Selling car boots and getting rid of an engine helped us buy the first four bed home worth £ 355,000.

Military couple Nicola and Andy Patterson whipped their belongings for car boot sales and got rid of a car to cut expenses and save on bail.

After 13 years in military shelter, the couple, now 35 and 40 years old, had decided to buy their own house, but they only had £ 2,000 in savings.

To increase their bail, they get rid of a financed car and save £ 270 a month.

They also went on to sell car boots and toys that their children – Ellie Mae, 15, Ronnie, 11, and Rosina, three – no longer used and clothes they had grown out of.

Although the prices were very low – one item for 50p or three for 1 pound – the family could make about 100 pounds each time.

Five years later, in July 2020, the family finally moved into their newly built four-bed home on The Crescent in Carterton, Oxfordshire.

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They took a 5% down payment of £ 18,000 to buy the house for £ 354,950 but also used Help to Buy programs to bring the mortgage down.

Nicola left her job as a pharmacy technician with the Royal Air Force in May for a role in a general practice while Andy works as a firefighter for the Royal Air Force. You are both taxpayers with a property tax rate.

We met Nicola for The Sun’s My First Home series.

It is a new semi-detached house in the Crescent in Carterton, Oxfordshire.

It has four double rooms, three bathrooms and a toilet on the ground floor.

There is also an eat-in kitchen and a separate living room.

We paid £ 354,950 for the house and paid 5% cash of approximately £ 18,000.

We reserved the accommodation in February of this year and then moved in in July.

We took out a 29-year mortgage for the first five years. Our repayments are now £ 954 per month.

Our family was previously in military shelter as shown by your wages, but I don’t know how much it was.

Our property purchase was completed two days after Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the stamp duty vacation. Thanks to that we saved £ 2,500.

It wasn’t a huge amount but we used the extra money to pay for the blinds on the house.

Yes, we have used both the Help to Buy loan program and Forces Help to Buy.

We borrowed 20% of the house value through Help to Buy, which gave us a £ 70,000 loan.

The Forces Help to Buy program allows you to borrow 50% of your salary interest-free up to a maximum of £ 25,000 and use it for a deposit and other costs including fees.

We received £ 16,000 as a result which helped cover legal costs and increased our deposit.

Our mortgage is now around £ 253,000.

We have limited ourselves to only having one car that has a PCP (Personal Contract Purchase) contract. This saved us £ 270 a month in costs.

It was difficult to get used to the fact that we only had one car, but Andy rode his bike to work as we don’t live very far.

We also went to some auto boot sales and sold all the children’s toys they no longer wanted and clothes they had grown out of.

We’ve probably made over £ 100 every time we went to a sale. We didn’t sell the items at high prices, we liked one item for 50p or three for £ 1. It added up.

Last year we did three car boot sales with the family.

We also set grocery shopping budgets from £ 80 to £ 100 a week and started planning meals so we only bought what we needed.

We have now continued, so this has actually become more of a habit.

It means we plan what we are going to have before we go into stores and buy what we need instead of walking around and getting all the purchases that are available for free.

Otherwise, you will get things that you don’t need.

We used to throw away about a third of the food we bought because we didn’t use it. They were probably worth £ 25 a week.

Also, we only went out for dinner once or twice a month and not once a week.

Overall, I think we saved around £ 300-400 a month on our deposit, which took us five years.

We had £ 2,000 savings in our savings account when we decided to save for a home deposit.

We have lived in this area in Oxfordshire since we returned from our service in Cyprus in 2013.

My two oldest children have attended four different elementary schools so far, so I just wanted them to have continuous education.

It’s a good place to be honest, it’s pretty central to everywhere.

My parents live in Weymouth and my in-laws live in Peterborough so it’s kind of in the middle.

When I left the military, I took a course on transitioning into civilian life.

They talked about housing and at first I thought I would keep saving until my husband left the military.

But then they said if I can afford it, I should look it up because otherwise you will be renting in military shelters for another nine years.

That could be a nine year mortgage, so we decided to go for it

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