When you're in your 20s and early 30s, superannuation can seem like a beautiful pot of money hanging tantalisingly out of reach.

Sure, planning for retirement is important, but where are you going to live between now and then when property prices are through the roof?

Now senior Government ministers are discussing whether young Australians should be allowed to access their superannuation to buy their first house.

Awesome, right? Well, before you get too excited, let's take a closer look at the numbers.

How much could you save through the scheme?

That depends on the final details of the scheme, if it even eventuates.

But we've had a stab at it based on our best understanding of the proposal floating around Government — that is, that you can divert three years of super contributions into a home deposit saving fund, as long as you match that with an equivalent amount of savings from your after-tax income.

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Obviously, how much you can save will also depend on what your income is.

But, to give you an idea, we crunched the numbers based on what an average 25 to 34-year-old earns (according to the ABS), which is around $75,000 a year.

That means the 9.5 per cent compulsory super contribution is $7,125 per annum, plus another $7,125 per annum from post-tax income as the required co-contribution.

We then assumed it is invested in a deposit account earning 3.2 per cent per annum, which are the better three-year term deposit rates going around.

(The interest calculation is a bit simplified, but it gives a pretty good rough guide.)

The result? The average person in this target age group for first home buyers could probably save about $45,545 after three years.

So what can you buy with that kind of money?

The short answer is not much, at least if you want/need to live in Sydney or Melbourne.

Property researcher Cameron Kusher from CoreLogic crunched the numbers for us to provide a helpful list of suburbs and towns you could afford to buy in with a $45,545 deposit.

If you want to take the safer, and cheaper, option of putting down a 20 per cent deposit, then there is no suburb in or around Sydney, Melbourne or Darwin where you could buy a typically priced house or even unit, and just one in Canberra.

There are 19 affordable suburbs in Brisbane (but you would basically be limited to buying a unit), 32 in Adelaide (including nine where you can afford a house), six in Perth (all units), and only 18 even in Hobart.

If you like living dangerously, you can opt for a 10 per cent deposit, and the extra cost of lender mortgage insurance (which only protects the bank, not borrower, from loss) that goes along with that.

Even then, CoreLogic found only 81 suburbs in Sydney where you could buy, mostly units. The only place you could buy a typical house would be the Central Coast or near Blacktown.

The closest unit you could buy would still be Merrylands West, which is a 27-kilometre, 50-minute drive from the Sydney CBD, and nearly an hour-and-a-half on public transport.

Melbourne was a little more affordable — you could buy a house in Frankston North. It's about 50km drive from the CBD, but also about 50 minutes according to Google Maps.

Apartments as close as Footscray and Flemington are still in reach for adventurous Melbourne home buyers.

Of course, if the current housing boom in those two cities continues, by the end of three years saving these prices will have gone up further still.

What's the downside when it comes to retirement?

Foregoing a few years of super at the beginning of your career may not sound like much, but thanks to the magic of compound interest, losing this three to five years' worth of super early on is the equivalent of losing seven to 12 years at the end of your career, according to Industry Super chief economist Stephen Anthony.

You're also left with a less diverse investment portfolio, which is risky.

"Super's supposed to be about retirement, and the allocation of a super fund should in theory over time outperform a single asset class, for example residential property," Dr Anthony said.

"You ask yourself, is it possible that a person be better off over their lifetime with that strategy?

"It's not your normal approach to diversification and wealth accumulation. As they say, it's likely to end in tears."

Dr Anthony cautioned any investment that sees people put most of their wealth in one spot at the beginning or the end of their investing lives was risky and should be avoided.

Any upsides at retirement?

No-one wants to lose their job 12 years before they were planning on being without a regular wage, but getting into the housing market early has different payoffs.

That house you bought in your 20s will probably be paid off by the time you retire, meaning you have rent-free housing.

Whether or not this particular scheme would actually make housing more affordable (and all the experts we spoke to agreed it wouldn't), owning your own home by the time you retire is important, according to Professor Peter Whiteford from the Australian National University.

"If you're a private renter in retirement you're likely to have really big problems," he said.

"The rent assistance we give to people in the private rental market is very low. If you're a single aged pensioner you get maybe $60. And you'd have to be paying $180 in rent to get that."

Public housing, where rent assistance is set as a percentage of your total income, was a little more affordable, but Professor Whiteford said owning a home was seen as one of the pillars of retirement incomes.

Real talk: Is this scheme likely to even get off the ground?

Well, PM Malcolm Turnbull has reiterated his opposition to letting young people access their super to purchase a home, but stopped short of explicitly ruling it out.

ABC political editor Chris Uhlmann said some Coalition ministers and MPs were worried that just a month out from the budget, ideas were being floated that haven't been settled.

There are also concerns the Government is taking ownership of a housing crisis that it can't possibly fix and the looming economic blueprint will be a grab-bag of ideas without a strategic direction.