Latest news with #housing costs
News.com.au
2 days ago
- Business
- News.com.au
4.3 million Aussies think they can't afford to retire
An alarming number of Austalians fear they won't have enough money in super or other investments to live off once they hit retirement as housing costs chew up a growing share of their income. Polling by comparison group revealed about a fifth of Aussies said they didn't have enough money in their combined assets to fund a retirement. The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) recommends $595,000 for singles and $690,000 for couples for a comfortable retirement. In contrast to these figures, Finder states the average Australian has $172,835 in super, with a median much lower at $60,037. This comes as much of the population continues to spend a disproportionate amount of their earnings on housing, with about one in five Aussie homeowners directing more than half of their income into mortgage repayments each month. The proportion of homeowners spending more than a third of their income on repayments was even higher, accounting for three quarters of those with a mortgage. The high mortgage expenditure means these homeowners have scant income leftover to store away for retirement. Finder revealed one in five, or 20 per cent of Aussies, believe they will have enough money to get by in retirement but will probably have to cut back on their spending. One in 10 said their super balance was too low but they will have enough in other investments. About one in four, or 27 per cent, said they were not sure if they would have enough money to survive once they they hit retirement. Finder superannuation expert Pascale Helyar-Moray said retirement may be financially out of reach for a large share of Australians. Insufficient super or savings could see millions of Aussies facing financial strain in the later years, she said. 'More and more people are worried that retirement will arrive before the money does, leaving them underprepared,' she said. Ms Helyar-Moray said some Australians assumed they will fall back on the Age Pension, but this wasn't guaranteed. Ms Helyar-Moray urged Aussies to consider playing catch-up by contributing to their super through salary sacrifice to build a bigger safety net. 'Super earnings below $30k are taxed at a maximum of just 15 per cent, which means salary sacrificing into super could help grow your wealth while also lowering your tax,' she said. 'You won't be able to access your super until retirement, so it's wise to ease into it – $100 a month may not sound like much, but it can make a real impact over time.' Ms Helyar-Moray added Aussies need to make sure their super fund is not charging them excessive fees and providing good returns. 'Make sure that you aren't stuck in a poorly performing fund and check regularly that your employer is paying your 12 per cent Superannuation Guarantee contributions on time.'
BBC News
17-07-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Funding changes ignore housing poverty
The council of a west London area known for its wealth has accused the government of not taking into account the impact of housing costs when considering funding expensive properties in Kensington and Chelsea mask that a third of children in the borough live in housing costs are factored in, London has the highest rate of households in poverty, according to London Councils, who said £700m of funding could be diverted from London as part of government plans to change the formula of how it shares funding between local said housing costs were not being considered but the government said it wanted "fairer funding" across all areas. But the leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (RBKC), Conservative Elizabeth Campbell, said the plans would take money from London and "give it to red wall seats in the north."However that housing cost is not being included in the formulae that the government is using to work out the deprivation need for each local authority in its borough leaders said not including housing cost when working out the deprivation need for each local authority as part of the government's the government's Fair Funding Review was skewing the a result, RBKC believes it will lose an estimated £82.7 million in funding over three years. "If the formula was fair we'd agree with that - what we don't agree to is selective defunding of certain London boroughs," said Ms Campbell as we walked past the Trellick Tower in Kensal Town."Look, here we are in North Kensington: Does this look like the sort of area full of privilege and wealth? Just because we have areas within Kensington and Chelsea with very wealthy residents it doesn't mean as a council we are a wealthy council," she added. Golborne ward in the north of the borough is one of the most deprived wards in London. There, local resident George Hencken was keen to tell me how young people like her daughter were being pushed out of the area they grew up in because of high rents. "For my daughter who was born and bred here and for so many of her contemporaries, it's a massive issue," she said. "None of them can afford to stay where they live. The government is not taking any account of the fact that housing costs are so extreme, beyond affordable here, and they're just going to be driving deprivation by doing this." But Ishmael Palmer, who works in the area, said: "I think it should be spread equally."I live in London so I'm going to obviously go with the option of London being given the most money, but that's just the selfish me speaking." London Councils said its analysis shows that some boroughs - which were already struggling to maintain financial stability - could see a reduction of more than 60% in their grant funding from central documents in the Spending Review suggested that to pay for services, council tax was expected to rise by the maximum 5% a year allowed without government permission or a inner London boroughs like RBKC and Wandsworth have charged lower council tax than most London boroughs - this financial year, RBKC increased council tax by 4%.Most London boroughs have already been raising council tax by the maximum amount allowed, and Ms Campbell says, even if she does that next year, it would only raise a fraction of the money her borough would lose under these proposals. The Baby Rhyme Time class at Brompton library in the south of the borough could be the kind of non-statutory service the council might have to cut if it needs to make Spiteri-Gonzi, there with her daughter Ava, said she did not understand why the government would divert funding away from London boroughs. She said: "We all love this class. I would be very sad to see it go." Aasim Hussain, at the class with his son Armaan, said "taking something out of one place to give it to another, I think that's just unjust, but I think keeping those opportunities equal for everybody is the right way forward".Labour MP for Kensington & Bayswater, Joe Powell, who also sits on the Communities, Housing & Local Government committee, told me he thinks it was right for the government "to look at the levels of regional inequality" in the country, but said he wanted to "make sure that the data that the government" was using accurately reflected issues like housing costs. 'Dividing a pie that isn't big enough' Another factor that works against inner London councils, according to Dr Jonathan Carr-West, from the Local Government Information Unit, is that the review would "downgrade" the impact on a council's costs of its "non-resident" daily population. That includes tourists and workers, which more than doubles the population in RBKC from 140,000 to 290,000 every day."For a lot of boroughs that have literally millions of people who don't live there coming in every day, and have associated costs, that no longer counts as much," he said."I think the real thing here is that this is all about dividing a pie that isn't big enough. We're not seeing more money going into local government, we're just seeing changes to how it's distributed."A Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government spokesperson said it had "made available a total Core Spending Power for London, including the GLA (Greater London Autgority), of up to £13.35 billion for this financial year". They said the government recognised the additional strain that commuters and tourists can place on service provision in some authorities – including those in London - and was taking account of need in specific service areas like temporary consultation ends on 15 August.
Washington Post
16-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Want to build stuff? Congress needs to make it easier.
If lawmakers care as much about housing costs, energy prices, climate change, domestic manufacturing and economic growth as they claim, Congress should take a cue from a big ruling in the Supreme Court's latest term. The way things were going, building a highway, or maybe even fixing a street, might have been stopped in court on the grounds that it could encourage the production of more cars running on internal combustion engines and hence contribute to climate change. To the chagrin of some environmental groups, the Supreme Court thankfully curbed the increasingly absurd abuse of the 1970 National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) to block all sorts of building — including projects crucial to protecting the environment. From here, Congress should ease construction of critical infrastructure even further. The court decided that the U.S. Surface Transportation Board could approve an 88-mile train track even if it might move crude oil from Utah to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The board didn't have to assess the potential future impacts if the new track encouraged more oil drilling on one end and more oil refining on the other. 'A relatively modest infrastructure project should not be turned into a scapegoat for everything that ensues from upstream oil drilling to downstream refinery emissions,' wrote Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh for the court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed: 'The Surface Transportation Board would not be responsible for the harms caused by the oil industry, even though the railway it approved would deliver oil to refineries and spur drilling.' Though the decision might seem narrow, its implication for the future of infrastructure is potentially momentous. It pushes back against the demands for increasingly stringent environmental reviews under NEPA, which opponents not always motivated by environmental concerns have used to block train tracks, pipelines, transmission lines, hydroelectric dams and wind farms. 'The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it,' Kavanaugh wrote. 'Congress did not design NEPA for judges to hamstring new infrastructure and construction projects.' The decision frees agencies from having to review all the conceivable direct and indirect environmental consequences of any given project now and in the distant future. In so doing, it should spur broader reconsideration of how environmental impacts interact with other priorities, to better balance societal costs and benefits. That would involve Congress. Court NEPA review of an infrastructure project is not the best vehicle to decide whether the federal government should help or hinder the development of fossil fuels or renewable energy. Right now, it's too easy for President Donald Trump suddenly to advocate for the welfare of whales off the coast of Massachusetts to stop an offshore wind farm there. It's also suspicious for environmental champions to dismiss the welfare of whales only when it gets in the way of wind energy. Environmental review should come down equally hard on a natural gas pipeline and a high-voltage transmission line that cut through the same ecosystems. To draw more sensible lines, Congress should reevaluate which environmental impacts society must tolerate and which it must avoid at all costs — looking at the variety of restrictions it has imposed on development. In the 1970s, a 'new' species of freshwater fish called the snail darter was discovered during NEPA research into the building of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. For the project to be completed, Congress had to exempt it from the Endangered Species Act. It turned out that the fish was not endangered. It wasn't a separate species. Opponents of the dam 'discovered' it to get the dam stopped. Questions about what should be protected are not going away. A flower called Tiehm's buckwheat might stand in the way of a Nevada lithium mine green-lit by the Biden administration. 'They're turning this flower's only known habitat into an industrial site, condemning it to extinction,' said Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is suing. Maybe the idea of protecting every ecosystem at any cost should be reconsidered. The flower, which apparently grows only on 10 acres in the proposed mine's footprint, is a close relative of other buckwheats. Is it a distinct species? Perhaps it could be grown elsewhere? Perhaps the battle against climate change — which will require lithium to build lithium-ion batteries to power electric vehicles — should take precedence? NEPA review had grown to require every government decision to survive endless judicial challenges, poorly serving the nation and the natural environment in which it sits. Congress should not leave it to courts to fix. America needs a new debate over how it interacts with the environment. Only the people's representatives can have it.
