Saving for a house deposit can feel like a massive mountain of a task, for most of us its likely to be the  largest amount of money we ever have to find for a singular purchase and the numbers can get pretty daunting.

I always find that when you have a big goal to meet its easier to break it down into baby steps (see what I did there ), especially when its a money or numbers goal, which is why I’ve created this Free House Deposit Tracker printable to help keep on track with saving for a house deposit.

Now, I know it looks pretty basic but lets be honest – when you’re working towards something this big, simple is good.
Writing goals down, breaking them into manageable chunks and having visual representations of progress are some of the best ways to keep you on track

Goals in writing are dreams with deadlines

How to download your Free House Deposit Tracker

Sign-up to the mailing list below to get access to all the free printables I create. There’s ones for debt snowball tracking, savings trackers and tons more in the works

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How to use the House Deposit Tracker

The tracker is made up of 200 ‘bricks’ so to find each brick value first you fill in your Goal amount, in this example below we’re going to use £25,000
To find out our 1 brick amount we just divide our goal by 200 so
£25,000 ÷ 200 = £125 per brick

Every time you make a transfer to your deposit savings you colour in a brick (or half/quarter of a brick depending on how much you’ve got), it’s as simple as that. I like to colour code my blocks and use a different colour for each month so I can see what I’ve managed to pay to savings and challenge myself to do maybe one extra brick than the last month (I share my progress over on my Instagram grid too!)

Where to find the money to save towards your ‘bricks’

There are lots of different ways to find money to save towards your house deposit. If you’ve followed the Dave Ramsey plan and have cleared your debt in Baby Step 2 with the Debt Snowball and then saved your 3-6 months worth of expenses in Baby Step 3 it’s safe to assume that you have a pretty tight budget and can find a chunk of money to put towards your deposit savings each month.

‘Reduce your outgoings or increase your income’

The first place to look when you’re trying to find extra money is in your budget, can you reduce some of your outgoings to then put that extra cash towards your savings goals?

What if you can’t find any wiggle room in your budget though?

If there is no way you can squeeze your budget tighter to be able to put money towards savings then you need to up your income somehow.
I find that the best and quickest way to up your income is by having a Side Hustle! A Side Hustle can be anything that helps you to bring in some extra money each month.
It doesn’t have to be something overly time-consuming such as working an extra part-time job (that would be great and really help to move the needle but it’s not ideal for a lot of people) it can be something as simple as using apps on your phone that pay you to do simple tasks or turning one of your talents or hobbies into a home business.

Online Mortgage Calculators and Tools

Need some help with the maths? No idea how much you need to be saving? Want to see how much difference an overpayment would make to the balance? Here’s some fab online tools that can help you out!

• Mortgage Calculator UK – Play around with different interest rates and see how it affects the monthly payments, look at projected payoff figures
• MSE Deposit Calculator –  Not sure what size deposit you’ll need? This calculator will help your work it out.
• Simple Mortgage Calculator – This one is in $’s but it’s still fun to play around with to see how much your mortgage balance goes down with each payment you make, it also breaks it into what your paying in interest and what’s going to the principle.