House

My husband is spending his time every night looking at the houses at domain.com.au. I used to do it but I stop the habit as I need to spend time studying for my Nov exams.

I mentioned before that me and my husband has different views of how much is reasoable for a rent. I prefer to rent 'cheap' and save the money for the 'real' house (purchase) but my husband prefers to live in 'style' hehehe... I was shocked to know that he's looking at $400-$500 pw rented houses. Somehow he managed to find out that that's how much some Singaporeans are paying there, through the forum in 'overseas singaporeans'. So there, he justifies his budget.

I'm still not sure whether we want a 2-bedroom apartment near the city or a 3-bedroom townhouse further away from city (20km). My preference is the latter, as I prefer to have an extra room for visitors (eg. my parents) assuming that my parents-in-law staying with us there. Also, I told my husband that it's better to live further away so we will get used to the distance if we buy a house around the same distance (I don't think we'll ever could afford those $1M houses near the city).

Unlike Singapore, renting a flat/townhouse there is usually unfurnished to it means we have to buy our own furniture and fittings. I wonder if they would provide, eg, washing machine or fridge. That leads to the question: Should i bring my furniture from Singapore to Australia? Should I shipped them out altogether? All that depends on how we're going to rent out our present flat. Most probably we will rent it out fully furnished as what is commonly done here. So most probably, we'd buy new furniture there.

Hmm, if I rent a place for a year and the owner decided to sell the house, wouldn't it be troublesome/expensive to move all the things to a new place? We do plan to rent for at least 2 years before buying a house. I hope we could sign a 2-year lease once we found a nice place to rent. Not too sure if it is common or possible to sign 2-yr lease. In Singapore, people sometimes sign 1-yr lease only so we only pay the agent commission for 1-year (which is about half-month rental from the tenant and half-month from the landlord) and we do a casual arrangement with the landlord later for the extension. Well, this only works if the landlord trust the tenant.

Thinking about it, I feel weird imagining some strangers would be staying my flat, would be sitting on the sofa that my hubby boasts of getting a good bargain of, would be sleeping in our room that was painted in purple colour (chosen by me), would be having dinner on my unconventional 8-seater square dining table. I hope they didn't spoil any of the furniture, especially the glass cover of the dining table. But I was told, it could not be avoided; tenants tend not to take care of the furniture as those things are not theirs. Oh well, I maybe getting to emotional about it but i guess one always have strong attachment to one's first house.