Do I know anything yet?

Last night we met with the mortgage broker once again so she could explain all the different loan products available to us and what they would mean in terms of repayments, interest, up front costs etc. I can only say that I am still a little confused because the type of loan used can make a great difference to the repayment amounts. What is in our favour right now is that there has been an interest rate drop. If we'd taken a loan last week we would have been paying out $500 per month more than if we took one out tomorrow. We haven't yet applied for a loan but she recommends getting pre-approval to improve our negotiating power should we find a house we're interested in. She advised us to make sure we fully understood everything though before we even went ahead with pre-approval.

She explained how much of a difference to the market first home buyers with no deposit can make to the prices of homes. Those without a deposit have a greatly reduced borrowing capacity effectively driving them out of the market, at least here in Brisbane. But if everyone was to borrow without a deposit and they were the only buyers around the prices would be pushed back to a more realistic value. She does not recommend borrowing without any kind of deposit however.

I like this woman, she's gutsy and honest and has been in the business for many years. She's a single parent of four children and does not own her own home. She explained to us that she too did not want to be in a position of not being able to put food on the table for her children just to own a home. Her two eldest have now, just this year, left home meaning she could possibly afford to buy a home sometime this year because she wouldn't need something as large (and more expensive) with only two of them left at home. Apparently the fact that she does not own her own home puts a lot of people off because they don't believe she can understand how it works. As she explained, she doesn't need to own a home to understand it. She has advised many of her potential customers not to buy a home right when they've wanted to because she could see the kind of precarious situation they would be in if they did.

So, she's going to put a lot of information down on paper for us so we can see exactly how we would stand and what each different loan product would mean to us personally given our own unique circumstances. She didn't recommend to us the lenders that pay her the highest commission because in her opinion, they weren't right for us.

We gave her a glass of wine while she was here and we laughed a bit and shared our stories of raising teenage girls but what do I like most about her? Well, she doesn't wear power suits or make up, she uses a lap top that looks like it's seen better days, keys are missing and she has post it notes slapped all over it. Her reasoning - why dump something that still works just fine, it'll only take up precious land space. She's not at all pushy but knows her stuff inside out. She's the sort of person we could remain friends with even if we never buy a house.

So, we're still no closer to buying and we're still in no rush to do so. We'll do it if and when we feel we're completely ready. We'll continue to inspect homes so we can feel we have given ourselves an opportunity to know whether we're getting value for money. Tomorrow is Saturday and we have four homes lined up to inspect and already I'm exhausted by the prospect.