First Time Home Buyer... Finally

Things are so exciting right now in the Malcolm household. After a decade of fighting for it, we have finally been able to purchase our first home. And the weirdest thing: it's the shortest move in human history. Why? Because we have bought the very house that we've been renting for the last 2 years!

It all started years ago, when I was still a part-time s*#^kicker at a local caravan park earning a measly $24,000 a year. May sound like a lot to readers living in a third world country, (or maybe even the USA as I hear proportionately your wages are low compared to ours),  but ask any Aussie and he/she will tell you that, "that sort of dough ain't buyin' ya squat in Austraya, mate. Bloody oath, bonza ripper. Bar-B. That ain't a knife... this is a knife." E-hem, sorry about that. However, my wife and I both grew up in poor families, so when it came to money we are both as tight as a badger's sweat pore. Anything that came in, we saved.

Then, when I got laid-off from that job and took up a night shift gig at the local fuel servo, things got a little hairier. (Is "hairier" a word?) I was only working 3 days a week, pulling approximately $340, while my lovely wife was about to quit work to give birth to, and look after, our first child. Things were about as tight as they could get. We'd not long been married, at 21 and 22, we were still running two cars, and were about to move from a tiny two-bedroom flat into a tiny three bedroom house half a block up the road. That was quite funny actually, the move. We had the best removal vehicle our money could buy... a baby pram. Don't worry, the baby, only a couple of months old, wasn't in the pram at the time. That'd be irresponsible. She made him crawl behind on a leash.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, things were tight. But somehow, we still managed to squirrel away a little money every fortnight. Then I got asked to come back to the caravan park full-time. Apparently the crazy-lady they had taken a punt on when they chose who to lay off 8 months earlier was more crazy—and less of a lady—than they'd anticipated. So there I was back s*#^-kicking with a small pay-rise (about $6000 a year more than my previous employment there). That was around about the time that child number two was coming along.

Wasn't long into that stint that my wife and I started investigating the option of buying a house. There came a couple of times that our position in the current rental looked perilous, due to house sales and such, and the idea of having a house ripped out from beneath my family was not what I'd call good. Back then, house prices in our town were pretty low, around 145K, and we thought we may have been able to crack it. Apparently not.

Fast forward almost ten years and two more kids, and things were looking a little more rosy, financially. (What? So we've had 4 kids under 5. It gets cold where we live and there's not a lot to do of a night-time. And before you say, "get a TV", we had already tried that and it didn't make a pinch of difference. Maybe it had something to do with the way I sleep...[insert subtle throw-back to an earlier blog post]) A few years before we'd had a neat little nest egg saved up, just a titch over 12K, but when the forth kiddie was about to come along, we realised that we weren't all going to fit in the car we had at the time. Down goes the bank balance. But we'd whacked the loan and rebuilt a bit of savings again. We started trying the banks to test the water and see if they'd give us anything. "Just can't get the servicing to work", they'd all say. I hate that word now. No, not work; I've always hated that word. Servicing is the one I dislike.

So we gave up trying, just focusing on saving every cent we didn't have to spend. Around the same time, I had started my little handyman business, which to my surprise had taken off like a seagull and defied all expectations. I made a turn over of $43,000 in my first year. First year! Blew me away. And I wasn't ripping anyone off to do it, either. Just working bloody hard. The second year went up a little bit, then again the next year. I past with flying colours the two year threshold where they say half of all small businesses fail.

A couple of years later we had a nicer little nest egg stowed away, and we decided it was again time to try for a home loan. We had just moved from a squishy three-bedroom brick thing on a block of land big enough to run around forty-three times in under a minute, into a five bedroom (one for each kid!!!) ex-queenslander on 1300 square metres. Heaven. By the way, for non-locals, a "queenslander" is a mid-late 20th century Australian home design. Ask Mr Google and his mates at the Interwebs. Anyway, I knew the owner; he was a customer through the business. To sweeten the deal for us, he took the house off the market, but said he was still dead keen on us buying it. Basically as an investment property, it was a bit crap. It had cost him a bit of money and was only likely to cost him more, so he wanted it gone. I said, "sure mate, we'd love it. I'll go down to the bank and see what they say."

It was a no go, still. Despite making more money running a business than I'd ever made working for someone else, ironically it was the running of the business that was stopping the numbers from checking out. I asked if he could just wait a little while until we saved some more and see what the banks said then. He said, "sure", waited six months then promptly put it back on the market. Thanks for the tiny bit of back-stabbing there, old mate. Real honourable. So we had to deal with weirdos wandering through our house, looking in our kids' cupboards and being asked to perform changes to make the house "more appealing" to prospective buyers. Blurgh. But luckily, the owner had far too much on it and it never actually looked like selling.

Until late last year.

A young couple came through, going on how they really liked it, planning where their dogs would sleep and which room she was going to do her hair in. They put it under contract, and it looked like my four kids, wife and I would be out on the street in less than two months. Wouldn't have been the first time for me, as I've been homeless before... twice. But with kids, that's a scary prospect. However, they asked too much of the owner in the contract, and he wasn't willing to come to the party. Then they wanted a lower price; he wouldn't come to that either. Like a miracle, the contract fell through and we were once again safe.

All while this had been going on, a mate of mine gave me a call out of the blue one day and suggested I waddle down to a particular local bank and have another go at a loan. He'd just got one, and by his calculations I was in a better state that him, so I was a shoe-in. So I did waddle down, and the young girl that was there filling in for the holidaying regular loans manager brought us in and went over our financials. She said she reckoned it'd go through at $150,000, with a weekly repayment of $208/week. I said to her as we were leaving the room, "if we don't get that at such a pathetic payment amount, I'm going to cry." At the time we were paying $280/week in rent.

We bloody got it, didn't we? I couldn't believe it. And the lady on the phone that gave me the pre-approval, said that the amount she had cleared was $170,000. I questioned the difference, and she explained that she thought 150 was too low, so she bumped it up to see what would happen! Amazing. Especially when only a few weeks before, we'd been in the loans office of another major Australian bank that have a name beginning with "Comm", and the woman on the tele-conferencing computer screen told us, "well, I'm not even going to bother telling you the number you qualify for with us. You can't do anything with that." Cold that was. Bloody cold.

So, after getting pre-approved for a purchase price of 200K, we spent a couple of weeks looking for anything with in our budget, thinking that pretty soon these peoples' contract was going to go through and we'd have to move. Do you reckon we could find anything that was going to fit our voracious brood? Not a chance. Small, small, tiny and cramped. Did I mention small? It was frustrating, to say the least. There we were with the first home-loan "possible yes" either of us had achieved in our lives, and there was nothing we could do with it. Our eldest son has Asperges, and there was just no way he (therefore us) was going to cope living in any of the houses that we looked through.

Christmas 2013 came and went, with us still floating in limbo an not knowing what to do. The contract for the other people had fallen through, but we were still lost. Should we buy a dump and try to make it work, or just let the pre-approval slide and keep renting? Until one day, I reported a small maintenance issue to the Real Estate and received a note that the girl was going to come around and have a look at it, and that the owner wanted to come too. We thought that was weird. Then the owner turned up ten minutes early, shook my hand and started the conversation with, "So, when are you going to buy my house?" "As soon as you drop the price to two hundred thousand, mate," I replied. He started stammering and mumbling something about two ten. I popped inside to get some photos of the house to show him, thinking I could bolster our case, and when I return my wife says, "We can do two five, can't we? Well, shake his hand then. We've just bought the house."

Bloody wow. The final approval on the loan came through, and now today six weeks later, I'm sitting on a couch writing this in the very first home I've ever owned. I've already been up and started painting the roof. It's fibro and needs a good covering to buy us time till we can rip it off. She's going to look sweet! We've got a few more changes to make, and the place is old, which means maintenance. But hey, guess what? I'm a handyman, so that bit's kinda sorted.

I still just can't believe it. I suppose it will feel more real when I hold our first rate bill, choking on bile through gritted teeth as I hand over a cheque for around $2500. Till then, I'm quite happy to be only half in reality. Nothing I have has been given to me by anyone, which is the way it should be. No value in a hand-out. I work for everything, both physically and mentally, and I'm ok with that. With that philosophy in mind, I look back to before I was married, when I was sleeping in the back of my car at a camping ground, and then peruse the journey between there and here... Well, it just makes me smile, really.

And the moral to this story: if you have a dream or goal that you've been fighting for, please don't give up on it, even when it looks like you'll never get there. Because just at that point when hope fades to fear and hopelessness, you too could be just six weeks away from holding the figurative key (spare key, in our case, obtained from the real estate because we already had the full sets) to your metaphorical first home. You'll get there. Just keep at it.

Thanks for reading. Till next time,
-Damien.