Gen Z mortgage broker pushes back on controversial Boomer advice: ‘Small luxury’
There’s a controversial piece of advice often offered to young Aussies wanting to buy their first property… stop buying coffee. But one Aussie mortgage broker is pushing back on this advice and even opened up her own coffee shop for home-buyer hopefuls.
Cherisse Morgan’s coffee shop sits in the front of her Redcliffe mortgage brokerage business and she launched it last year. She offers six months of free coffee as a perk to those who get a home loan through her business.
The 26-year-old told Yahoo Finance the “spur of the moment” decision was helping get home buyers through the door, with coffee customers often stopping to chat to her about interest rates and house prices.
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“I was trying to come up with fun, creative marketing ideas and thought no one had done this before,” Morgan said.
“It’s a good incentive for people who want to come and get their home loan refinanced or buy their first home from me, especially in my local area.
“It gets them through the door but funnily enough a lot of them don’t come for their free coffee. So it gets them in but they’ll only come for a coffee every few weeks or month.”
Morgan said the idea that you needed to stop buying coffee if you wanted to buy a home was generally out of touch unless you were going overboard.
“If you’re doing that every day, a couple of times a day and spending $30, $40 or $50 a day, then obviously it does add up over the course of a week and over the course of a year,” she said.
“If you’re just buying a coffee every day, that’s nothing multiplied for a small little luxury. You’ve still got to allow yourself to have those things and just budget it. It’s all about budgeting and setting that in there so you can allow yourself to have that.”
The price of an average coffee has increased in the last few years as many coffee owners are hit with rising costs. But if you were to spend $5 on the average small coffee everyday, it would set you back $35 a week or $1,820 a year.
The average capital city property price is $864,000, meaning that you’d need $172,800 saved up for a 20 per cent deposit. That’s nearly 100 years’ worth of coffee.
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Buying first property at 21
Morgan bought her first property in Werribee in Melbourne when she was 21 but said it required a lot of hustle.
“I started saving when I was 18 and got my first full-time job,” she said.
“I was working a lot of jobs. I was working a full-time job during the week and going to university at night. On the weekends, I would work in cafes and bars.
“I would split up all my income. The full-time job would go to a savings account every pay, the weekend work and hospitality jobs would pay my rent and bills.”
Morgan relocated to Queensland after meeting her partner and they have since bought property together.
She now has three staff members working at her cafe, along with a personal assistant working with her on her mortgage business, Morgans Mortgages, which she said was her primary source of income.
About half of her customers are mortgage clients, while the other half are locals.
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