Buying My First Home: What I Wish I Knew

Kevin: How expensive the rates are. If I could go back I would look more into the rates because that wasn't something I would think about as a tenant. As a tenant I knew about utilities, rent and bond, but I had no idea about the rates and how to deal with them.

We’ve decided to pay our rates weekly. At the moment it's $138 a week. That way it's easier for us to keep tabs on it rather than a quarterly lump sum. We don't want to get kicked out for not paying our rates and knowing us, we’re very dangerous impulse buyers, so if we had that money then we'd end up buying a big couch or a cow or something.

Kevin: I think things like, floating mortgage, fixed mortgage, floating rates, fixed rates. Those fancy words. I was lucky enough to have a mortgage broker as one of my good friends, Linda Eagleton. So we used her and she was amazing. Linda explained everything very well. She made it idiot-proof for us to be able to understand it. Whenever we couldn't figure something ou, she was very accommodating. She understood that we don't come from a money or property background.

JC: Like Kevin said, she helped us and was really patient about explaining everything.

Kevin: If I was to do it again I’d probably do it the same. There’s nothing I wish I knew beforehand because I would just overthink things.

JC: I wish I knew that getting curtains would take so long. If I had known that, I would have organised it earlier. But I think the developers wouldn't let us have a third party coming in to do the measurements anyway. We didn't have curtains for a month and a half. It was so weird. We were in a fishbowl.

Kevin: From my experience flatting in Auckland I knew I had to get movers and boxes.

JC: I had experience setting up internet so within a week we got the fibre sorted. The gas was supposed to come on the day but then the gas was too close to the heat pump. That took a couple of days to sort.