The house we have decided on is progressing settlement.
There has been no hiccups in the process just yet that we couldn’t handle. One of the hiccups was my name, which isn’t a problem for any one but the OSR (who administer the home owners grant) essentially I have 3 names, but I only really use 2 of those in practice. The problem comes with my birth certificate which has a name on it I do not use.
The other problem was with the council inspection, which failed for a very silly reason. But we hope they can work past it, or just ignore it. Their whinge is far from anything worthy of consideration.
The home loan is ready to roll. The building and pest inspections came back OK. Now, we just need to get the moving preparations completed, and get ready to settle at the new house.
Now, the RBA has announced a interest rate drop, which will help reduce the loan term from a theoretical 10 years to somewhere near 9 or so. I hope to have it paid in 5 – 7 years, but that’s probably unrealistic.
I would have thought the big bank we are going with would be a bad choice, but they are surprisingly competitive. The rates are, after discounting, competitive with what ING Direct and Bankwest offer, and the other advantages included make them a wise choice.
It’s surprisingly smooth so far. It’s just that you sit and wait for something to go ‘bang’ – this is gonna stop you unless it’s fixed. But, as we near settlement, it seems less likely that something like that will happen.
The car though, has proven to be costly recently. I took it in for a service a short while ago – and resolve an issue with a CV joint – and now we are in for new shocks, a timing belt, brake pads, and wheel alignment. I figure it’s just tipped 210,000 so it’s likely to be fine once we get the $2000 worth of work completed.. Maybe the timing on the spending isn’t right though.. That’s a good chunk of my pay on a car.
Moving isn’t going to cheap either. We’ll need to move connections over, then the tiresome packing, and relocating everything to the new house.
We can take some relief in once it’s done, it’ll be done for at least 8 – 10 years.