Investing Isn't Evil, But the House Might Be a Different Story

Someone on r/AusFinance asked why there’s so much hostility towards investing on a finance forum. Their post said investors get called leeches, people want them taxed more, and there’s a general “anti-aspiration” mood. The thread ran to hundreds of comments. I read a good chunk of it between meetings, which is a sensible use of a work day.

My first reaction was sympathy for the poster. It would be annoying to turn up to a sub about building wealth and find half the room treating wealth as a character flaw. I’ve bought index funds for years. It’s dull, it works, and I’d recommend it to anyone. If you can’t say “I put money in an ETF” without someone calling you a parasite, the conversation has gone off the rails.

My second reaction was that the poster had mashed several different things together.

Shares, a small business and a laundromat are one kind of investing. You put money into something that produces goods or services, and you take a return. Someone else gets a job or a product out of it. I don’t know anyone who has a problem with that, and the thread agreed. One commenter put it well: nobody objects to building wealth, and the problem is housing being used as the vehicle. I think that’s the real line. A house is the one investment that is also a basic need. When the price of shelter is bid up by people treating it as a portfolio asset, the buyer on the other side of the trade is a 29-year-old who just wants somewhere to live. Both are doing the rational thing. One of them is losing.

So the heat in the thread isn’t anti-aspiration. It’s what’s left over after a generation of policy tilted the field. Negative gearing and the capital gains discount have been argued about for decades, and the evidence on them is fairly consistent. They favour people who already own property. I’d like to be wrong about that, but the numbers keep landing in the same place.

There was an exchange further down that I liked. Someone said people should spend less time complaining about socialism and more time on career development. Two replies came back almost immediately, one from a top-5% earner and one from someone with a PhD working 60-70 hour weeks, both saying they support more redistribution. That doesn’t settle the argument, but it does undercut the idea that this is just people with no money being jealous. Plenty of comfortable people think the settings are off.

I hold a contradictory position here, and I’ll admit it. I own a house in the outer southeast. It has gone up in value, and I haven’t lost sleep over that. My daughter is a teenager, and I’d quite like her to be able to buy something one day without needing us to hand over a deposit. I can’t make those two facts sit comfortably next to each other. I’m not sure they’re meant to.

The thread also had a fair point about the sub itself. It’s part ratings forum, part Ozbargain, part venting space and part politics, and the tone shifts depending on the hour. Someone noted that comments change after 5pm, and that matched my experience. It’s a general Australian sub with a finance label. Expecting it to behave like a focused investing forum is a bit like expecting the 7:42 to Cranbourne to be a quiet carriage.

Where I land, for now: investing isn’t the problem, and the poster is right that “leech” is lazy. But the anger isn’t random either. It’s pointed at a specific arrangement, and most people in the thread could name it. Separate the two and the argument gets a lot more useful. Keep them lumped together and everyone just yells past each other.

Meanwhile, the same day’s top post was about a morning TV show losing its mind over property prices dropping. A few commenters pointed out that this is what everyone said they wanted. I’ll leave that one there.

I’ll keep buying the boring index fund. I’d also like a housing system where doing so isn’t the only sensible option.