In 1870, the Kiama Independent ran a piece titled How to Get Rich. The advice was breathtakingly simple:
Work hard. Spend less than you earn. Save a few hundred pounds. Buy a small farm on the edge of town. Build a modest house. Marry a prudent woman (the sexism was free). Live happily ever after.
And the best part? Don’t worry about furniture. As the newspaper sternly advised, “If the average colonist can have a carpet and fine furniture without taking another man’s money to pay for them, let him have them. But if he cannot afford it, bare floors will not hurt honest men’s feet.”
In other words: buy the farm first, worry about the carpet later.
And here’s the thing, it wasn’t a joke. Back then, this advice actually worked. You could slog for a few years and end up with a farm. Land ownership was within reach of an ordinary labourer.
Fast forward to 2025, and you’d be laughed out of the bank for suggesting such a thing. Today’s version of How to Get Rich might read something like this:
Work hard. Spend less than you earn (if that’s even possible). Save for a decade while rents chew through a third of your income. Watch house prices climb faster than your wages. Cry into your smashed avo (because it wasn’t the avocado that broke the bank). Apply for a mortgage that will consume 50% of your household income. Repeat until retirement.
Here are the hard numbers:
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The house-price-to-income ratio in Australia now sits at about 8 times annual income (9.5 times if you’re in Sydney, 10-12 times if you live in Kiama). In 1870, it was closer to 1:1.
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It takes the average household more than 10 years just to save a deposit—and that’s without the market leaping ahead while you save.
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If you’re lucky enough to secure a mortgage, expect half your income to vanish into loan repayments. If you’re renting, a third of your income disappears into someone else’s mortgage.
In short: in 1879 “getting rich” meant a few years of thrift and sweat, and you could end up with your own patch of dirt. Today, thrift and sweat mostly buy you the right to complain about real estate agents and doom scroll Domain listings at midnight.
The truth is, our ancestors may have lived with bare floors, but at least they could afford the walls around them. Carpets were optional. Houses weren’t.
#HousingCrisis #CostOfLiving #KiamaHistory #ThenAndNow #BareFloors #HomeOwnership #AustralianDream #LocalHistory #RealEstateReality