Building a house

[rare ss]

We built about 18 years ago.. we looked around at house and land packages and mortgage brokers all tried to funnel us into the "Keystart" deal which is the zero deposit bang all your fees onto the loan and pay interest on the lot

Found a great block of land that was being used for a carpark lot for the sales office which we put on hold while we looked at finance options, we put it on hold for 48hrs and got to shopping, titles for the block weren't issued for 8 months time so we only had to put down 1k to hold the block which was great as we had planned on not building right away as we were living at home for free and I was working away at the time so we had months to get the best deal for us

Ended up chatting direct one of the "big 4" bank and used our savings to get a loan for the block, now this chewed up our savings before we even got to the deposit however we managed to save the extra coin over the 8 months to get the deal down when titles were released and the block was ours

Part of the deal with the land was we had to build on the block within 2 years, so for 2 years we smashed all our savings on the loan and after 2 years we had enough paid off with the increase of the land value to refinance with the bank to increase the loan to build our house

Sorry for the spill, it was a fair process to get there but worked out well for us and we were on track to pay it off in 3 years but kids (twins!!) came along quite unplanned which put the brakes on that plan rather quickly!

Moral of the story is there's always more than one way to get what you want, trick is finding out what works for you and your situation