GROIC Day 25

Things are a bit hectic at the moment as I need to get a few days ahead and I need to make sure I have the right numbers (or excesses) of things for the remainder of the month. Tonight I surprised myself with an epic effort, but you’ll have to wait until the day after tomorrow to see what it is. My efforts for today’s consignment were also fairly epic, but less spectacular, as I sorted out all the documentation associated with various real estate transactions over the years (motivated by the fact that I’d somehow managed to set up two separate folders on different occasions for each of the properties involved when I moved nearly two years ago).

In doing so, I reminisced about my first real estate purchase: 5 acres of steeply-sloping, south-facing, mostly bush block in the hills above the township of Snug, which I bought in 1991 for the princely sum of $17000. I was a PhD student and half-time bottom-of-the-rung academic at the time, and this was the only way I was ever going to be able to afford to become one of the landed gentry. Although it had many impractical idiosyncrasies it was a beautiful peaceful spot with the bonus of a creek (technically the Snug River) on its boundary. My family and I did a lot of landscaping work to add native plants, and we cut a terrace into the hill and built a lovely stone wall behind. Much of the bush part was burned out in a 1994 bushfire (although not the area we’d worked on most), but it recovered over the following years, and we had a couple of Scout camps down there.

Some 13 years after buying it, when I’d been in Melbourne for quite a few years despairing at the price of real estate there, I was pleasantly surprised — although also saddened — to be able to sell it for over four times as much as I’d paid for it, giving me enough money for a decent deposit on my Brunswick West townhouse that I bought in 2006.

And at the end of 2011 the Brunswick West townhouse to all financial intents and purposes turned into my Tasmanian abode.

I have still kept some of the documentation associated with each property, but the advertising brochures and generic bank documentation, an inspection report and redundant contracts of sale, together with an ancient collection of rates and land tax notices, are now headed for the paper recycling bin.