Our First Home

The past couple of months we have been actively looking to purchase our first home, which is both exciting and a royal pain in the butt. After looking through a number of properties which were awful and a few which ticked a lot of our boxes we finally found one we both knew straight away we wanted to put an offer on and last Friday we went unconditional!!

There are so many things you need to think about when it comes to purchasing your first home. Obviously your budget is right near the top of the list, and for us is one of the reasons we were struggling. The budget we were hoping for was very modest and means that without a doubt we would be looking for a property which needed work doing to it to get it up to a standard that we would really love.

When thinking through your budget you need to look at things like whether or not you are eligible for a first home grant from the government – if you’ve been in kiwisaver for 3-5 years you can get $3,000 – $5,000 per person buying the property (or up to $10k if you’re buying brand new or building). It’s a bit of a pain in the arse process as we didn’t find home start all that easy to deal with but for the sake of filling out a bunch of paper work and keeping at them about the status of your pre-approval it is definitely worth making sure you get this free $ if you are eligible.

Next you should check in with your kiwisaver provider as to how much you have with them and consequently how much you can take out (and how much you actually want to take out) and put towards your first home. If you’ve been in for a few years and have been contributing the whole time you may find you are pleasantly surprised how much you can take out. Between the home start grant and our kiwisaver contributions we had a pretty sizeable contribution to our first home.

One all your finances are sorted and you know how much you can spend, stick to it! Some agents will be ridiculous and start trying to show you properties $100k above your budget, while others will just show you properties in the budget you have specified. Find a few agents you like and try to deal with them direct if you can.

Next thing you need to work on is what you MUST have in your first home and what you would LIKE to have as well. For us we HAD to have three bedrooms (or the ability to easily add a third, within budget), something that was structurally sound and didn’t require too much work – we are happy to paint and redecorate but ideally didn’t want to be putting in new kitchens etc unless we could do it within our budget, a reasonable sized section and a double garage – or space for a double garage and a private backyard. Things that would have been nice are the added extras like a reasonably tidy kitchen and bathroom and a nice outdoor area.

In the end the property we are buying ticked all our boxes.

• Well Priced
• Three Bedrooms
• Tidy Kitchen
• Garage (only single but room for a double, and priced well enough we can afford to put in the double!)
• Structurally sound
• Reasonable Section Size
• Just needs painting & decorating, nothing major.
• Decking
• Private

While we still need to do something with the garaging to get it to a double+ and there is a lot of painting and decorating to do we were well within our budget so should be able to put our own touches on the property and stay within the budget.

With the purchase of our first home I will be blogging more about the house and everything we do to it which is both exciting and a HUGE learning curve! We have a long settlement as there is currently a tenant in the property, which gives us plenty of time to create A LOT of pinterest boards – Follow me here if you want to follow along.

Do you own your own house or are you still renting? – Let me know in the comments, I love hearing from you!