Our first home, 1999, one year after we built it, preparing for the driveway to be poured…
4 bedroom brick house on a half acre block for just over $100, 000
Home Stories series, are personal accounts of my property investing journey spanning 20+ years…
My home-owning story begins way back.
Roll back to 1994, my now Husband, Paul and I desperately wanted to buy our first home. Paul’s mum was selling her house in Morwell and was asking $33,000. What a bargain! It was a 3bedroom brick house with creek frontage, next to a school. Perfect really. At 19yrs of age, I knew what I wanted.
A mature 19, I was ready for home-ownership. Or so I thought. After much consideration, Paul and I were ready to jump in, and went to the Bank ––who had other ideas. We were swiftly declined, simply because we weren’t “home-buyer” ready.
According to the bank we didn’t have enough money saved (And we didn’t). We at least needed a healthy deposit. In today’s terms a minimum of 5% ($1,650) in genuine savings or even 20% wasn’t a huge amount of money. What potential homebuyer couldn’t gather that kind of money? Not us. Because we were 19 years old, and when you’re 19, life is all about living!
But we weren’t extravagant. In fact, life was stripped back for Paul and I in 1994. Our kitchen table was won on a game of Cards. Our first couch, a brown 1980’s modular – was traded for a slab of beer! Nothing we owned was bought brand new – imagine that?
Following our rejection from the bank, we learnt to budget and save. First for our engagement, and then for our wedding, and by the time we got back around to saving for our first home we were experts!
How did we do it?
Between 1994 and 1998 we saved our deposit by living on one wage and banking the other. It is a fairly standard template for saving in a couple. (Perhaps for singles, halving your wage and living on that might be an appropriate tack.) Not sure we could do that now, but 20yrs ago the cost of living was much less, and we had no children at the time. (Big savings!)
4 years of tight living, and by 1998 we were ready (actually this time) to take the plunge. My now husband, Paul and I bought our Australian Dream–– a quarter acre block in Traralgon, and it set us back a mere $37,500!! (If I knew there was going to be a property boom, we would’ve bought two!)
Within 18 months we’d moved into our brand new 4 Bedroom home with a double garage––which from memory cost $120,000 to build. I was 23 and we already had our dream home. We couldn’t have been prouder.
When you buy in a new estate and are the first to build you have no neighbours for a while. But as the estate develops and more land opens up, you pretty quickly begin to feel a little hemmed in–– suddenly our 4 bedroom/quarter acre felt oh so tiny!
The one thing you quickly learn is your first home is not always your forever home, your life and your needs change. You move, you invest and sometimes you jump in the deep end and renovate. 21 years since that first purchase and I’ve bought and sold 8 different properties; built two brand new homes, and renovated two. I’ll share some of these experiences with you over the coming weeks and hopefully it helps inspire you to stake your share of the Australian Dream. Something I can definitely assist you with.
But first, you must save…