One spreadsheet beats a hundred good intentions
From Aaron’s TikTok: “Free First Home Buyer Spreadsheet for people wanting to buy your first home in New Zealand.”
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Posted 11 July 2026
The short version
- Most people saving for a first home cannot answer two basic questions: exactly how much do I have, and exactly when will I have enough. A spreadsheet answers both.
- Track the full deposit picture in one place: savings, KiwiSaver, any family help, minus the costs of buying.
- A visible finish line changes behaviour. "Someday" becomes "20 more weeks", and skipping a week suddenly has a cost you can see.
- It is also your first conversation with a broker: turning up with your numbers already in one place puts you months ahead.
The two questions most savers can’t answer
Ask someone saving for a house how it is going and you will usually get a feeling, not a number. Money is spread across a savings account, KiwiSaver, maybe a term deposit, maybe a promised hand from family. Nobody has added it up lately, so nobody knows how far away the goal actually is. That vagueness is where deposits stall.
A first home spreadsheet is nothing fancy: what is coming in, what is going out, what the deposit total is today, and what it needs to be. The moment those numbers sit in one place, the goal stops being a mood and becomes a date.
What belongs in it
The deposit side: cash savings, your KiwiSaver first-home withdrawal estimate, and any family contribution, honestly labelled as gift or loan. The cost side: not just the deposit, but the buying costs people forget — solicitor, builder’s report, LIM, valuation if needed, moving, and a buffer so settlement does not clean you out to zero.
Then the engine: your weekly surplus. Income minus real spending, not aspirational spending. That number times the weeks remaining is your trajectory, and watching it tick down is genuinely motivating in a way a bank balance never is.
Why the tracking itself speeds you up
Anything measured weekly improves, mostly because drift gets caught in days instead of months. A subscription creep or an expensive month shows up immediately as weeks added to your date, and that feedback loop does more for spending discipline than any budgeting lecture.
Aaron gives his first home buyer spreadsheet away free through the First Home Buyer Academy, along with the rest of the getting-ready toolkit. Grab it, fill it in honestly, and when the finish line comes into view, check what your numbers could actually buy.
This is general information, not personalised financial advice. For advice on your situation, talk to Aaron.
Keep learning
How to budget for your first home
Work backwards: target house price, minus KiwiSaver and any help, equals the cash you still need. Divide by your weekly surplus and you have your timeline.
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