Four money saving challenges helped us buy £250,000 first home – here's how you can too | The Sun
DITCHING subscriptions and binning takeaways helped Alexa and Jordan Wilson save the £12,500 needed for their first home.
Savings challenges helped them save £1,000 a month to put down a deposit on their £250,000 first home.
Jordan, 29, and Alexa, 26, had been renting for eight years, buttwo years ago they decided it was time to get their own place to raise their six-year-old son Oscar.
Like many other first time buyers, the couple needed to cut back on spending to help save up cash for a deposit.
Putting in place savings challenges helped Jordan, who works for an engineering company, and Alexa, an early years educator, do this.
They did this by cutting back on takeaways and by stopping eating out, saving around £300 a month.
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The pair also cancelled their subscriptions to Netflix and Now TV, as well as switching to a SIM-only phone plans – saving around £90 a month.
After they got married in February 2022, the pair had £1,500 left from their wedding budget and £3,500 in monetary wedding gifts that they were able to put towards their deposit.
They bought their property using the government's Help to Buy Scheme.
The government scheme gives budding buyers an equity loan and allows them to put down a deposit of just 5%.
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You can get up to 20% off the value of your property – or 40% if you live in London – under the scheme.
The loan is interest-free for the first five years – but bad news for any budding buyers, the scheme has now closed.
But there are other schemes available that will give you a helping hand up the property ladder.
The Help to Build scheme offers an equity loan to help you build a home or convert a previously commercial building.
Through the scheme, the government offers you a loan based on the estimated costs to buy a plot of land and build a home or buy a building to convert into a home.
The First Homes scheme was launched last year and means prospective first-time buyers in England can get homes at a 30% to 50% discounted rate compared to market price.
But, if the homeowner decides to sell the property down the line, the discount on the new value will be made available to any future buyer too.
Jordan and Alexa got the keys to their home in September 2022.
We sat down with Jordan to see how they went from being a saver to a homeowner for The Sun’s My First Home series.
Tell me about your home
It's a four-bedroom, detached house in Louth, Lincolnshire.
The property is a new-build with an open-plan kitchen and dining room leading to the back garden.
The garden is perfect and really handy for our bulldog, Nala.
Upstairs, we have a family bathroom, a master bedroom with an ensuite and two further rooms.
We also have a front garden and a driveway.
How did you decide on location?
We knew we wanted a new-build property after years of renting a fairly old house.
Our rental home was a three bedroom, semi-detached house, but it was a lot smaller than where we are now and only had one toilet.
It was also in the middle of a town.
We had also previously lived in a rural cottage, so we wanted somewhere that was the best of both worlds and I feel like we have that.
It's far enough out of town to enjoy the peace and quiet, but still within reasonable reach of the shops and the community.
How much was it?
Our house was £250,000 and we put down a 5% deposit of £12,500.
We took out a mortgage of £187,000 for 30-years with a fixed-rate of 3.9% for five-years.
We also applied for a Help to Buy equity loan.
It's a scheme that helps first-time buyers get on the property ladder with just a 5% deposit, even if they borrow enough for a mortgage.
The government will loan up to 40% of the value of the property if you live in London, or 20% outside of the capital.
We received a £50,000 loan from the government as part of the scheme.
Our mortgage repayments are around £900 a month.
How did you save for it?
We really started to save hard from 2019, then Covid hit in 2020 and we had to postpone our wedding.
While this was disappointing, it did mean that we had more time to save.
It wasn't in our plan to buy a home so soon, but we found thatthe pandemic restrictions meant we could put away more cash and save for the wedding and a home at the same time.
Alexa and I both set up a standing order so that £500 would go out of our accounts and into a savings account at the start of each month.
We save around £200 a month by cutting out meals out and drinks with friends over lockdown.
We also cut down our weekly takeaways to monthly, saving us around £100 a month.
Cancelling our Netflix and Now TV subscriptions meant that we had an extra £30 in our pocket at the end of the month.
We also decided not to renew our phone contracts in order to save money.
Both of us were spending around £60 a month on our phone bill, but we reduced this by £45 each by switching to SIM only deals.
If I had anything left in my account before pay day, I would it over to my savings account.
This wouldn't happen every month, but it could vary between an extra £50 and £250 going into our savings.
After our wedding in January 2022, we had around £1,500 leftover from the budget, so this went towards out deposit.
We were also lucky enough to get a total of £3,500 in monetary wedding gifts from friends and family which also went towards the house.
How did you afford to furnish it?
We had a lot of relatively new furniture from our previous rental property that we had accumulated over the years.
It meant we didn't have to fork out a big chunk of cash for furniture when we moved into our new home.
We have decided that if we do want new furniture in the future, we will buy things in stages to spread out the cost.
What advice would you give to other first time buyers?
We knew we wanted to do be homeowners, so we set our minds to it and we got there in the end.
You just have to be 100% dedicated to it, and don't give up.
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