The latest AMP NATSEM report shows that Australians are getting into significant debt in order to own their own home, raising concerns about sufficient insurance levels.<\/p>\n
The report, entitled ‘The Great Australian Dream – Just a Dream?’, examined housing affordability and housing stress.\u00a0 It found that median house prices grew 147 per cent to $417,000, while median after-tax incomes only increased 50 per cent to $57,000 from 2001 to 2011, pushing the price to income ratio from an affordable 4.7 to what the report believed was a severely unaffordable 7.3 today.<\/p>\n
‘For those who do manage to purchase a house high house prices mean taking on very high levels of debt that will constrain their lifestyle for many years into the future,’ the report stated.<\/p>\n
According to the report, nearly\u00a0one in ten buyer households spend at least half their after-tax income on housing, with the conclusion being that\u00a0these households are at serious risk of financial difficulties, especially if family or economic circumstances were to change.<\/p>\n
AMP Financial Services Managing Director, Craig Meller<\/strong>, said households that are in housing stress are devoting a large portion of their after-tax income to housing costs.<\/p>\n “Buying a home and paying off the mortgage is putting Australians under considerable stress. \u00a0It can be a struggle to get into the market and when people do, many have little funds left over for essentials, let alone a family holiday,”\u00a0he said.<\/p>\n However, the level of debt being accrued is not matched by an increase in life insurance take-up.\u00a0 The Association of Financial Adviser’s (AFA) ‘Risking Everything’ research found that only 52% of Australians held any form of life insurance. \u00a0The main trigger for the take-up of insurance was the purchase of a house\/taking out a mortgage (24.9%).<\/p>\n The research also found that those people who were insured but did not have an adviser estimated that just under $400,000 was an adequate level of cover.\u00a0 With the average first home buyer mortgage sitting at $280,000 this raises concerns about how these homeowners would cope even with some level of cover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The latest AMP NATSEM report shows that Australians are getting into significant debt in order to own their own home, raising concerns about sufficient insurance levels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}