Quick question - well may be being a bit nosey here!! - but here goes!
Does everyone (ie Expats) have mortgage's in Australia? Because there are some places that seem quite reasonable like outskirts of Melbourne where you can get decent house with UK equity from a house sale - but other places like Brisbane where you might need some financing.
I've prob not explained that very well - but I was just thinking if we do get big property are we the only ones with a mortgage!!! or if we're mortgage free is that uncommon?
Thanks for your help and apologies for my nosiness!:

Lots of people with large home loans on here and lots who own there house

Can't help with the area's you are looking at, we are in WA. But in my experience house hunting here, the area's we could afford to buy outright were not area's we would have been happy living. We managed to get a mortgage with no probs. It did help having a large deposit. We also managed to get it before hubby had a job, but I think that was because we were investing over 50% of the price of the house and had kept savings back to tide us over in the event of long term unemployment, which thankfully didn't happen.

Nicky x

We have a mortgage. The funds from the house sale meant we could put down a large deposit, but no chance of us being mortgage free.

The amount of money that we brought over from the UK bought me a lovely place right on the beach. Here's the picture:

Wow Wendy it's fab

edit : and not a lego block in sight!

We're going through the process now, it works out as if we were to of up graded in the UK. The area difference here is amazing, the exact house 5 mins in the wrong direction could be thousands cheeper. we used to look at realestate.com all the time in the uk marveling at the house prices and what we could get with our money but since being here most of those houses we wouldn't even dream of looking at. we're looking at borrowing $240k on a $495k prop. which roughly exchanges at borrowing £100k for a £235k prop

Thanks I like it

For my other house I had to borrow 95%

Wendy, I bags the first two weeks in August

No problem.

I bought in Sydney four years ago and we have a bigger and longer term mortgage here than in the UK. Mostly this is because we moved from a regional area (Reading, Berskhire) to a capitol city. It is also we got a slightly larger house but there was little or nothing in our UK budget range that we would have lived in house wise or area at the time of buying.

Four years on, we realise we possibly could have moved to a less expensive area and been just as happy but this is the feeling after five years of learning and knowing more than when we first landed.

We are planning in living in this house we bought for at least another five years and we are relatively happy with it. Long term we are now back at our UK positions. Emigration is a hughly expensive lark for most and though it might gall, if you plan that you may go back down the experience and finance ladder you do tend to get less annoyed.

Comparison to others is hard to avoid, I sometimes even feel jealous that the people emigrating and selling now in the UK are bringing bigger sums than I did because of the increase in the UK market - but then they have the increases here to deal with, I need to look at the bigger picture.

Hope it all goes well for you