A condensed, recent history.
We came close to defaulting on our mortgage, really close. I mean, we didn’t have enough money for our next payment. Our house was on the market and we had signed a conditional offer from potential purchasers, the condition was they needed to sell their home. It was a stressful time, the housing market was only showing slight signs of life, New Zealanders were tightening their belts waiting for interest rates to fall. We weren’t the only kiwis in this position but with no media coverage around this it felt like we were alone. The story around why we came so close to defaulting on our mortgage is another blog in itself, possibly a series :), but it has to do with us having different values to a big bank - go figure:)
So you’ve probably guessed but we did sell our home, with perfect timing. We received the deposit payment 1 or 2 days before our next mortgage payment was due and the rest is happening now.
What we realised throughout our time as home owners (we had owned a beach bach before moving onto a much bigger home) was that we would accumulate “stuff”. We would buy “things” to fill spaces, spaces that we really didn’t need. We were living in excess, albeit our excess was the societal ‘norm’ where we lived.
We decided not long after moving into our new home, which coincided with the birth of our second child, that we didn’t need the extra space for our day to day lives. You could say that we had succumbed to the ideal of bigger is better, that we needed the space for our expanding family. The kiwi dream of continuous progression was alive and well within us. It took experiencing it for us to realise it was not for us. We would find ourselves cuddled up on the couch at one end of the house, with all the other rooms unused. We are often together, where ever we are. It was then, and still is, a priority for us that both parents spend quality time with our children.
To own a home like ours would mean we would both need to be working, one of us full-time. Although this was not our preference, we did attempt to make it work. We couldn’t sell our house so soon after purchasing it, could we? Chez came up with an amazing plan to stay in her cultural change role at ANZ bank, they weren’t as interested in cultural change as profit gathering, who would have thought? I was picking up crumbs in the construction game but the industry was in decline and I was new to area trying to get a foothold. People didn’t have the spare cash for renovations resulting in an ultra competitive market.
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