Beginning our Journey

Hi There,

Thanks for visiting me here and reading! I’ll go into far more detail later, but I wanted this first post to just give you a long little background into our journey thus far.

My husband and I started looking at houses to buy in 2012. We had about $9000 saved in our bank account and not a single dollar more to our names. We realised that to buy a four bedroom home where all of our children would have their own rooms was going to be just too difficult for us. We would definitely break the budget.

Aaron looked into the First Home Owners Grant (FHOG) and how they were starting to gear it towards new homes and builds. That was the first time we looked into the idea of building. In our eyes and our current situation, it was the only way we would be able to buy a “forever home” on our budget.  

THE LAND

We bought our block of land on the Central Coast, NSW, and settled in September of 2012. Yep, that’s a while ago. But we weren’t ready to build a house. We bought our block because it was a great price for a reasonable size and knew we were going to have to sit on it for a little while.  

TENDER ONE

So time went on and we went from display home to display home. We eventually found a house that we absolutely loved through Beechwood (I found that Allworth and Beechwood had the most functional homes - where the layouts actually resemble a real house without a bunch of useless nooks and crannies - but that’s just personal opinion). We had a tender drawn up, but there was no way the bank would loan us money with our debts and no deposit. So our tender sat there doing absolutely nothing.  

TENDER TWO AND THREE

We cleared some of our finances and got together the $5500 deposit required for Beechwood, and had another tender drawn up. We were so amazed at the price and how cheap it was that we added a few extras. It still came back under budget of what we thought we could afford. That’s where we went wrong I guess. Because then we went to the bank. And we couldn’t borrow the money. Fast forward to just over 12 months later, and we are in a great place. We have paid off two debts in that time to make us more attractive borrowers, and saved more money too.  

TENDER FOUR

We went to the bank first to get some sort of assurances that we would be eligible to borrow a ball park figure of how much we thought the house might have gone up by and they said that yes, we were. I almost could have cried. We’ve been waiting so long. It has now been 3 years and 5 months since we first started our journey but it’s really only just beginning.

Next post will be in a few days, as a lot has happened in the past two weeks. We’ve been to numerous appointments with numerous different entities and I’ll try to give a weekly update, or an update anytime anything interesting happens.

Thanks for reading to the end, you’re pretty much a champion if you made it this far. Make sure you visit back to hear more of our story and see some cool pics along the way too.