Last updated: 22 November, 2023
Buying a house is just about the most intense and stressful thing you can do.
The only way to make that experience less of a drip is to make sure you have the A-Team of property buying around you.
And the first step to forming your super squad?
Your broker!
Hello – I’m Aleks, founder of Broke Girl Wealth and I recently used Finspo for my home ownership journey.
When I started my property journey and Finspo reached out, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had purchased an investment property back in 2019 and was renting in Sydney. I had tried to renegotiate my interest rate with my lender to no avail and with interest rates at historic lows I had this itch:
You should be getting a better deal than this.
Well, an insatiable itch and one invite to ‘start my home loan journey’ later – today I’ve refinanced my property (saving me around $24,000 over the life of my loan) and my partner and I currently have pre-approval to purchase another.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.
You probably want to know how this all started.
Well.
Let’s begin.
Home buying is a huge enterprise – from the time you start saving your deposit to buying is at least 20 months according to GfK and Google.1
There’s a huge cost, there’s an enormous amount of paperwork and so many emotions amongst all the ‘is this the right place for me?!’ You’re also generally attempting to get your finances and lending in order while researching the market.
Getting started
I was conscious when beginning to look at my options that the refinancing rigamarole was kind of part of the deal. But Finspo pleasantly surprised me when they said:
‘We’re paperless!’
I could have wept for joy at not having to buy a printer.
(Full disclosure: banks are not quite as progressive as Finspo, but Finspo didn’t ask me to scan or print a single thing!)
Their digital ethos starts with their quick-start application. It asked me for a few details about myself and in about 10 minutes I had created a profile with my financial position and had my Zoom meeting in the diary with my broker Daisy.
Meeting with our broker
The following week, Daisy, my partner and I caught up over video call to discuss my goals (unclear), my finances (slightly more clear!) and my current mortgage (a bit terrible!).
Daisy helped me organise my frazzled thoughts around ‘do we buy a home?!’, ‘do we rent-vest?’ ‘do we just rent forever and sink into a pit of despair?’ We left the call feeling buoyant.
Exploring our options
Daisy came back to us with some clear options – set out in coloured little tables.
I’m allergic to Excel as a lawyer but I cannot tell you how much clearer my mind was when I saw our alternative paths laid out.
Rent-vesting would look like this.
Buying would look like this.
It is so much easier to formulate a plan when your options and the associated financial outcomes are laid out. Finspo are not financial advisors so while they couldn’t give me financial advice, I could easily see the consequences of the decisions I was considering.
We looked at the different scenarios like purchasing an owner-occupier vs. investment property, making principal and interest repayments vs. interest-only repayments, as well as evaluating each option’s affordability with purchase price and rental income in mind.
From there, we could assess the tax implications, the financial implications, and the emotional implications – because let’s be honest, buying any asset (with a considerable debt attached!) is emotionally driven!
Putting our plan in place
We caught up again in a week after my partner and I had discussed our options and what worked the best for us. Once we’d settled on a plan of action, Finspo asked us for all our documentation (uploaded or synced with our banks automatically) to send our documents to a bank for pre-approval.
From there, I have to say – the work was not on us.
You kind of get to sit back while your broker and the bank do their thing.
We used that time to start researching so that we at least had an idea of which markets were interesting to us and held potential.
After Christmas, about 2 weeks into 2022, we got the email (congratulations!) we had been conditionally approved for our original plan.
So what exactly is our plan?
As of right now, we have renewed our pre-approval and are looking to buy a primary place of residence, better known as a home!
Home ownership is increasingly headlined as unachievable but I think that is false advertising and I think it is a damaging narrative because that kind of doom and gloom can discourage people from even having a conversation with a broker because it feels out of reach.
The thing that held me back from seeing a broker was two-fold:
- Not thinking I was ready to buy just yet; and
- Not knowing what I wanted.
Little did I know that that was exactly the right time to get in touch with Finspo.
In Sydney, we’re all asking ourselves the same question; are we ever going to own a house?
A broker can be such an objective force for good because suddenly the question becomes; how am I going to get to my goal of owning a house?
So if you take one message away from this article, it is: just talk to a broker.
Even if you’re not ready to buy yet – a conversation with a broker was, in my opinion, the fast-track to putting a pathway to ownership down.
Because ownership may not look like it did for our parents but it is not out of reach – there are so many ways to achieve home ownership.
For us (as you might be desperate to know), we settled the finance on my current investment property a few months back – did I mention it will save me around $24,000 over the life of my loan?! Not only that but the equity in that property had increased sufficiently enough to enable me to use that equity as my half of the deposit with my partner.
So what next?
We’re looking to buy a home and continuing to add to our deposit in the meantime. While we haven’t found the right place yet and even though rates are rising, we have a pre-approval (so we have a budget!) and we have narrowed down what we’re looking for.
So to anyone who has a property dream – start getting a step closer to that dream by getting the right team around you.
