![]() We first joined Liberty Trust after a friend presented the details during a church service. Bruce
and I started our married life living in a mobile home for four years
while we saved for our first home - a 9metre x 6metre converted barn. We
lived here for 5 years and had two children. Then, 8 months pregnant
with our 3rd daughter we bought our first real house, and it was 3 years
later that we were introduced to Liberty Trust. We are now in our 22nd
year of our marriage and live in Auckland with our 6 children (5 girls
and one boy). We have used our loan to buy an apartment near the
University. It is currently tenanted, and we are envisaging using it for
accommodation for our children should they decide to go to University. I’d
like to relate to you now, the story of how we bought our first “real”
house. It was 1995, and we lived in the South Island, several miles
north of Christchurch. With a third baby on the way we were growing out
of our little home so we decided to look around for a section in order
to build a kitset house. We heard about a local woman who had a section
she needed to sell and made her an offer of $7,000. The first miracle
occurred when she accepted this offer. The purchase of this section used
up all our savings and we decided to consider building several months
in the future, once we’d saved a little more. However, a few weeks later
on a shopping trip in Christchurch, I called in to have a look through a
relocatable house, just on a whim really. Stepping across the threshold
I instantly fell in love with this house, and when I arrived home I
wore my poor husband’s ear off, extolling its virtues. Finally he
consented to look at the house, was relatively satisfied with its
suitability and accepted the vendor’s offer of $45k including shifting
fees. Without any legal advice we signed the papers. We hired a
contractor to measure the foundations (each house is unique and
foundations must be made perfectly to fit each one) and to start laying
them. It was while he was pouring the concrete for the very last
foundation footing that a stranger arrived. Now
this man had just purchased land in order to plant a vineyard and was
preparing to hire workers from the area. Coincidentally, he had also
just bought a relocatable house. The same house. During
a subsequent discussion it transpired that several months previously he
had bought this house, and signed the purchase agreement, from the
elderly owners for $35,000. Their son, not being satisfied with his
parent’s deal, had gone behind their back and resold the house to us for
$45,000. Now he was attempting to negate the previous contract.
Obviously the local landowner had the only legal contract, but we had
foundations in place which would only fit one house. This was the
quandary we found ourselves in. Fortunately the landowner was also a
Christian and did not want to cause an upset in the local community. He
therefore proposed that we cancel our agreement and he proceed with his
agreement to purchase the house. Once this was legally done, he would
on-sell the house to us for our agreed price of $45K. We were obviously
relieved with this outcome and trotted off to the bank to apply for the
loan. Amazingly, in our naiveté we had never considered the bank’s
lending criteria. In our circumstances (i.e. no collateral, and no
credit history) they would only loan against a relocated house once it
was on site and connected to services. Our previous agreement, which
we’d signed with no legal advice, required us to pay the full fee
upfront before the house would be uplifted from its current site. There
would have been no way we could have done this, and in hindsight we
could have been sued for breach of contract. But our amazing God, who
knows the end from the beginning, had arranged for another Christian
man, who lived less than 5 miles away, to buy the house for us in
advance. The house itself was 40 miles away, which in itself is a
miracle. It could have been sold to an unknown trader 50 miles in the
other direction. So, the landowner bought the
house for $35K, and delivered it to us, whereupon we connected it to the
services, and applied for our mortgage, to buy the house we already
had. God blessed the landowner with a nest-egg towards his own house,
and he blessed us with being able to purchase a house through a process
that only God could have arranged. Doesn’t this make you shake your head
in wonder? What a mighty God we serve! Bruce & Joanna Hingston 2 October 2008 |
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