Celishia Marneweck

I have been living and working in Dubai for almost 10 years. It has always been my plan to buy property back home in South Africa, but not being a resident made it a little hard to get a loan from the South African banks. Even the bank that I was banking with, would only give me 50% of the value of the property, which means I needed to save. So I did. I saved as much as I could (whilst still enjoying life) over the next few years and then started looking at places to buy. I was so happy when I saw a new development in Centurion. I went to go have a look at them as soon as I got a day back in Jo'burg. Initially, I was only going to save 50% of the price I was looking at, but looking for the right place took a little while and I was able to save some more. This meant that I was able to buy one of these sweet simplexes that caught my eye, even though they were quite a bit more than what initially planned for. Then came the problems with my mortgage requests. Most banks denied me because at this point I had been an expat for over 8 years and even my own bank would only give me 60% of the 50% that I needed to loan. I was just about to give up hope, when I got the e-mail on that happy day, that SA Home Loans would mortgage the other half of my property. It had been a stressful week after hearing rejection after rejection, but I had a lovely sales consultant, Narisha, that managed to make it possible for me to get the finance that I needed.