Most mornings I will read the news on my phone as I have breakfast. This is my contact with the outside world and the good thing about it is that I have complete control over it just in the same way that China wishes it could control all its citizens. I of course need to use a VPN to jump over the Great Firewall and at the moment it seems to be working OK. If I was at home, wherever that is these days, I would be listening to copious amounts of bullshit about Brexit and if I happened to be in Australia I would be bombarded with the political drama that is Australian politics, although there is another fascination in Australia and that is the Royal Commission which they seems to have for just about anything these days, another expensive waste of time but it keeps many high paid folk in jobs.

So the banks are currently under scrutiny and of course like any business they bullshit their customers at times to make an extra quid, but what I find totally laughable are the customers themselves that believe the bullshit that they are told. And now many of the customers are complaining because they cannot pay back the huge amounts of debt they have accrued by investing in the property market. Many have tried to cash in on the property boom that has been going on in Australia for many years but now it seems to have leveled off and the prices are even beginning to fall and of course now there is no cash flow for some due to the down turn in the mining sector and the shit has hit the fan

I bought a house back in 2004 and shortly afterwards I needed to replace my car and so I approached the bank and asked if I could increase my by $12,000 and they said yes. My finances were stretched to the hilt but I needed a car, because in Australia not having a car is not an option. As a matter of curiosity I asked the bank manager about how much money I could borrow if I wanted to buy another house, he told me I could borrow another $250,000 on top of my current debt of $125,000. I asked how I could pay for all this debt considering I was just scraping by. He replied” Just get a renter into your new place and all will be well” and this is where many are caught in the financial web. I agree it is not good practice to sell someone a product that really does not suit them or that might be a little dangerous for them but at the end of the day these borrowers must take the final responsibility for their actions, grab a pen and paper and do a few sums and see if you can pay back the money. If you have been given the wrong information or have been sold a product that professes to do something other than you were told then of course you have recourse, but if you are just too stupid and greedy and can’t count then I would have to say tough shit.

And so once more breakfast has come to an end and I can turn off the VPN and shut the western world out for a bit and become a mushroom once more. This is one really good thing about living here, I don’t have to listen or come in contact with the piles of so called news bullshit and there is no tabloid nonsense either. Of course if you live in amongst it all, you can do the same but eventually some of the bullshit will filter through.