Driven couple go from zilch to two houses in two years
Buying an Auckland house in today’s market is a struggle and is only getting harder but it’s not impossible.
In early 2013 Liz Clayton, 50, and her husband, Talo Vailahi, 47, had no savings and no home, and had to borrow money from family to cover their rent.
Today, the couple have just sold their first property, which was bought in Matamata in 2013, and are left with just $200,000 owing on the twobedroom Mt Wellington property they bought at auction in 2015.
While Clayton said they were “well over the age” of the millennials who’d shared their property journey in the Herald yesterday, like them, they’d also started from scratch. Her husband earned around $33,000 a year. She had just recovered from a lengthy life-threatening illness and had few contacts in her line of work. “I had to borrow $10,000 to pay rent while I was bedridden.” But Clayton said fortunately, when she got back on her feet, she managed to bill close to $200,000 in her first year working.
“I just went out and worked, and worked and worked,” she said. “I gave up all luxuries, basically gave up everything.”
Clayton said the reason she’d never bought a house before 2013 was because it simply wasn’t a priority. She said getting sick gave her a bit of a wake-up call and changed her focus in life.
Clayton said if she’d died while they were renting, her husband would have been left with nothing. So they began working and saving hard, and within a year saved a 20 per cent deposit for a four-bedroom Matamata property, which they bought in February 2015 for $330,000 and last week sold for $410,000.
But Clayton said they didn’t buy it to make money, but to use it to leverage a mortgage on an Auckland property — which they managed just three months later.
In May 2015, they bought at auction a two-bedroom Mt Wellington property for $640,000.
She said it was “horrid”. “But we’ve pulled it to pieces to rebuild.”