Goya Dmytryshchak
Point Cook resident and former Around Altona editor Melissa Longo and her children are embarking on a tree change due to COVID-19.
Her family will move to Lara while she continues to commute to work for Altona and Laverton Community Bank branches.
Ms Longo said she wanted to experience country life without letting go of everything in the western suburbs.
“We started looking outside of our bubble but not so far away that I would feel like I would have to disconnect from everything,“ she said.
“We’ve been renting and having an investment property just sit there behind the scenes and suddenly COVID struck and we’d all been stuck inside for so long.
“I said to my partner, ’if we want to get rid of that investment property and make our move, now is the time to do it because once the recession strikes it’s not going to be an ideal time to sell the house’.
“So, I said, ’we do it now or we hold onto it for another three to five years’.
“We went with the first plan and we sold it to the tenants that are living in it.“
Ms Longo said she had planned to move to Altona but couldn’t afford it.
“We thought, what is it that we value now that our life has been put under a microscope?
“The thing that we decided was is we’re good career-wise and we’re good socially… but the one thing that we haven’t locked down yet is the way that we’re going to live and are we going keep renting in a suburb that we effectively can’t afford to live in otherwise or are we going to go and get our own slice of the pie.“
