By Patrick Hind

Having only recently got rid of me from the upstairs bedroom, my parents were in no mood to cede to my request for a bit of financial assistance with putting down the deposit for a house. After a year renting with my girlfriend, Lorena, in Walworth , south London, we had come to the conclusion that this was simply throwing money away to an inept and unhelpful landlord. It was time to buy.

We found a lovely little house just off the Walworth Road in a lovely little street. And while we had the neither lovely nor little London prices to contend with, the house was sufficiently close to the Aylesbury Estate, which crops up in the news from time to time, to keep the prices just about within our limit.

If it was simply down to making mortgage payments each week, we would have been fine. We both hold down decent, if hardly superbly paying jobs and would have got by without much of a fuss. But is was the five per cent deposit that killed us. There was simply no way that we could stump up the five per cent deposit of £7,450 straight off.

Our only option was to save up as fast as we could in an effort to make our target. I started by ensuring that whatever money I had was earning its keep. So I went about ensuring that I was fully utilising my ISA allowance and that anything left over was put in an internet savings account, which offers the best rates of interest coupled with the slight danger that someone will hack in and take everything in there. Then it was on to cutting down on expenses. Journeys to see friends in far flung parts of the country would be severely limited as it is not only the cost of a train ticket but the evenings of drunken revelry that often hit me hard. I vowed to eat less, take sandwiches to work rather than buying them from the local bakery, and walk wherever possible to save on the Oyster card.

Lorena, as far as I could tell, would be shopping less. As simple as this measure seems, it appears to have had the same impact on her bank balance as all my measures put together. I remember thinking at the time that I was glad we had decided against having a joint bank balance.

I often used to make detours on the way from work to look at our prospective house and to make sure that the "For Sale" signs were still outside and as we grew closer to our target I would find my heart beating as I turned the corner, hoping to see the placards still in place. And so it is, that 21 months after first finding the house, and after a last minute decision to sell our old Renault Clio for £1,500 to get us over the finishing line, we are happily ensconced in our new home, from where I am writing this now.