Burning Through The Dough

Before your mind leaps to conclusions about SMG trying to bake pizza and burning the dough literally, it was a figure of speech. For my mysterious(lurking) international readers, dough down under refers to the moolah variety and not the flour variety heh.

It has been a few years since I've tried to bake my own gourmet pizzas and that didn't go down too well when my creativity with the ingredients took hold and the end results were three very, weird tasting pizzas o.O

Back onto the topic of personal finance - or rather the lack of it lately.

We have been eating out so much that I think the kitchen is becoming stale from lack of use. Sigh. I love to eat out frequently, but it's not exactly great for my poor stomach and for my dough. Also, something wonderful is happening in my personal life in March and while I would like to disclose this event to y'all, for the sake of protecting my own privacy, I can't say too much save for the fact that my funds are haemorrhaging weekly and that won't be stopping until 2012 is over. If you're astute - you may figure out that vague comment of mine...

Last night, while dining out with some mates at the insanely spicy African restaurant Radio Cairo, inevitably the conversation leads to snow trips and buying properties. Most of them are approaching the comfort stage of life where they are ready to buy a larger pad instead of perpetually living in small apartments. I am not alone in my quest to find a larger house to buy. Hopefully we won't end up competing against each other when bidding for a house. Damn, should have thought twice before encouraging them to buy nearby lol

One friend was expressing his shock at the amount of strata levies applicable to town houses in Marsfield. They were close to buying an investment apartment in Guildford but decided Guildford was too much of a slum to invest into (fancy a drive by shooting anyone?). If you've never owned an apartment before and are wondering wtf are strata levies - it's simply your portion of the maintenance bill as an owner of a property with common areas to maintain such as units/apartments/town houses which have shared driveways, common walls, shared gardens and shared facilities such as tennis court, gyms and pools.

If you buy a free standing house that's not strata titled, then you won't have to pay levies. Paying levies is the pits because there are countless expenses that you can't control but yet have to pay a portion of...such as somebody else's renters/tenants who damage their balcony door lock or reverse their car into the garage wall and you're applicable for a portion of the damage bill even though they were at fault... grrr ...infact, analysing strata expenditure reports in too much depths leads to high blood pressure...