Weeds

We aren't even there yet and life is beginning to imitate art. With news again rumbling out of the RBA about potential rising interest rates and credit card debt back scaling the mountain of stupidity, a dude in the Hobart suburb of Moonah has gone all Nancy Botwin, moonlighting as a pot barren to ease his financial distress.

Why? Well for this guy, the brown stuff from the bowels hit the air displacement mechanism when the fixed rate mortgage on a rental property switched from fixed to variable.

It was then, the mild mannered father of three, junior soccer coach and scout volunteer, saw a grow-op as his best chance to get things back on track. As you'd understand, for any average guy who was earning over $100k a year - well it's hard out there for a pimp - when he trying to get money in as rent - SUV and petrol money spent - and bitches like me talking shit.

That's right, brother was earning over $100k a year and still struggled with the payments before he turned hydroponic. I'm being too simplistic, for sure, so investigating Moonah, where the rental property is/was, will probably turn the heat lamp on and light up this situation.

Here's a 3x1 with downstairs flat, and to my man, 'D' from Sydney, who asked what 3x2 means? That's 3 bedrooms x 2 bathrooms. Sorry D, I haven't been counting parking spaces.

The current asking price is $395-425k, after selling eight years ago for $168,000. So the owner, like most every other dill with a ten year limit to their property memory, clearly believes houses double in price every seven years. This, after the growth in the previous eight years was a more subdued 14%.
 
And here's another 3x1 from the bud bearing suburb of Moonah:

Asking price? Mid $300's, my assumption $340,000 would be nice. Sale eight years back? $120,000.

Moonah pot merchant probably wouldn't have found himself in this situation if he'd bought back in the early part of the decade, like all property investors are happy enough to tell you, "go find a flux capacitor, get back in time and buy a property, you moron." Buy in the last couple of years and your skull is really banging on the ceiling of affordability and growth. How else does a guy on $100k find himself up the spout and growing weed to pay the mortgage? Probably through buying at the worst possible time, in the middle of euphoria, when property can never fall, you can never lose and a new pricing paradigm has been established - albeit until we revert back to the old one again.

Pass the dutchie and maybe we can defy gravity a little bit longer.