Gracie’s Life Experiment

Geez – we filled in (hopefully) the last of the paperwork for our house purchase today. As we are first home buyers in Australia we qualify for a couple of extras with our house purchase. As part of the incentives to get more people into the housing market (and prop up an impending crash) the Aussie government have doubled the First Home Owner’s Grant (FHOG) as well as having reductions/exemptions in stamp duty (First Home Plus) for homes under $600k. Ours was just over $580k so we got a little bit of a reduction in stamp duty and we qualified for the $14k FHOG. Now, both are provided by the same government organisation and have identical forms with identical evidence required. Yet, one must be filled in and submitted by the bank/mortgage company and the other by the solicitor/conveyancer so you have to do 2x as much paperwork and submit 2x as many photocopies of the same evidence. But hey, I don’t mind jumping through a few extra hoops for some free money – it’s all going to help what with the massive mortgage repayments we have in store (4x the amount that we paid on our UK mortgage). 2 weeks today we complete and we can’t wait. So excited.