I Didn't Have £20,000 to Invest in Property. I Bought the Deal Anyway.

I bought my first investment property in 2019, a three-bed mid-terrace, for £109,000. The slight problem was that I didn't have the deposit.

Not "didn't have much of it." Didn't have it. No pot of savings sitting there waiting to be put to work. If you'd asked me to write a cheque for 25% of that purchase price, I couldn't have done it.

Debbie, who was my girlfriend at the time and is my wife now, asked me the obvious question. The one any sensible person asks:

"Where is the money coming from to buy the house?"

It's a fair question. It's the question most people stop at. And it's the reason most people who could be investing in property never do.

Here's what actually happened. A family member funded the 25% deposit, in exchange for a genuine 25% share in the property, not a quick loan with a fixed payback date. A mortgage funded the rest. My own contribution to the purchase itself was about £800, and that went on legal costs, not the deposit.

That 25% share stayed real for five years. It wasn't tidied away quickly or quietly forgotten about. It took five years of the property performing before I was in a position to remortgage, release enough equity to buy that share back, and own the property outright. The property has produced roughly £500 a month in profit since it was first let, which is a large part of why that five-year wait made sense for both of us.

The deal comes first. The finance comes second.

That's not a slogan I came up with afterwards to sound clever in hindsight. It's genuinely how I approached it, and it's the single biggest shift in how I think about property compared to how most people think about it.

Most people start with "how much do I have?" and let that number decide what's possible. I started with "is this actually a good deal?" and only once I could answer that properly did I start working out how to fund it.

That ordering matters more than it sounds like it should. If you start with your bank balance, you'll only ever consider deals that fit inside it, and you'll talk yourself out of good opportunities because the money isn't sitting there yet. If you start with the deal, and it's genuinely commercially sound, you give yourself a reason to go and find the funding structure that makes it work.

I want to be precise about what that philosophy does and doesn't mean, because it's easy to hear "finance is almost insignificant" and take away the wrong lesson.

It does not mean finance is irrelevant. I still needed a real mortgage, underwritten properly, on a property that stood up to scrutiny. It does not mean funding is guaranteed. A family member doesn't hand over a real equity stake because you ask nicely, they do it because the numbers on that specific deal make sense to them too, and they're taking a genuine risk doing it, one that in this case lasted five real years, not five minutes. It doesn't mean you can skip having any money at all, my £800 was real money I had to find, and it doesn't mean the arrangement resolves itself. Buying that 25% share back required the property to actually perform well enough, for long enough, that a remortgage could release the equity to do it. That wasn't guaranteed on day one. It's what happened because the numbers held up.

What it actually means is this: I learned to spend my time and energy on finding a deal worth doing, before spending any time worrying about whether I personally held every pound of capital it needed. The finance is a problem to solve once you've found something worth solving it for. It's not a gate you have to already be standing on the right side of.

Why this matters more than the number does

I could have used that £109,000 figure to make myself sound impressive. I'm not going to, because the number isn't the point.

The point is that not having the deposit didn't stop me. Not having significant savings didn't stop me. What could have stopped me, and stops a lot of people who are otherwise perfectly capable of building something real, was deciding in advance that property investing wasn't for people without a lump sum sitting in the bank.

That first deal, funded almost entirely by a family member's equity stake and a mortgage, with £800 of my own money in it, was the start of a portfolio that grew to £1.3 million in three years, built on less than £19,503.45 of my own capital across the whole thing. That first purchase is where the "deal first" approach either worked or it didn't. It worked. Not because I was owed anything, but because the deal itself, and £500 a month of profit every month since, justified someone else's confidence in it for five whole years.

If you're waiting until you have £20,000 saved

You might be waiting for a while. And you might be waiting for no reason.

I'm not telling you that a family member will fund your deposit, that's not how this works and I'd be doing you a disservice pretending otherwise. What I am telling you is that the amount of cash sitting in your account today is not automatically the ceiling on what's possible. It's one variable in a bigger equation, and it's usually not the one worth obsessing over first.

Find the deal. Work out if it's genuinely good. Then, and only then, work out how to fund it properly, with real numbers, real risk, and real scrutiny, not wishful thinking. And be honest about how long any funding arrangement might genuinely take to unwind. Mine took five years.

That's what I did with £800 and a very patient girlfriend asking me sensible questions I didn't fully have the answer to yet.

Where it stands today

That three-bed terrace is currently valued at around £130,000, up from the £109,000 I paid for it in 2019. It rents for close to £893 a month at current market rates, around an 8.2% gross yield on that valuation. £800 of my own money, a family member's patience for five years, and a property that's paid me roughly £500 a month in profit the entire time.

That's not a story I'm telling you to boast. It's the actual, current, checkable answer to "was it worth it."