The Australian Guide to Buying Your First Home E-Book

Robbo Roper

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 291

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Discover how to achieve financial flexibility with this blueprint for homeownership and worry-free living

Robbo Roper (aka the Aussie Mortgage Guy) is here to show you how to get out of the rental trap, get your finances sorted and buy your first (or next!) home. The Australian Guide to Buying Your First Home is not a step-by-step guide to living in a beachside mansion with a $15-million property portfolio. Instead, it is an essential real-world companion for taking control and getting into your new home faster. You'll learn how to increase your income (and borrowing power) and buy the ideal property for whatever stage of life you're in. Better still, you'll get valuable advice on how to manage and pay off your mortgage sooner.

Owning your own home creates a safe haven for you and your family. Your home is not only a valuable financial investment that builds long-term wealth. It's also a place to make cherished memories and truly flourish. A home is about creating stability and a lasting legacy for you and your loved ones. At the end of the day, finding your own home is about building a happy, balanced life.

Inside, Robbo brings together the advice that has made him Australia's most-followed financial content creator. You'll discover how to:

• Set your goals, reduce your expenses and boost your income so you can get into your first home faster
• Determine your borrowing power and create an action plan for savings, loans and schemes, and taxes
• Find a home that balances what you need with what you can afford
• Pay off your mortgage and become debt-free sooner

Learn from everyday Aussie success stories and get the strategies you need to reach your goal of home ownership sooner. The Australian Guide to Buying Your First Home is an indispensable handbook for assessing affordability, setting realistic goals and taking control of your future.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

Learning from my mistakes

My turning point

My breakdown

How this book will benefit you

PART I: Take CONTROL of YOUR INCOME

1

Aim for

ABOVE AVERAGE

The average income vs the average house

Finding an industry that suits your income goals

2

How

EXPENSIVE

is your

LIFE?

The Basic Budget

Lifestyle creep

Create your money goal

3 INCREASE

your

INCOME

My side hustle

From DINKs to parents

The income-tax myth

Overtime vs secondary employment

The path to a $100 000-per-year side hustle

4

What are

YOU WORTH?

The moment I realised my own worth

Setting your income goals

Negotiating your salary

Refine your resume

PART II: BUY your FIRST HOME: BUY

your

FIRST HOME

5

How much

CAN YOU BORROW?

Income vs expenses and liabilities

Living expenses

Liabilities

Interest rates

Debt stacking

6 HOW MUCH

do you need in

SAVINGS?

Your home loan deposit

Lenders mortgage insurance (LMI)

Government home-buyer programs

Upfront costs

7

What should you

LOOK FOR

in a

HOME LOAN?

Securing a preapproval

Interest rates

Home loan features

Construction loans

Non-bank lenders

Paying off your home loan

8

What

TYPE

of

HOME SHOULD

you

BUY?

The cost of owning a home

How much can you afford to pay?

What’s the best location?

Rentvesting

Making an offer

PART III: Get DEBT-FREE:

Get

DEBT-FREE

9 MANAGE

your

MORTGAGE

Refinancing your home loan

Accelerated payments

Paying off your mortgage ASAP

Keeping up with the Joneses

Exit plan

10

Achieve

FINANCIAL FLEXIBILITY

Renting in retirement

Increasing your hourly rate

Generating a passive income

Investing in the stock market

Maximising your super fund

How we distribute our income

Helping your children buy their first home

Creating your financial flexibility roadmap

CONCLUSION THE SECRET TO SUSTAINING A FINANCIALLY FLEXIBLE LIFE

Get supported now

INDEX

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 1

Table 1.1: your borrowing power on a variable home loan interest rate of 6.5...

Table 1.2: the median dwelling value across all capital cities as at 1 Febru...

Table 1.3: the highest paid jobs requiring and not requiring a degree

Chapter 2

Table 2.1: the Basic Budget vs your spending habits

Table 2.2: how much you should allow for needs, wants and savings on differe...

Table 2.3: monthly household expenditure measure for a single adult

Table 2.4: monthly household expenditure measure for two adults

Table 2.5: monthly household expenditure measure for two adults and two chil...

Chapter 4

Table 4.1: creating an income goal using the SMART framework

Chapter 5

Table 5.1: difference in repayments between a secured and an unsecured perso...

Table 5.2: impact of a personal loan on a single applicant’s borrowing power...

Table 5.3: impact of a credit card with various limits on a single applicant...

Table 5.4: impact of a HELP debt on maximum borrowing power

Table 5.5: impact of various interest rates on your maximum borrowing power...

Chapter 6

Table 6.1: approximate LMI premiums on a property valued at $600 000, based ...

Table 6.2: First Home Buyer Guarantee (FHBG) property price caps

Table 6.3: Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee (RFHBG) property price caps

Table 6.4: Family Home Guarantee (FHG) property price caps

Table 6.5: first home buyer exemption/concession amounts on stamp duty in Ne...

Table 6.6: first home buyer exemption/concession amounts on stamp duty in Vi...

Table 6.7: first home buyer exemption/concession amounts on stamp duty in Qu...

Table 6.8: first home buyer exemption/concession amounts on stamp duty in We...

Table 6.9: stamp duty payable by first home buyers in South Australia, new h...

Table 6.10: first home buyer exemption/concession amounts on stamp duty in T...

Table 6.11: stamp duty exemption/concession income thresholds for first home...

Table 6.12: first home buyer exemption/concession amounts on stamp duty in t...

Table 6.13: stamp duty payable by first home buyers in the Northern Territor...

Chapter 7

Table 7.1: difference in interest paid over 30 years at 6.2% and 6.8%*

Table 7.2: difference in monthly repayments between 6.19% and 1.98% interest...

Table 7.3: pros and cons of variable and fixed interest rates

Table 7.4: advantages and disadvantages of non-bank lenders

Chapter 8

Table 8.1: pros and cons of owning a house

Table 8.2: pros and cons of owning a townhouse

Table 8.3: pros and cons of living in a unit

Table 8.4: pros and cons of owning an apartment

Table 8.5: pros and cons of rentvesting

Chapter 9

Table 9.1: interest saved after refinancing a home loan

Table 9.2: impact of making extra repayments across a range of home loans

Chapter 10

Table 10.1: how super fund management fees can affect your bottom line

Table 10.2: age when you can access your super if you aren’t working...

List of Illustrations

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1: the Basic Budget breakdown

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1: ways to achieve an annual income of $1 million

Chapter 7

Figure 7.1: a home loan with three offset accounts

Chapter 9

Figure 9.1: interest charged on a $600 000 home loan making monthly versus f...

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1: the home loan structure of my properties

Figure 10.2: how our income is distributed

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

Begin Reading

CONCLUSION THE SECRET TO SUSTAINING A FINANCIALLY FLEXIBLE LIFE

INDEX

End User License Agreement

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THE AUSTRALIAN GUIDE TO BUYING YOUR FIRST HOME

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR INCOME, MANAGE YOUR MORTGAGE AND GET DEBT-FREE

ROBBO ROPER

First published 2025 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd

© Trusted Finance Pty Ltd 2025

All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial intelligence technologies or similar technologies. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review) no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Rob Roper to be identified as the author of The Australian Guide to Buying Your First Home has been asserted in accordance with law.

ISBN: 978-1-394-26834-4

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. Level 4, 600 Bourke Street, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia

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Cover design by Alex Ross CreativeCover photo: Grace Vivien Photography

For my wife Grace. Thank you for your endless support. The best thing aboutthis life is building it with you.

INTRODUCTION

In my 20s I put myself in a shitload of debt. It led to the biggest breakdown of my life.

Here’s what happened.

In 2014, my wife and I bought a home that pushed us to the limit of what we could afford. We had the dream of renovating a run-down, 1960s home into our very own version of a ‘Block-worthy’ dream house. If you’re an avid The Block viewer like we are, you’ll understand where we were coming from.

Our strategy was simple. As we continued to climb the corporate ladder in our respective careers, our incomes were expected to increase. Then, once our home went up in value, we would increase our mortgage to release the funds required to complete the renovation. Plan sorted!

However, after a year of living in the house we had a grim moment of realisation. House prices across Perth, Western Australia, had declined. In our suburb, in particular, house prices were down over 5 per cent. Since we bought the house with only a 5 per cent deposit, we now owned a home valued the same as our outstanding mortgage. In the eyes of the bank, our loan-to-value ratio (LVR) was above their ‘maximum lending guidelines’. Our refinance plans were no longer viable.

Learning from my mistakes

I became obsessed with television shows like Grand Designs, Fixer Upper and House Hunters. These shows fuelled my desire to renovate. A daily reminder to keep up with the Joneses.

We must have been talking about it nonstop because one day my wife’s parents made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. They were willing to increase the mortgage on their own home to fund our renovation as long as we could afford the increase in repayments on their home loan. (I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I felt very fortunate to have such generous in-laws.)

We accepted their offer, but with variable home loan interest rates sitting at around 5.5 per cent per annum, and the fact we now had two mortgages on the one property, we elected for the ‘renovation mortgage’ to be interest only (IO). This strategy reduced our monthly repayments, maximising our cash flow, but it meant the mortgage balance would not decrease over time. We were clinging onto the hope that we could refinance our own mortgage based on the increased value of our renovated home and pay my in-laws back the renovation mortgage in full.

We pushed ourselves to the brink of what we could afford. Every single cent mattered. Then, just like in any home building show you’ve ever seen, the renovation went over budget. The only way to continue the renovation was to borrow more money from my in-laws. This pushed us beyond what we could afford and, to rub salt into the wound, house prices in Perth continued to plummet. The debt was suffocating. Questions kept circling around in my head:

What if we can’t finish the renovation?

What if it’s worth even less than when we started?

What if the bank won’t let us refinance?

What if property values keep going down?

How am I going to pay back my in-laws?

What will they think of me?

Do we cut our losses, scrap the rest of the renovation and try to sell what we have — walking away with a debt while being forced back into the rental market — or do we brainstorm a way to create additional income?

You get the gist. It was make or break.

My turning point

The thought of losing our home was debilitating. As this feeling grew, it became harder for us to come up with a way to generate any additional income. We felt trapped.

I was working fulltime as a high-school teacher and one afternoon, after all the students left, I sat in my classroom and sobbed. I had just calculated that we would be left with a debt of over $200 000 if we tried to sell our home. At that exact moment I received an email from a parent of one of my students wondering if I could tutor their older sibling.

Out of the blue, a viable side hustle had crystalised. It meant working after hours, but in addition to our full-time jobs, it might just be enough to get us over the line. I started marketing my services in local community groups on Facebook. One student turned into two, then three, then suddenly I was tutoring 10 students per week.

I was now working more than 50 hours a week, but that debilitating feeling had dissipated. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. We were able to finish the renovations and achieved a bank valuation of our property above what we expected. This meant we were able to refinance our mortgage and pay back my in-laws in full.

But I hadn’t anticipated the dramatic increase in repayments now that we were forced to pay principal and interest (P&I) on our home loan.

That feeling of suffocation was rearing its ugly head again. But this time it wasn’t debilitating. I had already proven to myself I knew how to take control of my income. This made me rethink my tutoring side hustle:

How could I generate even more income?

By restructuring how I delivered the tuition, my business quadrupled in size, growing to over 40 students. Life was good. For the first time in years, our income was paying our expenses and leaving us with some savings.

To add to our happiness, one day after work, my wife announced she was pregnant.

After feeling pure joy for a few days, that familiar feeling returned. I felt choked by the thought that our income was going to be almost halved once my wife’s paid maternity period finished. We were finally comfortable and now this beautiful, but also completely unknown, variable was turning our financial stability upside down.

If you’re about to start a family, these are the questions you need to be asking yourself before you make any massive financial decisions:

How will you continue to afford this life if you have kids?

What will your life look like? How long will you be living on one salary? How expensive is day care?

What will this mean in terms of your happiness?

During our renovation, it was questions like these that collided to create a tornado of self-doubt, anxiety and depression. But that financial pressure cooker of a situation forced me to adopt a different mindset. In Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki explains that he forbids himself from saying, ‘I can’t afford this’.

He replaces this statement with, ‘How can I afford this?’

I know it sounds simple. I remember standing in Big W reading the first few pages of Kiyosaki’s book, thinking there’s no way something so simple could have an impact. But this strategy completely reshaped my mindset. When I ask myself this question, rather than make a statement, it opens and challenges my mind. Like a seedling growing every day, looking for the light, I’m constantly trying to find a viable solution to my problems. (Try it for yourself — it’s powerful.)

I had 9 months to figure things out. So, while I was still working fulltime as a teacher, I took our tutoring business to the next level. I leased an office space and employed my first staff member. Over the next year our team grew to six teachers tutoring over 90 students a week. Between the business and my full-time job, we were doing so well that my wife didn’t need to return to work after her maternity leave.

But there was a hard pill to swallow: I was working over 65 hours a week. I was tired. The only thing keeping me going was knowing that our son had his mum by his side 100 per cent of the time — which, in my opinion, was worth every working second.

As the business grew to 15 teachers and over 180 students, it was finally time to reduce my workload. At the start of 2020, I scaled down to around 30 hours a week, and only teaching one day a week. Then, 3 weeks later, we found out baby number two was on the way. But this time I felt prepared. Everything was already in place to handle another little rugrat.

Then COVID happened.

My breakdown

The impact that COVID had on our tutoring business was devastating. Our income was reduced by 90 per cent due to the lockdown procedures forcing us to shut our doors. It all happened so fast. One week I was able to fully support my family, the next I couldn’t even make the mortgage repayment. This prompted my first ever breakdown.

I felt hollow.

The weight of all those years spent working over 60 hours a week to pay for the financial decisions we made in our 20s came crashing down on me all at once.

How long is life going to be like this?

How long can we survive?

I can’t afford this!

I was stuck, deep down in that dark hole again. Struggling to see a way out. Weeks went by and the feeling of desperation only grew. But this time my wife was the one holding the torch.

‘You’ve done this before, and you can do it again,’ she said.

‘How can we afford this?’ I asked myself.

Trusting that she believed in my ability to provide for our family, regardless of what was going on in the world, was empowering. Her confidence gave me the resilience I needed to push through and find a solution.

COVID completely rewired me. I was now focused on wrapping my family’s lifestyle in a suit of armour. Luckily, due to Western Australia’s prompt border closure (which reduced the initial outbreak of COVID in 2020, allowing businesses to reopen after approximately 8 weeks — much sooner than other states), our tutoring business survived. But I was fixated on generating alternative income streams.

I’m sure someone in your life has told you to ‘find a job you’re passionate about’. But what they don’t tell you is that passion isn’t a starting point. It’s a result. Entrepreneur and leadership expert Simon Sinek said, ‘When we work hard at something we don’t believe in, we become stressed. When we work hard at something we do believe in, we become passionate’. I already knew that I was passionate about education. After spending 10 years teaching and 3 years building my tutoring business, I knew that whatever I did next needed to revolve around education.

The trials and tribulations of our renovation journey fuelled my desire to complete a mortgage-broking qualification, and just after the birth of our second son, Trusted Finance was born. But as our family grew, so did the number of hours I spent working. I was now split between teaching, the tutoring business and Trusted Finance. While working over 75 hours per week, I took solace in the fact that I genuinely loved what I was doing. That schedule left me with 44 free ‘awake’ hours per week. With most of those hours spent playing dad, much fewer spent playing husband and even fewer left for myself, I wished that someone had taught me how to take control of my income, set sustainable budgets and forecast the impact of having kids before we bought our first home.

After I started Trusted Finance, I realised something: there are thousands of people out there who could learn from my mistakes. So, I started making content on social media, sharing my journey and educating Australians about the home-buying journey. After a year I had gained over 200 000 followers on TikTok, making me the most followed financial educator in Australia. In a relatively short period of time, I became classified as an expert on first-home buying. Despite the fact I was helping thousands of people buy their first home, I couldn’t help but feel like an imposter. In these moments I would go back to 2014, when I was making financial decision after financial decision without anyone warning me of the potential consequences. In those moments of self-doubt, I would repeat this mantra:

My journey is worth sharing.

I have been in your shoes.

I can help you buy your first home.

I can help you avoid financial stress.

Through helping as many of my followers as possible, my business evolved. I now connect home buyers with the best mortgage brokers, investment brokers and building brokers all over Australia. At the time of writing, in July of 2024, more than 40 000 home buyers have been connected to brokers via my website www.trustedfinance.loans. I have been, and continue to be, blown away by the support of my 1.3 million followers on social media and hope they know that this book is inspired by their desire to provide for their families.

How this book will benefit you

As you’ve just observed, I made countless mistakes when buying my first home. Mistakes that severely affected my mental health. I’ve learned from these, used strategies to create sustainable budgets, climbed the corporate ladder and built successful businesses to take control of my income. And I balance all of this with being a husband and father. This journey has made me passionate about helping people buy their first home, avoid financial stress and provide for their families. Since you picked up this book, I’m guessing you want to be supported too.

In the pages that follow I will provide a step-by-step plan for buying your first home. As you might have already figured out, I did things in the wrong order. First, I bought a home; then, I tried to budget. When that didn’t work out, I desperately tried to increase my income. This is what caused my financial stress.

But this book isn’t just the ultimate guide to buying your first home in Australia. It’s a roadmap to gaining financial flexibility for you and your family. Each new phase of life poses different challenges. Financial flexibility is about balancing your spending today with your investments into your future. It means that you’re investing enough of your income into owning a home, mortgage free, and producing future passive income streams that will enable you to retire years before you gain access to your superannuation. Achieving financial flexibility will release you from the burden of traditional employment while you’re still young enough to enjoy the fruits of your labour.

In part I, I’m going to teach you what I wish someone had taught me when I started my home-buying journey: how to take control of your income. By learning how to create a sustainable budget, in line with increasing your hourly rate, you’ll be able to save a house deposit while the dream of owning a home is still alive.

The information in part II will save you tens of thousands of dollars in upfront costs and fees. There’s an art to buying a home in Australia. Taking advantage of first home buyer incentives, utilising stamp duty exemptions and considering guarantor home loans could result in you buying your first home years earlier than you ever anticipated.

Part III of this book is arguably the most important: how to get debt free as soon as possible. At the age of 36, I made the final repayment on my mortgage. That home loan — the one that caused all that stress in my 20s — is finally paid off. I’m going to teach you how to implement simple strategies that will shave years off the life of your mortgage and save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest.

Buying a home and becoming debt free is the key to surviving your retirement. But gaining financial flexibility is the key to enjoying it. In the final chapter of this book, you will create your very own financial flexibility roadmap. I’ll share with you how I plan to retire before the age of 50 and live off my passive income, how I plan to maximise my super fund in the lead-up to retirement and the steps I’ve put in place to help my children buy their first home 20 years from now.

To get the most out of this book you need to reflect on each phase of the journey and explore all your options. I have included a reflection task and an ‘Explore your options’ activity in each chapter to help you understand your financial position, improve your mindset around your finances and open your eyes to the possibilities available to you.

In each reflection task, you will be guided through a self-analysis designed to highlight your specific areas for growth. The ‘Explore your options’ activity will show you how to achieve this growth by following a number of possible pathways.

This book is designed to be highlighted, dog-eared, written in and doodled on. By the time you’re finished, it will become a first home buying guide and roadmap to financial flexibility that’s specific to you.

To show you that you’re not alone, I’ve collated 10 home-buyer journeys in the form of case studies — one at the end of each chapter. They are based on the contexts, incomes, liabilities and goals of the home buyers that my mortgage broker referral partners have supported to achieve property ownership.

To help you get your head around some of the terms and their acronyms related to buying your first home, here’s a list of the ones I’ll be referring to in this book. You can flick back to this page any time and remind yourself of what each acronym refers to at a glance:

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Family Home Guarantee (FHG)

First Home Buyer Guarantee (FHBG)

First Home Owner Grant (FHOG)

Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS)

Higher Education Loan Program (HELP)

Household Expenditure Measure (HEM)

interest only (IO)

key performance indicators (KPIs)

lenders mortgage insurance (LMI)

loan-to-value ratio (LVR)

principal and interest (P&I)

principal place of residence (PPR)

Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee (RFHBG)

Situation, Action, Outcome (SAO)

Okay, let’s get into it. The earlier you buy your first home, the younger you’ll be when it’s completed paid off.

PART ITake CONTROL of YOUR INCOME

1Aim for ABOVE AVERAGE

Let’s begin with some stats.

In 2024, the average age of a first home buyer in Australia was 36. In 1984 the average age was 24. An average house today is worth eight times the average income. Back then, it was only four times.

Over the past 40 years the property market has outpaced annual income at such a rate that it has changed the family dynamic for most Australians. Long gone are the days where a family could thrive on an average single income. Instead, most families are making the tough decision to put their children in day care so that both parents can work to cover housing and living expenses.

ABS statistics show that, across Australia, in 2024 the median income was $68 000 per year before tax. This figure includes all work types: fulltime, part time and casual. The median full-time income was $83 000 per year before tax. Where you sit on the income spectrum will determine whether you can buy a house, townhouse, unit or apartment for your first home. In fact, it will determine whether you can buy a property at all.

Most first home buyers today are limited by how much the bank will let them borrow for a home loan. This is called your ‘home loan borrowing power’ (also known as your ‘home loan serviceability’). A bank will calculate your serviceability by comparing your income to your living expenses as well as liabilities such as personal loans, student loans and credit cards.

By the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have created your home buying plan using a strategy specific to you, designed to help you take control of your income, buy your first home and manage your mortgage to create financial flexibility. But before I guide you on this journey, it’s important that you understand what type of income you need to earn to buy a home in your city. You need to set realistic expectations so that your goal of home ownership is achievable.

Approach this chapter with an open mind. It’s all about options. Every statistic you learn in this chapter should be the fuel that inspires you to keep learning. To keep researching. To act and to change your circumstances.

To create financial flexibility, you need to consider properties in all states in Australia and be open to building a career across a range of industries.

The average income vs the average house

Before we investigate the type of home you could buy, we first need to unpack your potential borrowing power. How does your income affect the amount a bank will let you borrow for a home loan?

Table 1.1 outlines your borrowing power based on a variable home loan interest rate of 6.5 per cent per year. Banks are constantly adjusting their home loan variable interest rates. As of April 2024, most banks are offering a variable rate of around 6.5 per cent. The higher the interest rate, the less a bank will let you borrow for a home.

It’s important that you research current interest rates as you consider the income vs borrowing power figures in table 1.1. For our purposes here, we will assume you don’t have any personal loans, student loans or credit cards. The banks refer to these as ‘liabilities’ and having any or all of them will decrease your maximum home loan borrowing power. (I will discuss how to reduce the impact of these liabilities in chapter 5. For now, let’s focus on your income.)

Table 1.1: your borrowing power on a variable home loan interest rate of 6.5 per cent p.a.

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