Buying your dream home can come with a lot of planning, budgeting and weekends spent driving to different open homes. But for Victoria Devine, financial advisor and host of She’s on the Money, it came with a lot of walks past a certain dream home and a ‘forthcoming auction sign’.
Victoria is a rare mix of emotional, logical and financially literate, which should have made buying her dream home a breeze. While, ultimately, it was, it doesn’t mean that she followed her own set of rules when it came to purchasing her dream home.
When speaking with Home Beautiful’s Editor-in-Chief, Elle Lovelock, on The Edit, Victoria shared her thoughts on how imagining your life in a home can pull you in ways you wouldn’t have imagined.
Listen to Victoria Devine on The Edit podcast:
Ahead, we discuss if buying a home actually has less to do with the house itself and more to do with the life you imagine happening inside it, and what to do if your dream house isn’t within your budget.
Victoria Devine on making an emotional home-buying decision
She might be a finance girl, but when searching for her ‘stepping stone’ home, she had a humbling experience. And because she came prepared with so much logic, she forgot that she was “also a deeply emotional person”.
The thought of raising babies in the house had her hung up on a bathtub and forgetting about her true non-negotiables; that was until her husband stepped in and reminded her of their plan. It’s something Victoria sees often in her mortgage broking business, Zella. People enter into the buying process “incredibly rational about money until they walk into the house and suddenly every extra $50,000 starts feeling justifiable”, shares Victoria.
But she doesn’t want you to strip the emotion out of the buying process; quite the opposite, actually. She wants you to have that emotional reaction, but only once you’ve done the finances. The “sweet spot”, as she calls it, lets you “be emotional about the homes that exist inside your boundaries. That way your heart still gets a vote; it just doesn’t get the deciding vote on the budget.”
How to afford your dream home without overstretching your finances
Victoria Devine’s Tips To Avoid Overstretching Your Finances
- Do the rational work first
- Define what a dream home means to you
- Get clear on your numbers
- Know your borrowing capacity
- Build in breathing room
The first part of affording your dream home is understanding what falls in your budget, and doing the rational work before going to an auction.
Then, Victoria suggests “defining what a ‘dream home’ means to you” because ultimately, everyone has something different that they’re looking for. She notes that “things that genuinely impact how you live” should be your priority to figure out.
After that point, she wants you to “get really clear on your numbers before you start looking. Knowing your borrowing capacity, but also working out your own comfortable borrowing capacity.” Because there can be a big difference between the two, and having that information will let you “walk into open homes knowing exactly where you can compromise and where you absolutely won’t”, says Victoria.
“Get really clear on your numbers before you start looking.” – Victoria Devine.
And importantly, “build in breathing room”, she tells us. Because, as Victoria explains, “interest rates change, incomes change, babies arrive, renovations cost more than you expect, and life happens. Your dream home should add to your life, not leave you financially terrified every month.”
Can the atmosphere of a home change your non-negotiables?
Picturing your life in a home is a natural part of attending open homes, but if the atmosphere of the house is off, it can be a game-changer, especially for Victoria, as she wanted her home to feel welcoming and open to all.
Victoria Devine’s best tips for being ‘guest ready’
Victoria, a natural entertainer, has always lived with an ‘open door policy’, so when it came to her own home, she naturally wanted her favourite people around.
“I love that friends can drop in, sit around the kitchen bench while I’m doing something, or that a quick coffee somehow turns into an afternoon together. I don’t need everything to be perfect before someone walks through the door, I’d much rather have a home that’s actually lived in and full of people I love,” shares Victoria.
Fortunately, she has a really good cleaning routine. Her house “is probably 99 per cent of the time in a state where I’m genuinely happy for somebody to drop in,” explains Victoria. Because of this constant readiness to entertain, we had to ask her about her top entertaining tips.
“My biggest entertaining tip is to make it easy enough that you’ll actually do it. I always have a bottle of red, white and sparkling ready to go, with the white and sparkling already in the fridge. I’ll also always have olives, nuts and chips in the pantry, so if someone drops in, there’s something I can put out immediately. A really good coffee machine is another one for me. Having fresh coffee and milk at home means catching up at our place can be just as nice as meeting at a cafe, especially when friends are dropping in casually.”
“And my slightly more overachieving trick is cookie dough! I’ll make a batch, portion it into individual balls and keep them in the freezer. If someone is coming over, I can put a few straight onto a baking tray, and suddenly there are warm, freshly baked cookies with about 15 minutes’ notice. People think you’ve made an enormous effort when you absolutely have not,” says Victoria.
“I love that friends can drop in, sit around the kitchen bench. I don’t need everything to be perfect before someone walks through the door. I’d much rather have a home that’s actually lived in and full of people I love.” – Victoria Devine
So, perhaps finding your dream home isn’t about the house at all; instead, it could all be about the life and people that make it feel like a dream.
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