Buying a house 101: the truth about how we saved for a house


There are many reasons how people get on the property ladder. In a day and age where owning a house seems to be impossible, it is so handy to know how people get on the ladder. I think it's so important to talk about things like this. As how do you know if you're able to do it unless you know how others have managed to do it? It shouldn't be a taboo subject. It took us just over a year to save £14k for our house deposit. That was for a 5% deposit for a two-bedroom terrace doer-upper house valued at £240,000. Here is how we did it.

We wasn't given a lump sum of money by our parents but we did receive some help in lots of ways. We were lucky to both live at home paying minimal rent to allow us to plough most of our money into savings. That helped us immensely and was the main reason why we were able to save such a huge amount of money in just a year.

I was given some money when I passed my driving test which my parents had saved in a life insurance scheme from the day I was born. I wrote my car off after five weeks when I was about 22, long story, so I got a a sizeable lump sum back of around £2,000. I haven't driven since so put the money away into a savings account. This helped towards my half of the house deposit. I was also made redundant from my job around four years ago, so this went into my savings too. This was around £1500 as I dipped into for a cheeky holiday at the time.  Both these things really helped me get a start on my savings. I saved up £3,500 myself to help bring my hotel half of the deposit to £7k.

My boyfriend had some shares that his great uncle left him in his will when he was a teenager. He cashed these when we started to start seriously save for a house. He got a couple of grand and then saved the rest himself.

So that's how we did it! It was thanks to cheap rent living at home that we were able to do it in a short amount of time. Although rent is a lot cheaper in Essex than in London, it would have taken us a lot longer to save if we were paying rent.

1 comment:

  1. We bought this year as well. Our deposit was all money that we had slowly squirrelled away. But it was also the main factor in us living London. Our London rent was too high to ever save for a proper deposit so we moved so we could save up better.

    ReplyDelete

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A Essex based lifestyle blogger who lives a champagne life on a lemonade purse!

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