bennymacca wrote: yeah i wasnt talking about in the past, obviously we are in a vastly different economic situation to the early 90s when the state bank collapsed etc, though i cant really comment on that because i wasnt old enough
Apart from interest rates being much higher then, the state financial position looked much the same as it does now to me as an investor.
The one exception was that, as I said above, there were still assets that could be sold later. We haven't got that option now.
I lived through the crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s and was involved in by having several business enterprises running at the time, owning (each with mortgages) my own house, and business premises in North Adelaide and in Hahndorf. Fortunately, I saw the writing on the wall during 1987 and sold up the two business premises and my Porsche during 1987-88, and cleared my debts before the collapse. I almost didn't get out of the Hahndorf property in time.
Meanwhile the Bannon government guided by Paul Keating's advice that the
"J-curve" was coming - that is that the economic down turn was about to bottom out and the economy rise again - encouraged the state bank to keep lending and encourage business investment. The SA branch of the AMA was one of the institutions that listened to that bad advice and by late 1988 their new building in Ward St, Nth Adelaide, was worth less than they owed on it.
By then, the state government could not refill the hole they had encouraged the state bank to dig, and nor could they put back the similar size hole left because they had spent most of the holdings for the state superannuation fund meant to be there to pay government staff pensions. Things then just limped along until the Liberals came to power and bit the bullet by doing what was necessary to clear the debt (and took the flack for it) in the early 1990s.
(That situation may have also been one of the reasons Bannon's ALP successor Lynn Arnold stepped back and did nothing to oppose the Grand Prix moving to Melbourne.)
I did not move back into investing until the mid 1990s when things were starting to look like getting better, but it was still slow until the early 2000s.
I did well out of property, in Victoria, between 2003 and 2008, before our more recent slump, although again I only got out, completely, in the nick of time in late 2008.
That was compensated for by being able to buy property in SA below council valuations in 2009 and 2011.