Our first delivery to our new house – a congrats savoury box from The Hamper Emporium…

…from Mortgage Choice in Tumbi Umbi. Thank you John and Amanda. What a nice surprise 😋 .

John sorted out the loan for our previous house in Saratoga NSW, and now this one in Emerald Victoria. It’s been a long road, figuratively and literally. We packed up and left our old home on December 1 last year. We’ve been road tripping most of the time since then, and hope to finally move into our new home in a couple of weeks.

We didn’t intend to take that long to find a new house. Our “pre approved” home loan with ING turned out to require additional financial info, which was difficult to do while we were on the road. I recall voicing our frustrations over the phone while driving through some country road out the back of nowhere. In any case, that pre approval expired after six months and banks started limiting new pre approvals to just three months. I’m not sure how they expected buyers to find a home in such a short time. In the end, we tried to get a loan through Suncorp, due to their good environmental policies (not investing in fossil fuels), but at the last minute they required additional recent financial info that we couldn’t provide easily (we’re self employed and been travelling for a year). So, we ended up with ANZ Bank, who thankfully accepted our previous financial year’s details. Mortgage Choice took care of all that applying and reapplying for us, through the 12 month 50,000 km journey.

John is also an EV owner. He bought a Polestar at about the time we started off on our road trip. When we signed the final paperwork for the new loan, he mentioned that his wife has ordered a Tesla Model Y. They had taken one for a test drive and were super impressed in general, especially when it automatically prevented an accident. Coincidentally, we also ordered a Model Y at about the same time. Mainly to make it easier to get in and out (Francis has some arthritis) but also more room for road tripping. John was also talking about perhaps replacing his Polestar with a Tesla.

A few months later, we’re both still waiting on delivery of our Model Y. They are stuck on the Glovis Caravel car ship, out in the ocean off Brisbane. It’s been stuck in that area for two months, because port authorities detected some kind of stink bug on board. As we know, it only takes one invasive species to wreak havoc on our ecology. So, although inconvenient, it’s probably worth it. All we can do in the mean time is join the hundreds of others monitoring the “Tesla Model Y Waiting Room” discussion forum and see if the ship moves on the Marine Traffic app 😉.