Finance Approved!

After a few months of trying to sort out a few things financially, the bank has finally approved our loan to buy our new home. Yay! Our dream of living on a big block of land is only a short while off.

We have agreed for the current owners to remain in the property after the settlement has gone through, although this was only because we've brought privately (direct from the owners) who are an elderly couple wanting to downsize. They weren't expecting to sell for another 2 years, so haven't found somewhere yet. Now that we've got finance approved though, I suspect that they will want to move into a new property themselves fairly soon.

Part of the original plan was to sell our other home in Perth to free up some cash. Unfortunately we couldn't get a good price, so plan B is to rent that one out, and then live in this new home (we've been renting here in the meantime). Financially it will only cost around $100 a week more (worst case scenario in 30 years we'll own it outright), but it is really about the non-financial reasons that we're buying (big garden, we can do what we like to the house, settling down permanently in Victoria).

On the gardening front, it's also the first time that I've been able to plan a garden quite like this one. Our other gardens have been more a default setting - either the previous owners had it set up one way, or we didn't have the space to have much choice. This time we've got a stack of options, so can really consider many more aspects.

I'll post something shortly to show some past gardens that we've had, and I'll post another time to explain the set up of our new garden.

While we won't be handing over the cash any time soon (or rather, borrowing from the bank), it will be a stretch on our budget compared to what we've been able to do in recent years, so for now it's about settling into a routine and budget that we'll be having to live to shortly. And as part of that routine, I'm off to plant some seedlings out into our winter vege garden here!