PRACTICE nurse Lauren Doran and her husband Stephen took part in clinical trials to help them save the £23,000 deposit they needed for their first home.
The young couple bought their two-bed coach-house in Oxford in 2018 for £230,000, when Lauren was just 23 and Stephen was aged 28.
They used a 10 per cent deposit worth £23,000 which they saved over four years.
To boost their savings, the pair signed up to research clinics in Oxford where they would take part in drug trials for cash.
Of course, it wasn’t without its risks but as they were both healthy and fully understood the possible side effects, they decided to press ahead.
They each earned £4,500 for a two week clinical trial where they were treated for typhoid, while Lauren was paid another £3,000 for a drug to treat malaria.
At the same time Lauren was training to be a nurse, she worked weekends and university holidays at Marks & Spencers to boost her savings by £500 a month.
Living with Stephen’s family for three years to help them to cut back costs, and they restricted themselves to going out once a fortnight – and budgeted £50 each – to save cash.
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At the same time, Lauren and Stephen, now 25 and 30, were saving to pay for their wedding shortly after they bought a new house – all in they’d managed to get together £35,000.
We spoke to Lauren before the coronavirus lockdown for the My First Home series.
The couple have now put their home on the market but they take us through what it took for them to get on the property ladder.
What is your house like?
We live in Oxford in a coach house so it’s just one floor but there are four garages underneath us – three belong to other properties on the development and one is ours.
The development is around 10 years old, so we’re not the first to live in the house.
It’s got two bedrooms, a double and a single which is really useful to keep storage.
Our kitchen and living room is at one end with the bathroom all the way down the other end of the corridor.
A year after we moved in, we actually converted our garage into a second living room and put in a patio door that opens onto the garden.
There are stairs that go down from the house to the garage and we put in an under-stairs cupboard there too. You won’t believe how much more space it has given us.
We didn’t need to get planning permission to convert it – we’d only need it if we changed the outside – so the garage door is still there but it is plastered up from the inside.
The idea was always to do some work to the house once we’d bought it.
We sort of did bits as we went along rather than save up and do it all at once, so as soon as we’d save the money we plastered things, painted it, got new carpet in some rooms and laminate flooring in others.
Then we refitted the kitchen. We sort of picked a room to do at a time.
How much did you pay for your house?
We bought our house in 2018 for £230,000 with a 10 per cent deposit at £23,000.
All of the solicitors fees and everything cost probably another £5,000 on top of that.
Our mortgage was for £207,000, which we took out over 25 years. It was a five-year fixed deal.
How did you save for the deposit?
It took us five years years to save £35,000 – four years for the house and a year for the wedding.
Actually, we were saving for our wedding at the same time – we got married a few months after buying our house.
We both already had Help to Buy Isas but because you’re limited to saving a maximum of £200 a month we had other accounts too.
I moved into Stephen’s parents house in Oxford six months after we started going out in December 2012.
He was actually in his final year at university in Cambridge at the time but I was at Oxford Brookes university so it meant I could pay cheap rent, while we saved to buy somewhere. We were there for three years.
I’m a practice nurse so I received a bursary to help me cover my living costs but I worked part-time on weekends and uni holidays at Marks & Spencers too to increase my income.
This meant I could put the £500 a month I earned from the retail job straight into savings.
To get some extra cash, I also took part in a couple of clinical trials. Stephen and myself signed up to a research group.
We’d done our homework and I knew for the most part that it would be safe – of course there is a risk involved which you need to think about if you’re considering doing it to.
But being a nurse, I knew that it was in a controlled environment and I felt comfortable with it.
