Hey Beautiful people, welcome back to the Jalloh family blog. Pull up a pew and stay for a while; We have some things to tell you.
Who would’ve thought, when we met at fourteen, we would be where we are today? We spent the latter parts of our 30s wondering if we were ever going to be homeowners in London. Were we ever going to be able to save up enough money for a 20% deposit now that all the 5% loans were obsolete? Make sure you read to the end to see the video of us finally moving in to our own home.
The average price of a 3 bedroom flat in London, where we lived at the time, was £630,000. Even though we were both, graduates and professionals in the youth sector, earning what we thought was a decent amount, we could not see how this was going to happen. Our expenditure was equal to or just above our income. Now I know that many would say, “Why don’t you live within your means?” and to those people, I would say, we thought we were living below our means.
Our career paths have always been intertwined. Ruth, working with budgets in her then role as Regional and National manager, knew the power of a spreadsheet, so we put one together for our incoming and outgoing. Once we saw how much rent and utilities were bleeding us, it was obvious we had to find a way to put that money into something that would belong to us at the end of all that paying. We didn’t want our children in this Ferris wheel, enjoying the highs of payday and the lows of bill day, all the while not progressing forward.
Most people, like us, couldn’t rely on a secret trust fund. Like many, we were going to have to do it our selves. However, we knew it was going to be tough because, in normal circumstances, early Millennials (the group to which we belong) stayed at home with parents, until they have saved enough to venture out on their own. Unfortunately, Ahmed and I never got that opportunity, due to a series of unforeseeable circumstances which we will go in to in later blogs. We couldn’t stay at home, with our parents, and save. Yet, we couldn’t rely on them to fork out £60,000, which we doubt they had stashed in a mattress somewhere anyway.
Everything was pointing to us never owing a home in London. All we knew was if we were going to ‘own our own’ we needed to do something drastic because we were becoming tired of earning as much as we did but the banks wouldn’t even consider us as safe investments. We had tried to approach our banks previously when we thought about buying Ahmed’s 9th floor, 1 beddy studio apartment which was around £400,000 at the time in 2010, but were refused due to the apartment being located on the ninth floor. Really?
So, fast forward to 2015, when we managed to save up to come to Oz for my sister’s wedding, we spent time researching the property values, visiting open homes and witnessing how ‘happy’ the Aussie way of life made people. We wanted a piece of that happiness action and this was the trigger of a series of fortunate events which led us to Brisbane city centre meeting our MARA agent. You can read more about that journey here and here. We decided there and then that our true happiness and fortunes were to be discovered in Australia and 3 years later, almost to the day, we were packing up our bags and heading off to the great beyond. Then a year after that, we were handed the keys to our brand new home, which we wanted to share with, you, our extended Jalloh Family.
The video below is on settlement day. We were so excited once the house had settled that we decided to start moving our belongings from the house we were renting to our new home.
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Love as always,
The Jalloh Family
The Jalloh Family 