Highlights of 2022 - House buying in Australia

Wow sobrang busy ata namin nung 2022 at wala talaga akong nasulat at all sa blog na to hehe. Anyway, thinking about it now, medyo busy nga kame last year. For most of 2022 (up tp August), I was working 2 part time jobs (BWAA and SUEZ), working on TDD and then starting up the operations para sa Kitanglad Hall. And of course, amongst all these, are being a mom and a wife and all the chores in between. We were also deep into finding a house and into our first property buying experience. October 2021 - started to talk to Ms Normi our home loan broker. She explained to us patiently everything that happens in the home buying process and all the requirements that we need. We started to collate our documents and she gave us quotes of different home loans. Dec 2021 was when our preapproval was granted so we started to go to house inspection almost every weekend. It was a very exhausting process. It was then that I was working full weeks and our weekends are spent going to all these inspections. Sometimes we would go to 2 or 4 properties in one area per day! We would make offers and sometimes it gets rejected. It was a very emotionally and physically tiring process. I had a love hate relationship with the real estate agents. I love the part of making offers. I feel like I am finally doing all those things that I have been reading in Robert Kiyosaki's book! But some agents can be a pain to deal with too. February 2022 - we made an offer in a property in Macquarie Fields. We have decided on going the route of buying a fixer upper first (and not too expensive) so as to have more experience in property ownership. The news of interest rates going up are starting to emerge so we didn't want the stress of having a really nice house but a very large monthly mortgage repayment. April 2022 - Our property buying was finalised and we got the keys to the unit. Honestly, we were a little bit underwhelmed by what we got. I mean there were so many we wanted to fix first. We wanted to change the toilet, the flooring, the backyard, the doors etc. And since we gave all of our savings as house deposit, we had to save up first so we can finance the renovations. We decided to stay in our rented home first. It was a bit of a stretch for us during this time as we are now paying rent, mortgage for the new house and have to save up for the renovations. I think we were going overdrive here with TDD to help with the finances.

August 2022 - We took our first irrevocable step into doing our renovations and that is we finally ordered the materials for the toilet renovation. We also found a tradie who would do it. All in all we paid %7K for the labour and $3K for the matrials. It was a complete overhaul and I loved the finish product. October 2022 - We also decided on having new flooring for all the rooms except the dining room. We were also going back and forth from Fairfield to Macquarie Fields to move some of our personal stuff. November 24 2022 - This was the date out movers moved our BIG stuffs. Most of the small stuffs have already been moved to Macquarie fields. This was a very tiring month of cleaning, packing, unpacking. Very emotional too when we finally left our home of 9 years in Fairfield.

December 2022 - We are starting to settle in our new "old" house. We can still think of a lot of stuff to fix around this house. We are just taking it one step at a time.