It’s not a story you hear often amid Ireland’s ongoing housing crisis, but Casey Harris and her fiance Alex Nugent bought their first home together last summer at the ages of 26 and 27. The couple bought a new two-bedroom home at a development in Co Meath, about 40 minutes from Harris’s native Finglas.
Harris and Nugent were able to avail of Government subsidy schemes to make the purchase – namely the Help to Buy scheme, which goes toward the required 10-per-cent deposit, and the First Home shared-equity scheme, which bridges the gap between what you can borrow and the price of the home.
Harris, a singer, music teacher and the Rose of Tralee’s 2024 Dublin Rose, has been sharing the couple’s house-buying experience on social media. She says, “It’s absolutely not my intention to try and suggest in any way, shape or form that the housing crisis isn’t that bad.
“My intention has never been to make [buying your first house] look easy. It was always just to make it look possible,” she says.
RM Block
Harris notes that she and Nugent were lucky in that they were able to live at her mother’s house in Finglas and save money towards a mortgage rather than spending a large chunk of their income on rent each month. Living with family rather than renting is the norm among their peers, she says. “Most of my friends, who grew up in Finglas, Glasnevin, Ballymun, Coolock, are still living with their parents.”
People sometimes assume that the couple may have had help from the so-called bank of mum and dad, but that’s not the case, Harris says. “We’re four generations of working-class people and every single one of us [in her family] has worked for absolutely everything that we’ve ever had,” she says.
Harris and Nugent, who is from Navan and works in sales, initially thought it would take them years to save a 10 per cent deposit for a house and that was reinforced, Harris says, by what they heard from other people and online.
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Their first step towards buying their home was meeting a bank mortgage adviser at the beginning of 2024, who told them they could potentially qualify for a mortgage of €290,000. They had €15,000 in savings at the time, Harris says, and as they had no rental history, they were required to demonstrate a saving capacity of €1,600 a month, which they did by saving that amount to a joint account each month.
They couldn’t withdraw funds from the joint account on an app which helped them to save and to hold each other accountable, she says. They also became more conscious of their day-to-day spending and cut out occasional trips abroad.
“Like anything else, you have to compromise. I would have been, once upon a time, quite frivolous with money. I would pop into Penneys and pick up a little dress for myself, or we’d go out for a nice meal – and we also love to travel. And then we just got to a point where we said we are not doing that any more and just started redirecting that money.”
Harris, a natural organiser who describes herself as “chronically type A”, used a spreadsheet to keep an eye on their finances, she says, and the couple still had to factor in their household and car expenses while demonstrating their saving capacity.
Their house search was briefly put on hold while Harris focused on the Rose of Tralee in 2024, but the couple made it a priority to get mortgage-approved and find a house when 2025 rolled around.
Their mortgage application was not straightforward, as Harris works partly freelance and part of Nugent’s earnings come from commission, but they had the help of a mortgage broker, which Harris says was a huge help to them.
They made the decision to opt for a new-build as they were vaguely aware of potential Government subsidies for first-time buyers of new houses, and they were wary of entering into bidding wars in the second-hand market.
Harris first became aware of the Help to Buy scheme on a housing developer’s website, and having applied for it, the couple were approved for the maximum sum towards a deposit under the scheme, which is €30,000.
They then went into full search mode and narrowed their focus down to two options based on their budget: a three-bed more than an hour’s drive from their network and workplaces in Dublin, for which they would not require bridging finance, or the two-bed they ended up opting for closer to the capital, which required bridging finance of about 12 per cent through the First Home scheme.
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Almost as soon as the couple saw the layout of other two-beds in the Meath development online, they called the estate agent and put down a booking deposit of €3,000 to buy the house off plans.
“With the First Home scheme, the Government own a percentage of your property, but my answer to people who come at me with, ‘Well, you don’t own your house’ is, I wouldn’t own my house anyway because the bank owns my house – that’s how a mortgage works,” Harris adds jokingly.
First-time buyers availing of the First Home scheme have the option to buy back the Government’s stake in their home and there are no charges during the first five years of ownership, but there is a service fee from year six.
Once Harris and Nugent agreed to buy their home off plans in the summer there was a lull in communication until everything came at once in late October/November, when the estate agent and their solicitor got in touch to get everything in order for the sale. “You have to send your signed contracts across to First Home so that they release your funds to the solicitor,” Harris says.
They eventually got their keys in November, just in time to share their first Christmas together in their own home.
The biggest thing they learned from the process, Harris says, is not to touch savings until after the sale is final, as there were a few nail-biting weeks when they thought their mortgage might expire and they’d have to be reassessed, having already spent some of their savings on furniture for the new house.
The couple are now continuing their saving habits to funnel towards their wedding, which they have booked for 2027.
“We were nearly so discouraged [to look into buying a house] by all the negativity that’s out there and the narrative that it can’t be done,” says Harris.
“It would have been nice if there had there been a glimmer of light out there going ‘Well, this is what I did’, and some sort of a representation that wasn’t somebody earning a six-figure salary, of people who just work normal jobs.”
Tell us about it
Have you bought your first home in the last 5 years?
Have you bought your first home since 2020? If the answer is yes, we’d like to hear from you.
For those renting or living with family members with the aim of buying their own home in the future, stories from those who have recently gone through the process can be helpful.
Respondents who share their story via the form below have the option to remain anonymous in any subsequent articles that may be prompted by the responses. You will be asked to supply your name and contact number though so we can verify your identity.
In your response, please consider the following:
- What you learned about the buying process (such as applying for a mortgage, viewing, bidding and so on)?
- What you would do differently?
- What compromises you made – in terms of house type or location, for example?
- What, if any, unexpected expenses you incurred?
- What your experience was if you used Government subsidy schemes for first-time buyers on the purchase of a newly built home?
Please limit your response to 400 words or less.
