Say Goodbye to the Great Australian Dream

My mum wants me to buy a house. She's wanted me to buy a house since I finished uni and got a "real" job. She wants me to have stability and to get onto the property market as quickly as possible. She sees it as an investment that will act as a guarantee for my future. Bless her, she worries a bit about what her eldest is going to do with her life, particularly as she seems more interested in sampling Melbourne's bar and restaurant scene and shopping online than putting money into a savings account.

One of my best friends has bought a house. She bought it for $115 000 or a similar unfathomable price about five years ago. It is probably now worth a lot more than that. Financially it's probably the smartest thing she ever did. Sometimes she finds it frustrating because now she's tied to that location for the foreseeable future, and all her spare money goes on repairing the gutter, and unfortunately the tenants with whom she shares the property turned out to be From Hell. But it was a very shrewd decision and in ten year's time she will be very glad she did it.

Unfortunately I am Generation Y and, as the newspapers are constantly telling us in a slightly patronising way, we are all about instant gratification. So telling me that it'll be a really great idea in TEN years really isn't going to do it.

You see, if I wanted to buy a house, there would be a few things which would need to happen. I would need to stop spending money on Asos and actually need to put some money into a savings account. I would have to make a decision about which city I want to live in. Unfortunately the city in which I currently reside is unlikely to make the final cut, so I would also have to more interstate/overseas and find a new job. So would Strummer, assuming that he would still want to live with me after I stop dressing in clothes from Asos and become consumed with saving money, Scrooge-style. Then I would have to move to the farthest reaches of said city in order to find a property I could afford. I would also probably end up boring my friends with stories about renovations, which has got to be the dullest topic of conversation ever.

And why, why would I want to do this? Granted, it would be nice to be able to have a dog. I get the whole "rent is dead money" argument. But I don't want to be tied down. I want to be free - to take off overseas for a couple of years, to spend my money on pretty nice things that make me smile rather than a dull grey mortgage, to enjoy my youth. I know I'm not twenty-one anymore and maybe it's time I learned some responsibility. But dammit, I like my life. I like living in a happening suburb. I like eating out and going to the theatre and shopping. I like that we dream about moving to Italy on a whim. I like that I'm not in debt to anyone, let alone a bank.

So what then? What if I never buy a house? Well, maybe when I'm forty I can stay on my friend's couch. Or maybe I'll regret not doing it in ten years' time. But I'm hoping that a more bohemian attitude will ultimately make me happy. And happiness is kind of more important to me than stability at the moment. I think of buying a house as something to do when I have done everything else. For some people, I guess they feel they've "done everything else" at twenty-one (they're probably the same people who travel to "get it out of their system") but for me, it seems like the boring option. And life wasn't meant to be boring. I don't want to live in Mordialloc in a half-renovated house for two years while I wait for the benefits of my shrewd financial decision to kick in.

So I'll take the hazardous rental market over the white picket fence, and live up to my generation's bad name.