Try Not To Cry Over How Long It Takes To Save For A House Deposit In Every Major Aussie City

house deposit

Homeownership! It’s the great Australian dream, but as it turns out, it’s a really bloody expensive dream.

A recent report by Domain has revealed the exact amount of time it’ll take you to save for a house deposit and honestly, my pea-sized attention span could never.

The report, released on Thursday, assumes that couples can put 20% of their post-tax incomes towards a deposit. It doesn’t factor in variables like putting the cash in a high-interest savings account or transactional costs associated with buying a house.

Unlike every story you read about a young person breaking into the property market at 22, only to find out that their rich uncle Bob chucked them a cheeky $20,000, the report assumes you’re just a normal person who has to save for a house themselves.

Unsurprisingly, saving for a home in Sydney or Melbourne is the hardest, with the entry-level house price sitting at $680,000 and $600,000 respectively. That’s a lot of avocado toast.

According to the report, it’ll take a couple aged 25-34 years a whopping 6 and a half years to save for a 20% house deposit in Sydney, or 1 year and 7 months if you’re just gunning for that 5% deposit. If you’re single, you can effectively double the timeframe. Yikes.

Melburnians have it *marginally* better, only needing to spend six years of their lives saving for that 20% deposit, or a year and a half if you’re not too phased about paying lenders mortgage insurance (LMI). That’s two months longer than the report predicted it would take you last year.

If you’re looking to break into the property market in the next few years, your best bets are Darwin (3y 1m), Perth (3y 5m) or Adelaide (3y 11m), where you and your boo can likely scrape the cash together in less than four years.

In what seems to be the only silver lining of the report, Domain reckons you could get a 5% deposit down in one of these cities in less than a year. I mean it when I say, Adelaide’s Malls Balls have never looked so good.

Unsurprisingly, opting for a unit instead of a full-sized home makes it considerably easier to enter the property market. Regardless of which city you’re looking at, Domain predicts you should be able to save the 5% unit deposit in less than a year and a half.

house deposit

You can read the full report here.

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