Un Monstre a Paris

After our full day of exploring wineries and reservoirs, we settled in for the night with a glass of wine and a movie.  The film in question was 'A monster in Paris', which it turns out is not a very good film, but I enjoyed it non the less because of the memories it evoked.  Our final European trip before leaving the UK was to Paris and it happened to coincide with when this film had come out in the cinema.  When Barnadi and I first met I often referred to him as a 'Barnadi -Monster' mainly due to his temper and so I always felt the film was somehow relevant as I had my very own Monster in Paris.

My very own Monster in Paris

When the film finished Barnadi did a dangerous thing and fed his addiction.  His addiction for SBS.  SBS is an Australian TV channel that focuses on world wide TV, and they frequently put on good foreign films late at night.  Barnadi has fallen into the habit of turning on SBS when he gets home late from work and getting himself hooked to a film, staying up until the early hours of the morning so that he doesn't miss the ending.  This is OK for him as he never has to get up early in the morning, although it is a little less practical for me as my hours are more variable.  I wasn't working early today but it was still a little annoying as we had the plumber turn up at 8:30am to fix the kitchen tap.  It wasn't Barnadi who had to get up to let him in or find the water stop cock or clear the cupboard under the sink.  In fact it is happening again as I write this blog post, he is watching another French film.

Wine Country

Today was a very unusual day as Barnadi and I both had a whole day off together.  After taking the car to get its first 3 month service, we spent the morning exploring some of the 'cheaper' residential parts of Preston and ended up in the Northland shopping centre.  Although we are still thinking we will end up focusing our search for a house in Bundoora, we are not ruling out other suburbs like Preston if the right house comes on the market, for the right price.

Yarra Valley

We had a quick lunch back at home before taking our freshly serviced car for a drive into Victoria's wine country, the Yarra ranges.  Once we got to Yarra Glen we took a short stop to check directions then continued on to the Yering Station winery.  It seems to me the most cruel of situations to have so many nice wineries around, but all of them you have to drive to.  As I was designated driver, Barnadi enjoyed a nice glass of wine and we both had a dessert and coffee.   My dessert was a rhubarb pie with blood orange sorbet while Barnadi had a sticky date and rum pudding.  The desserts were delicious but the views alone were worth the lack of wine as despite the gloomy start it had turned out to be a beautiful day.

Yering Station Winery

On our way home we took a little detour to the Sugarloaf reservoir where we took a long walk across the dam before continuing on our way back home with a stop off at Bundoora to pick up some more affordable wine.

Sugarloaf Reservoir

The Health of a Nation

Last night I was watching Michael Moore's Sicko, and it made me feel very grateful for always living in a country that provides free health care.  The film focused on how the American health service has evolved to be run by rich insurance companies who will do anything they can to not pay out, leaving even the most comprehensibly insured out of pocket or refused medical treatment altogether.  The reasons for this quite unique anti-public health care stance is put down to an irrational fear of socialism drip fed to the general public by the government.  It is a stance which is unlikely to change anytime soon as President Obama's own attempts to create health care reforms has proved.  It is also the main reason I would never want to live in the USA.

The Australian health care service is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a million times better than that provided by the USA.  GP's, blood tests, stays in hospital and even opticians are completely free, but like the UK it does not pay for dentists (this is why Barnadi still goes to his sister in Jakarta if he needs any dental work done).  Medicines are not free but are heavily subsidised by the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, general patients can expect to pay a maximum of $35 for a prescription and patients with a concession a mere $5.80.  This is not quite as good a deal as you get in the UK where a standard prescription charge is around £7 and anyone with a concession gets all their medicines for free.

Health insurance does exist in Australia, and probably more common here than in the UK, the main advantage the insurance companies try to sell you is the tax refund you get from the government for having private health insurance.  They fail to mention that the premiums for the health insurance are more expensive than the medicare levy!

The one thing you do need to have insurance for is ambulance cover as this is a service the government in Australia does not pay for.  Ambulances are not cheap, and are usually required in an emergency, so it is not something that you can budget for.  This is a big issue for me, coming from the UK where you never had to worry about whether you can afford to call an ambulance or just hope that chest pain will go away by itself.......

Back to Reality

We met with a mortgage advisor at the bank today to look into how much we would be able to realistically borrow, to enable us to focus our search with a more accurate price range.  Barnadi went straight in saying we hoped to get a $400-$450k house, where as I simply wanted to know how much they would be willing to lend.  They explained the standard mortgage arrangements were for a 20/80 split with 20% deposit, stamp duty and loan insurance paid up front and the 80% making up the loan.  For a $400k house however that would mean we would need at least $90k saved up, and as we were considering starting the search by January next year this was not going to be possible.  They then explained they could do a 95% loan as long as the loan insurance didn't constitute more than 2% of the total cost, which in our case it would.  This means for us to be able to buy a $400k house we need to save up a minimum of $20k before January.  We are currently putting $2k aside each month into our savings account, although the bank thinks we could probably get away with increasing that to $3k with no loss in quality of life.  We would need at least 3 months of consistent savings to prove to the bank we can be capable of saving that much.  Even if we save $3k a month we would only have another $15k by January, not the $20k we would need, this means we might have to consider bringing over our savings from the UK, which Barnadi is very much against.  The size of our deposit will also be effected by the money we currently have invested in shares, if that goes up it will be a great help, but if it goes down we will have to wait even longer before we can consider buying.  The most positive outcome of the meeting however was when we got onto discussing repayments.  Over a 30 year period we would be paying back a monthly amount equivalent to our current rent, but by increasing the monthly repayments to $3k, something we could comfortably afford, it would cut the loan period to 17 years and cut the interest paid back by more than half.

Our only other debt at the moment is our car loan as we always keep our credit card balance clear and I completely paid off my student loan not that long ago.  The next biggest expense we have would be travelling, and unfortunately as more and more of our friends in the UK announce their engagement this is not an area we will be able to save in, at least not without upsetting a lot of people in the process!  After travelling the next most expensive thing in our lives is the rent, but unless we want to go homeless we can't cut back on that. Equally the utility bills are quite fixed and necessary, so we really are saving all we can.  So short of winning the lottery we will not be ready to buy a house until halfway through 2013, by which time house prices may have risen and mortgage deals worsened and we'll find ourselves back at square one.

So now "plan 2" is more than just a pipe dream, we have a much more realistic structure to what we must do and how much we must save in order to get our feet onto the property ladder, and although it may take a little longer than we had hoped, this is not entirely unexpected.  All in all, a positive outcome.

Moving On

Now as much as we love living in Northcote we are over half way through our current rental agreement and so we will have to decide what to do next.  It seems like a good time to start considering whether we are ready to initiate "Plan 2" -  Buy a house.  In order to get a more realistic idea of what we can afford (if anything), we are planning to meet with our financial advisor this week.

We have already made a start by narrowing down a list of which suburbs we would be willing to live in.  The first deciding factor is public transport, unless we want to buy a second car we need to live somewhere on the South Morang train line (for my work) or Tram line 86 (for Barnadi's work).  It will be unlikely that we will be able to afford to stay in Northcote and even Thornbury and Preston are a little too pricey for our estimated budget.  That leaves us with a choice of Reservoir, Kingsbury, Thomastown, Lalor, Bundoora, or Epping. 



Map of our Search Area, Courtesy of Googlemaps

Yesterday we even went to a couple of open house inspections in Bundoora, just to get a feel for what to expect if nothing else.  The first house was really quite nice and had a beautiful large covered deck out the back.  Barnadi was not so impressed, he has gotten too used to modern open plan living.  The second house was not as nice, it was very run down and absolutely stunk of stale cigarette smoke.  It would have cost more in renovations than the property was worth.

After the house inspections I took Barnadi to see Epping, now I have been working in Epping for several months now and know what an ugly, rough suburb it is but I don't think Barnadi really believed me until he saw it for himself.  As I had been telling him since we got here, if the only place we could afford to buy was in Epping (or a similar suburb; Craigieburn, Broadmeadows etc.) I would be on the first plane back to the UK.  So that has at least helped narrow down the search a little more.

We are getting a little ahead of ourselves, and it is just as likely we will end up having to rent a bit longer to ensure we can save up enough money for a deposit.

An elephant never forgets

We are being followed around the world by a parade of elephants.  We encountered our first elephant in London in our final week in the UK.  They swiftly followed us to Singapore where we encountered many more of them.  Now they have arrived in Melbourne.

Elephant in London

Elephant in Singapore

Elephant in Melbourne

This form of street art has definitely become a world wide phenomenon, back in Bath we had pigs and then lions, over in Bristol they had gorillas.  Elephants however seem a much more popular animal as this is the 3rd city around the world we have seen them in.

This kind of interactive art display has much appeal, firstly it gives local businesses and artists a chance to get involved with designing their own unique version.  It gives locals and tourists alike a treasure hunt of sorts as they try to spot them all.  It then ends in an auction were every piece is sold in order to raise money for charity.  Despite the lack of novelty I still find myself getting excited every time we find a new elephant in the city.

It could be you...because it certainly wont be us.

Barnadi has left me...to spend a week with his family in Indonesia that is.  His sister is a dentist and he needs some fillings done.  Also it is his niece's second birthday so he is enjoying spending time spoiling her rotten in the way all good uncles should do.  So while Barnadi is enjoying his time in Jakarta, I am left in cold rainy Melbourne.  Since I dropped him off at the airport on Monday the weather has been abysmal, cold, windy and unrelenting rain.  Still I have been at work most of the time so it doesn't really matter and in my time off I have made up for Barnadi's absence with multiple trips to Northcote plaza and cake baking.  I even kept up Barnadi's habit of buying a lottery ticket every day, not that we ever win more than a division 5 or 6 prize.  Barnadi always used to buy a lottery ticket for the UK lottery while we lived in Bath, but in the entire 8 years that I have known him we managed to win a £10 prize ONCE.  Since moving to Australia we seem to win these small $10-20 prizes on a more regular basis, but never enough to cover the cost of the tickets.  Barnadi still insists on playing however, as he quite rightly points out 'You have to be in it to win it'.

The lottery in Australia is quite a complicated arrangement, there is a different game on every night of the week, and all have a variety of rules and ways to increase your chance of getting extra prizes.  The main lottery is the Saturday night Tattslotto draw, this is your standard pick six numbers game similar to the UK game, except in Australia there are two bonus balls.  The Monday and Wednesday lottos are similar to the Saturday draw, but they are cheaper and the top prize is fixed at $1 million.  On Tuesday it is the Oz lotto, once again it is similar to the standard Tattslotto except their are 7 numbers to pick.  The prizes are usually much higher but then so is the cost of the ticket, your chance of winning a prize however is much lower.  The Thursday game is Powerball (similar to Thunderball in the UK), with this you pick 5 standard numbers and then the powerball.  The odds of winning this are possibly the slimmest of all as without matching the powerball number itself you aren't even likely to get one of the smaller prizes, the main jackpot however does grow to some very substantial figures.  There are a couple of other draws on Saturdays including 'The Pools' and 'Super 66', but as Barnadi never enters these games I know nothing about them.

There are several things you can do to increase your chance of winning, you can play system games where you chose more than 6  numbers, or pick 5 games where you pick less numbers but are guaranteed at least one matching number for the 6th ball.  A similar strategy for the powerball game is the powerhit which grantees the powerball.  All these 'cheats' come at an increased cost in the ticket and none of them will actually guarantee you winning a prize or else everyone would play them and the lottery company would go bust!  The other option is to join a shop syndicate, where you can win a share of any prize won from a mixture of games played.  The trouble with the syndicate is that even if the ticket wins one of the bigger prizes, by the time it is divided up between those holding a share, the actual amount you win is very small.  I still can't help feeling that playing the lottery is no different from any other gambling, and that as nice as the idea of money for nothing is, it always comes at a price.  Still if we ever did win a jackpot prize, I wouldn't say no.

Seeing clearly

One thing that medicare in Australia pays for which the NHS in the UK does not, is eye tests.  So Barnadi and I both got our eyes tested down at an optician in Richmond.  My motivation was so that I could investigate getting contact lenses again, but Barnadi just wanted a general check up.  The good news is that our eyes haven't gotten any worse in regards to general vision.  The bad news however is that there is slight discolouration on the macular of one of Barnadi's eyes, an early warning sign for macular degeneration.  A further eye test involving  looking at a dot on a grid and seeing if thelines look wavey or not confirmed it.  We are lucky in a way that it has been spotted this early and the optician advised that good dietary intake of vitamin A, C, E and Zinc may help reverse or at least halt the progress.  It looks like it is more than just vitamin D that Barnadi is deficient in, which is odd as our diets are almost identical and we eat plenty of  fresh fruit and veg.  He has been given a copy of the wavy line test and if it doesn't get any better or ever begins to get any worse he should get his eyes tested again.  The optician was very good though and took the time to answer all our questions and we never once felt rushed, we left feeling positive that there was something we could do to help prevent it getting worse.

Our second appointment today was with Barnadi's accountant in Thornbury.  In Australia it is a legal requirement for everyone to do a tax return at the end of the financial year, unlike the UK where only private business and the self employed have to do their own assessment.  You can do the tax return on your own, but because we have investments we decided it would be safer to get an accountant involved.  It was definitely a good decision as he calculated that I qualify to receive a full tax refund whereas Barnadi will receive most of his tax back.  So between us we only paid $200 tax for the time we have been in Australia.  We should receive a nice cheque for $2600 within the next two weeks from the tax office.  This will be a great bonus for our current savings.   Next year should be quite beneficial for tax returns too as the tax free earning threshold will go up from $6000 to $1800 as an attempt by the government to offset the effects of the carbon tax.

In a final note, I have received a second letter from Bayside council regarding our parking fine.  It pretty much repeats the first one verbatim, so it seems unless we are willing to go to court  we have no choice but to pay it however unjust it may seem.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this outcome.  Still fingers crossed, there's a $50 million jackpot on the lottery tonight, that would put a single parking fine into perspective.