36-Year-Old Man Buys First Home Using Down Payment He Earned By Recycling
One man's trash truly is another man's treasure!
Just dance | Shutterstock Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say, and in today's housing market, most people need to be as resourceful as possible to find their way onto the property ladder. For one Australian man, his answer to the conundrum of how to afford a down payment for a house ended up being among the things lying around his kitchen. Yup, he earned the cash by recycling.
An Australian man saved a down payment for his first house by recycling soda cans.
Thirty-six-year-old Damian Gordon had always dreamed of owning a home, but like so many of us these days, his dream felt totally out of reach. While Australia's housing market isn't quite as insane as the U.S.'s, it's pretty close. Depending on whose numbers you're using, Australian prices have surged by about 40% since 2020, compared to roughly 45% in the U.S.
So, just like here in the States, getting on the property ladder if you're not already a gazillionaire requires a lot of creativity. For Gordon, it turned out the solution was right under his nose the whole time, even if it did take seven years to come to fruition.
The man got the idea to earn money from recycling after noticing garbage all over a local beach.
Gordon told Australian website That's Life! that he often unwinds after his medical job by walking on a local beach near his home on the Central Coast of New South Wales. Relaxing as it was, he couldn't help but notice all the cans and bottles strewn around the sand. So he started picking them up.
By the time he finished his walk, he realized his backpack was full to overflowing just from one stroll. What first occurred to him was the environmental impact. Research online revealed just how staggering the amount of bottles and cans that end up in the oceans each year, and before long, Gordon was volunteering with Clean Up Australia, picking up trash on local beaches.
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A few years later, Gordon started a music festival in his hometown and made it part of his mission to ensure that all the soda, beer, and liquor bottles and cans left behind made it to the recycling center, not in the trash.
And when he walked out of the recycling center after that first event with a whopping $4,000 worth of Australia's $.10 per item recycling refunds, he got an idea. "I’m going to recycle my way to a house deposit," he told his mother, Helen.
After seven years of recycling, the man had saved enough refunds to purchase a home.
Gordon's mom is a keen environmentalist, so when he told her about his big plan to move out of the in-law apartment in her home and into a house of his own, she was immediately on board.
But, of course, a once-yearly music festival wasn't going to provide enough recyclables, so Gordon and his mom branched out. They began volunteering for other events and handling the recyclables pick-ups at people's weddings and parties. People in his community even joined in.
Each month, he'd return all the recyclables and place the money in a separate savings account. Three years later, he'd saved up $20,000. Another four years, and he'd more than doubled it to $45,000. Earlier this year, he combined that with his personal savings and realized he had enough for a down payment on a two-bedroom house.
"I can’t believe I’ve bought a house with rubbish," he wrote, but the journey hasn't stopped there. After furnishing his house, mainly from reclaimed and used furniture and appliances in keeping with his environmentalist spirit, he's continued his recycling gambit too. As he put it, "Now I’m paying off my dream home, one bottle at a time." One man's trash truly is another man's treasure!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
