After Cynthia, Tamarua and their kids Anton, Sae’Leigh, Lealin and Kodi were renting just down the road from where they now live in their new home with assistance from the Housing Foundation.
“We moved into our home in Papatoetoe in September 2014 under the Affordable Equity programme and had been striving to purchase our own home for years, since our first son was born, he’s going on 13 now. We weren’t too sure on how to do it and it felt impossible. Deposit, income all the rest. It was difficult. We wanted to build a base for our kids in Auckland. Because we’re not from around here, we both grew up back down in Whakatane. We’ll always be here, so our kids have got stability and somewhere they can come back to.”
Cynthia’s parents still own their own home.
It was good as a kid, lots of my friends’ parents rented and moved around a lot more. So, owning our own home is what I wanted for our kids.
We heard about the Housing Foundation in a couple of ways, Tamarua is a scaffolder and “One of my mates was a builder on these houses and asked me one day if I would be interested in owning one of these homes. I told him yeah, I’m interested, and he gave me the number to ring. I went back home and told Cynthia.”
“It just so happened at that time I (Cynthia) got an application at work. I initially thought it was a scam but went home and Tama told me how he works with those guys, and it seems legit. So, we filled it all out and sent it away.”
“It was all a little bit freaky really, like it was meant to be!”
“We applied and got a letter back that we were approved so sent in all our bank statements. It was so easy. Met with Joe from Kiwibank and next thing we are meeting with lawyers. It was about a year altogether from first applying till we moved in. Took a few months to receive the first letter.”
I remember the time going fast. “My mind set was, we’re not going to get it, we’re not going to get it. So that made the time move really fast. It’s not going to happen, it’s too easy.”
“We’re going to get a chance to do it!”
“There was not really any budget changes we needed to make, our place we were renting was a little bit less a week then what our mortgage repayments are. Main difference is now its going into our pockets, it’s not a waste of money. We used to rent from this lady at our old house, just the usual renting problems. It was an old cold house. Usually in winter we’d have to ring them quite often, this is broken, and can you get the fireplace fixed.”
“Constantly needing to take sick days off work. The kids were getting sick all the time during winter and now they don’t even get sick anymore. It’s like summer all the time here. It’s double glazed, I freaked out, oh my gosh there’s 2 pieces of glass!”
“You’re never too sure how long you’re going to be there when you are renting, you have an ideal, but at the end of the day the landlord could kick you out or put the rent up at any time.”
We feel settled now and have got to know many of our new neighbours, “They are all great people, all different ethnicities.”
We think it’s important to get to know your neighbours for security reasons, for the kids, they’re all around the same age. They will be growing up near each other for the next 20 or 30 years.
“Because it’s a shared home I thought the Housing Foundation would be over here all the time checking up, but they left us alone. It feels like our own house. As long as we look after the place and don’t make any major changes, it’s all good. We had a little hot water thing and we thought who do we tell and then realised, oh that’s us! It’s a little bit exciting too!”