Breaking into the property market has become more difficult for first home buyers in Australia as of late mostly because of reasons I’ve explained in detail on this blog before. It’s not an easy problem to solve as many of the options championed by self proclaimed experts are politically charged and increasing the housing supply isn’t as simple as many people think it to be. Thus many of the measures that the incumbent government suggests are often things that don’t address any of the underlying issues directly and instead look to put more money in the hands of potential first home buyers. Joe Hockey’s recent brainwave to address this problem, by allowing first home buyers to dip into their super for a deposit, is a classic example of this and it will neither help first home buyers nor address the underlying issues that they face.
Whilst it’s not a formal policy they’re looking to submit yet (hence the lack of detail around how the actual scheme would work) Hockey says that he’s been approached by lots of young people looking to tap into their superannuation in order to fund their first home purchase. On the surface it sounds good, younger Australians get to put a roof over their heads and get their foot into the property market, something which should hopefully sustain them for the future. The main problems I see with this are two fold; firstly most people won’t have enough super to make a difference and, secondly, it will likely set most people back meaning their retirement will likely not be fully funded by super.
On average your typical superannuation balance at 25 is on the order of $10,000, not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Even the most generous loans that let you get away with a 5% deposit would only see you able to get a loan for $200,000 with that amount of cash, not exactly the amount that many now first time home buyers are looking to finance. That figure doubles by the time they reach their 30s but that’s still not enough to finance the home on its own. Indeed first home buyers are likely to need double or triple that in order to buy their first homes which means that they’ll need to have at least $20,000 in savings for those meager amounts of super to help push them over the line. If they’re able to save that you’d then think that bridging the gap wouldn’t be outside of their reach, at least within a reasonable timeframe.
This then leads onto the conclusion that the opposite situation, one where someone couldn’t save that much and required their superannuation to bridge the gap, is the least preferable scenario for a first home buyer. You see a savings track record proves that someone will be able to cope with the repayments that a mortgage requires whilst at the same time still being able to afford everything else they need to live. If you don’t have this and are looking to get into property diving into your super isn’t going to help you, instead it’s going to put you in the unenviable position of having even less money available to you, eradicating any chance you had at getting ahead. You’d hope that the last batch of lending reforms would prevent most people like this from getting a loan in the first place but I think we’ve all seen people get themselves into this situation before.
On top of this using most or all of your super would essentially put you back 5 or 10 years in planning for your retirement. That might not sound like much when most people will have 50+ years of working life but a lot of the power of super comes from compound interest. When you take an axe to your initial savings it resets the clock, pushing back the compounding rate significantly. That means you hit the high growth part of your super much later in life, leaving a lot less than you’d expect for retirement. This would mean more people getting onto the aged pension sooner, something which the whole superannuation system was designed to avoid.
I’ll hold off on any other criticisms until I see an actual policy on this but suffice to say the idea is rife with issues and I think the only reason that they’re entertaining it is to win back some favour with the youth vote. If they do put a policy before parliament though it’ll be interesting to see how they address criticisms like this as I know I’m not the only one to find fault with this policy. Heck I’d love to see more people getting into property since it’d bolster my investments but honestly I’d rather see the underlying issues, like lack of supply and the owner-occupier CGT exemptions, tackled first before they start looking towards trashing people’s futures for short term gains.
