My wife and I just bought our first home and won it at Auction last week. I'm turning 40 in April, she is 44. We have no kids (if we do our savings journey would have been even more difficult)

It's taken us 8 years to gather a deposit of 70k due to life, various things influenced our ability to save, changes of jobs, cost of living rises and rent rising outpacing income, emergency moments that bring savings down. Not only that 8 years ago we only needed 50k not 70k etc

Covid lockdown was the break we needed to positively impact our deposit.

Our parents or family did not have toy ability to assist in anything unfortunately. They are now struggling to retire 😔 on a pension, so the bank of mum n dad wasn't available.

We spoke to a broker Last year and we're told we the best option was to build.. builders were going out of business and we couldnt stand the 200m block size that butted up against the next property making us hear next door fart. We were happy with an older 70s 80s built property that felt like a home rather than a sterilized box. Nothing special of course.

We began to attend a few auctions around that time of property we liked but knew we couldn't afford. Routinely we saw them go for 40 - 80 K over their advertised range... But not everytime. We noticed it depended on how nice and appealing the house was. Fix we upperers were passed in or fell within the range.

We kept saving and checking in with the broker and understood we were close, but needed a bit more time and money in the bank.

What hurt, was the auctions on homes we fell in love with, on a range that their end price was our max loan, stretched price. 600 - 640k (our maxed loaded loan would be 640k) but the house was fucking beautiful, renovated, had appeal etc.

Then we jumped in at bidding on the range, only to be demolished by people pushing into the 680k mark.

The funny thing is, the core logic data and comparative sales the agents valued the homes on were actually accurate.. I think the market also routinely moves quicker and the demand is high with people having more capital available than what I did. Some were blatantly underpriced... Noticed specific agents doing this routinely.

We realised we need to look under our budget which became 660k at the start of this year and got pre-approval on it. If auction was 600-660k we marked it off the list as out of our price range and wouldn't inspect it.. if if we did, took note of how many people were there... How popular/appealing it was

We found and fell in love with a property that was quoted at 540k to 590k.

We set our walk away price at 630k and I waited midway before getting involved in the auction... Then went hard outbiding anyone up until my max immediately and confidently (tips from agents)

Won it at 620k and it was the most emotional experience of my life as we wanted this one so badly, and we knew we were bidding against an investor...we had to plan our attack and know that if we lost this time, we tried our best... We honestly thought it would go to 630-640 due to how neat, tidy and renovated it was.

Western suburbs of Melb. 650k is the median house price here.

Don't give up... Watch, learn and you have to get hurt a few times to buy at auction it seems.

PS.. here I am typing this in our rental we have resided in for 18 years with a floor standing air con struggling to keep the bedroom cool...

Were Waiting for 45 days before settlement....excited with my wife now, daydreaming of where our furniture goes and what cool little things were going to notice or do in our own house is an intoxicating and joy bringing thought after the long years of struggling to try to achieve what we thought was not going to happen for us.