Sydney’s Fkd Median House Price Means It’ll Take 22 Years To Save A Deposit

Guys, we promise that the flow of articles about how you are permanently locked out of the Australian housing market which feature lead images cribbed from a stock image site search for ‘avocado toast’ will end after this week. We can absolutely promise that.

That being said, there’s still some insight to squeeze out of The Australian‘s much-maligned op-ed from Bernard Salt, which claimed (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that millennials are finding it difficult to buy into the housing market because they drop their dollars on frivolous pursuits like smashed avocado on toast.
This resonated, because we all know smashed avo on toast is extremely tasty and also more expensive than your average spread. Perhaps boomer shaming activates our grotesquely enlarged millennial guilt glands. Who knows.
But the immediate rejection wasn’t just on those grounds. Fact of the matter is, even without scrimping and saving and avoiding the luxury pursuits, it ain’t easy to enter the housing market.
The current median housing price in Sydney, for example, is a whopping $1,031.370. The median monthly income in that city is $5,078. If a person on that income saved 10% of their income each month ($510, let’s say), it’d take a monster 22 years to save up a 20% deposit. You could go for, say, a 10% deposit, but then you’d prob be paying mortgage insurance.
It’s not wildly more positive in any other Australian city, tbqh. In Melbourne it’d take you 16 years, in Brisbane it would take you 12 years, and in the city with the cheapest median housing price – Hobart – it’d still take you nearly 10 years.
The good folk at The Guardian have a helpful little calculator set up, if you want to enter your meagre spending habits and the median housing cost in your city, then cry bitterly into your avocado. They’ve quantified that 20% deposit in terms of avo toasts, btw. For Sydney, that’s 9,291 of ’em. Happy saving!
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: Getty Images.

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