budget shows that we are doing very well financially, however I must mention that we have changed the way we shop for consumables quite considerably. If we hadn't changed our set habits I think we wouldn't be as comfortable as we are.

Hope this helps...

Silver

[AlexUK]

Lol thanks silverwing

[moppet]

Thanks Gil that's great

[hoffenberg]

in my case we got a place to stay in new zealand. it is a frind of our family and she said its ok if we come to stay by her. what is the required amount for us in this case

[immortal167]

we are just about to leave, but we found that with a small mortgage and a combined salary of $130k we did ok. Not great, but ok. Didn't need to budget or anything but weren't driving new cars or buying Gucci.