I just turned 21 years old earlier this year, and thought that my life would finally become better for me but then my whole world came crashing down on me.
I have always been living with my father, the two of us were borrowing a room from our relatives. It was crammed but we lived there for about a good 10+ years, since I was in primary school.
My parents were divorced, I don’t really keep in contact with my mom anymore. The reason me and my dad didn’t apply for a rental flat was because my mom used my name to rent a flat and she stayed with her new boyfriend.
Life was pretty comfortable. Me and my father got so used to living in our relative’s home. My PC setup was a small coffee table propped right in front of my mattress, as soon as I wake up I was already in gaming position. Anyway we just stayed there until when I was nearing the end of my poly years, that’s when my relative told us we need to find a way to move out.
As every Singaporean would know, getting a property in Singapore is like a really huge milestone. I don’t know how me and my father are going to pull it off, so we came up with a plan.
Instead of wasting 2 years in NS, I decided to sign on and landed my self a nice $2.9k vocation (Of cause I didn’t make this decision lightly, I have weighted many factors in, including which vocation would suit me best). Now that I have stable income, we should be able to get a decent loan from HDB or bank. Together with my father’s 80k in his CPF OA, we just might be able to get a BTO or SBF.
That’s when I learnt that my father had deferred a HDB loan a long time ago, back in 1997. The interest has accumulated until a good 200k+. HDB was kind enough to waiver off half of this resale levy, but its still over 100k. Okay fine, how about public resale? We went back to crunching numbers and smashing calculators. My father has already applied for HLE twice so HDB loan is out of the question, we went down to DBS bank to ask for a loan, and after assessing me and my father’s situation, we learnt that instead of the expected 170k we could loan for 25 year tenure, we could only get 100k+ due to my father’s income and age.
Forget about getting resale, we couldn’t even pay the upfront cost for the cheapest options out there, and we haven’t even factor in the COV yet. I have only started working for a few months so I don’t have much savings as well yet.
So we went back to try and apply for a rental flat, and HDB rejected us because our combined income exceeds 1.5k.
A few days ago my relative gave me and my father a deadline to move out. I have already wrote a letter to MP to try and help us out with our situation, and am still currently waiting for reply.
I have also applied and got accepted for a part-time degree program. I am awaiting payment of school fees and have set aside 16k so that’s even less savings for housing.
With increasing property price the trend, plus the pandemic, BTO delay, etc, I feel I got caught in a really bad timing. I admit some of the issues I’m facing is due to our poor decision making in the past, even way before I was born. There is still a lot of things I don’t know about the world but with the decisions I need to make, I can’t help but feel overwhelmed.
If HDB rejects us again, we may have to look for a private rental. But honestly the reality of working just to pay rent and continue cramming in a single room, and we don’t even know what kind of restrictions the landlord might impose on us. Things seem to be turning for the worse, and if my salary goes to paying rent, how can we break out of the cycle?
I am thinking of asking my father to stop working so that our combined salary is just nice below 1.5k. We will have to wait until our next reporting of income tax statement. I don’t know how well this plan might work or if it might backfire on us.
Currently looking out for private rentals while awaiting HDB response, I don’t have any experience with this so I may contact an agent. If anybody has experience with this I would really appreciate it if you can share your knowledge. I heard there are some rental offers out there that are out to scam foreigners, there was a story about a flat that rented out to like 10+ people.