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Every Australian knows what a first-home buyer is entitled to by now. A heap of free money! But is there really such a thing as free money?

According to a recent report by market research firm Brandmanagement, young home buyers’ loans have jumped an unsustainable $52,000 (23%!) in the past two years.

From February 2008 to February 2009, first-home buyers have flooded the market, up 9.6% now comprising 26.9% of the market. It’s almost as though there’s something they don’t know!

Here we essentially have a boom within a boom. The increased madness of first-home buyers rushing to get into the property market before they lose their “free money” or “before the next boom” has pushed prices up, despite times of economic doom and gloom. This “mini-boom” in itself gives first-home buyers more reason to commit earlier than they should. In the belief that property will only increase in value, they want to enter the market as early as they can at any cost.

Andrew Inwood, from Brandmanagement is quoted saying:

“What the government incentives appear to have done is transfer the money from the people who are borrowing money to buy their first homes into the pockets of those who are selling at a more attractive price.”

The issue for me is the short sightedness of this whole situation. Anyone who has taken the time to do the research knows that Australia is not in a sustainable economic situation right now, and propping up the bubble with grants like these is just prolonging the inevitable. Why give people a false sense of security and then screw them over?

It’s hard to make a comparison, and this example is probably a little extreme, but during a war what would you prefer? To have your country bombed and suffer considerable damage in an instant, and then have the attacking country leave? Or to have troops attacking nearby, tormenting the families and fighting for five or ten years? The way I see it, instant annihilation, while hard for everyone, allows the country to be rebuilt immediately. People will realise what is actually important in life, and pull together to reconstruct their homes, hospitals, and so on.

It’s amazing how this whole situation is only centered around money, not life or death, and yet people still want to believe that everything is peachy, while all they are really believing in is a slow and painful death of the market.

I’ve been watching a lot of The Sopranos lately. I love the show, and to be honest I don’t know why. The life that they are leading is one that would just never interest me. For those that don’t watch the show, it follows the life of a mob boss, and everything that goes on around him in his day to day life. Long work days, carrying the pain of killing people (often loved ones), and stress about work and the consequences of his exploits (being arrested or killed). His family has every possession they could want, yet so many problems as a result.

Walking to the bus interchange today I noticed that someone had spray painted “Life?” on the path. It wasn’t like the usual graffiti that I see around there. This was written more like one of those “No Milk” or “Go Vegan” tags, which aims to make people think. It made me think for sure. I don’t know what it was meant to mean but to me it seems as though it’s asking me, as I walk to the interchange to catch a bus to work. Is this life? Am I living? Or am I merely just “getting by”? Doing what everyone else does and calling it life..?

It also reminded me of a radio show called “Hack” that I was listening to a few weeks back. On this particular show they were talking about death and all things death. One of the people they spoke to was a freestyle motocross rider who “flirts with death” for a living. When asked about life, he says that a lot of people are nowadays just living and working 9 till 5, and he’s more scared of that than dying. For him it’s all about feeling life and “being alive”.

Incidentally this morning as I was thinking about all of this, I played a song called Entertainment by Rise Against. The line that struck me was “We’ve all made petty fortunes but we can’t afford a life”, and I really think it rings true in a lot of people’s lives. Why do so many of us earn decent wages, but never seem to have enough to really enjoy life? I’ve spoken about it before – working to live or living to work. For most it’s a very fine line, unable to shake the expectations of friends, family, colleagues and so forth. For others it’s easy to just leave the life that is expected of them, in order to live the life that they will enjoy.

After just having four days away from work over Easter, I’ve had a good break to catch up with my fiancee. Yesterday we just laid on a rug and lied in the sun for an hour or so, just talking about everything and enjoying the outdoors together. That, to me is living. I’ve realised that in order to enjoy life I only need a handful of things, very few of which have anything to do with money. Today I’m in an office surrounded by people still trying to get a big enough hit of coffee to wake themselves up at lunch time.

This ain’t living.