The guilt of buying property

I’m going to buy an investment property this year.
I feel bad.
First up, if I could afford to buy a home that was within a realistic distance of my job and could fit myself and my boyfriend, I would. But I can’t.
Instead, I’m going to buy something in the town that I grew up in with the help of my sister, using money that our dad left us before he died. We’re going to rent it out to tenants so we can ‘get our foot in the door’. I guess basically, someone is going to pay our mortgage.
Does this make me part of the problem?
Australia’s housing market is so fucked and it’s fucked because it’s full of people who would never even ask themselves that question. But just because I am asking it, doesn’t make me a more ethical person, it just makes me someone who overthinks every aspect of their life. Investors, either baby boomers or from overseas, have driven up property prices to such a point that my generation (at least the part of it living in major cities) is pretty much screwed.
We all know it, and I don’t know what’s worse, whether most of our generation will never own property or the fact we all keep making shit avocado jokes about it.
When my dad was diagnosed with brain cancer he was given a lump sum from his superannuation fund as his illness fell under the category of having a ‘permanent disability’ (my dad couldn’t use the right half of his body particularly well for the last year of his life). Before he died he left myself, my brother and sister $30,000 each — telling us to only use it to invest in property.
My dad was never the best with money.
He sunk most of his life savings into building his dream home and was definitely more of a dreamer than a realist. My mum has always been the realist.
Dad was lucky enough to be privileged enough to not have to overly worry about money though. He spent most of his adult life living in a regional town and working as a high school teacher. As did my mum. Sure, they could have made better financial decisions and they weren’t rich, but in the circumstances in which I was raised — things were pretty good. I’m extremely middle class.
Because he never really made particularly good investments, he was particularly adamant the money he was giving me only be used for property, as he saw that as a solid investment. Not like the shares he bought in the random health food company a decade ago.
He told me this months before he died and I’m not going to break the promise even if I feel weird about contributing to a property market that is fucked.
If not for the death of him, I wouldn’t even be thinking about buying property, which is another reason it feels weird and gross to me. I’m profiting off someone’s death to enter a market that is unfair to those without a head start.
It’s why I’ve had $30,000 sitting in my bank account for the past few years. It would have made sense to buy property earlier, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. Partially because that money is attached to the death of my dad, partially because becoming a landlord makes me feel gross and partially because buying property is really hard. Like, how do mortgages work?
I know there’s people out there who have scraped together whatever they can, done all their research and still can’t buy a home. Or an investment property. But here I am on the cusp of doing just that, and I can’t shake this feeling of guilt. I don’t deserve something that is reserved for the elite. Or maybe I just don’t want to acknowledge that I’m one of them.
