saving

How Do I Save For A Deposit?

Market Insights
8 years ago
2 minutes

So it’s 2am on the 1st of January 2016, and you’re spouting off a variety of new years resolutions. 

However, when you wake up, there is one resolution that has stuck; and that is to save up and buy your first home.

So how do you save, and what are the tricks to doing it?

Well, thankfully, here are some of the best ways to commit to saving.

Budget

Budgeting is the single-most important thing to do when saving for anything. You should be able to outline where you are receiving your income, how much is coming through, and how much and what you spend your money on.

Once you have identified the following, you can then begin to remove things from your expenditure that you don’t really need. 

A good way to do this, is to print out your bank statements, both credit card and savings, and find out what all the little charges are, and add them all together. Whilst $2.50, and $4 here and there are not large amounts when spent individually, they do add up over the course of a month.

What can you afford?

Understandably, we all want those million dollar apartments, however when you come back down to reality, you’ll fast realise that this may not be achievable, or manageable for the time being.

Discovering what you can afford, is not limited to how much the house is on paper, but rather:

  • Land tax (this is applicable to many investment properties)
  • Stamp duty
  • Legal and solicitor fees
  • Lenders’ Mortgage Insurance (LMI) - this usually comes into play when you are borrowing more than 80% of the property’s value
  • Smaller costs that accrue throughout the purchasing process

Alternatives

There are always alternatives - and it is hard to eve be completely stuck.

If you are in the position, there are many first home buyers who ask their parents’ to guarantor their home-loan. Effectively, this means that the parents’ are taking on an equal risk if you fail to make your payments - i.e. if you go broke, it means your parents have to continue paying the repayments. This is often not a serious option for parents, as the risk can be overwhelming. 

However, there are new companies that make asking that question all the more secure - specifically, parentassists.com.au