How I bought my first home using the power of the crowd.

My name is George Rawlings and I'll admit from the outset - I'm a product of generation Y, a raging millennial with bells on when it comes to my expenditure. I eat out at least 3 times a week, have a car on finance, use Tinder and definitely don't blink an eyelid about ordering my daily flat white...I mean come on, it's ￡2.60.

Four years ago I was one of the 3 million struggling savers in the UK who hadn't achieved homeownership and this scared me. I knew how important it was to get on the ladder to build in some financial security. I lived for the moment and certainly did not scrimp away each month saving for a house deposit. It seemed so out of reach and unaffordable, I just didn't bother as this was something, like most of my friends, we'd address later in life. I mean come on, I couldn't give up my holidays and kooky attire from ASOS.

This aside, I wanted homeownership and being a millennial, I wanted it NOW. Of course though, I couldn't have it now, saving a deposit takes discipline, grit, resilience and willpower to turn down rounds of overpriced pints with the friends. But that deposit was something I financially didn't have. Nevertheless, I wanted to prove to myself I could do this, so I set my big goal, to save for a house deposit in two years. But I needed to come up with a plan.

I then played around with a few affordability calculators, I was earning about ￡32,000 a year, which meant as a single first-time buyer I could buy around the 125K mark, meaning I would need to raise ￡6,250 for a 5% deposit over the next 2 years. So how did I do this while maintaining my current lifestyle and what was my plan?

One evening, I opened my laptop and did some research on the cash-back sites to find out what they were all about as my good friend, James, raved about them as they were a tidy little earner for some beer money. I literally signed up to them all. However a ￡20 cash-back here and there from the odd purchase wasn't really going to make a dent in ￡6,250 needed but I thought 'hey ho' it should all add. SO I signed up for cashback and coupons for most of my online and offline purchases. The difference between my cash-back account and James' is I wasn't touching the money. I allowed mine grow.

However after two months into my project I had only accumulated ￡93 in cash-back. I certainly wasn't going to increase my spending just to claim more cash-backs! I so very nearly withdrew the money, packed it all in and put it towards a flight but then I had another idea. But I was going to need a helping hand.

I sat down with my mum and asked her a few questions about where she did her weekly shopping, normally filled up with fuel, the retailers she went to for home improvements, technology, clothes, flights, hotels, haircuts, insurance, mobile phone contracts, utilities, literally anything I could think of. It was music to my ears as amazingly all these big brands were part of the cash-back networks offering between 5 - 10% back on any purchase. It was at this point, I gave my mother my login details to my preferred cash-back site, showed her how to use it and “instructed” her to put any purchase she could through my account to help me hit my target for my first home. She was my first recruit and the majority of her expenditure was conveniently put through my account and my deposit was growing. But still, not at the rate I needed. I needed more people. More people meant more spending, meaning more cash-back. I needed the power of the crowd.

I spent the next month reaching out to a few people I knew about my project and talked to them how they could help me and what my mission was. Only one other person was putting their purchases through cash-back sites, and the others never actually claimed the cash offered anyway! The majority weren't even aware this affiliate marketing machine existed and before I knew it, my deposit was growing exponentially. I managed to recruit my parents, older sister, grandmother, uncle and a close friend who had all already bought and were happy to help me get on the ladder in this way. I was leveraging the everyday purchases of six of my closest family and friends, as well as my own and was virally growing my deposit.

I had 22 months left and needed ￡6157 to hit my target which I was well on track for as the cash-backs were growing. These mainly came from the weekly online food shops at Tesco, filling the car up at BP and hotels from Booking.com and trust me when you have 7 people including myself, it all adds up. You're right Tesco, every little sure does help!

I worked out with the people I had, these 6 people needed to collect ￡240 cash-back for me each month, that's ￡40 per month, or less than ￡10 per week, per person. This was excluding my own purchases! Without realising it I tapped into the sharing economy and harnessed the power of a few individuals through small cash-backs here and there. I hit my target 2 years later, withdrew the funds and went on to buy my first home in Cheltenham where I was very happy for 3 years.

How I achieved homeownership, from what I've been told, has never been done before which led me to the conception of something special. My startup, brix, is a points scheme to help people trapped in rent, to save for a deposit for their first home from everyday purchases they and a few people they know make. I’ve designed this as a points system not cash-back. Cash-back is too easy just to spend once you've earned that odd ￡20 here and there. So brix is a cash-back engine with a twist, it's for your deposit and nothing else. And of course, I'm working on the ability for renters to connect up their brix account, just like I did, to accelerate the rate at which they build their rental deposit too.

For me, the problem has nothing to do with overpriced flat whites or taking yourself away on holiday. There's a bigger picture here and much smarter way to solve the deposit problem.

Here we are three years later having made the move to London and as I sit here writing this in a quaint coffee shop in Parsons Green, I'm a man on mission. To help get as many people as I can out of rent and into buy and fundamentally change the way my generation saves for their house deposit. With increasing house prices and salaries hardly rising, it's almost impossible to save for the deposit so the game has got to change so we can get on the ladder. Build your deposit virally with brix, leverage your everyday purchases and tap into your network and to finish, keep sipping your flat white.

See how you can build your deposit with brix at https://brixpoints.com

George Rawlings, Founder, brix