AI First Home Buyer Assistant — Get a Personalised Path From Saving to Settlement Without Paying for a Financial Adviser
Built by VortexDaemon ·
About this build
A Claude powered conversational workflow that takes your income, savings, debts and target suburb and generates a complete first home buyer action plan — covering your realistic borrowing capacity, every Australian government grant and scheme you qualify for, a month by month savings and milestone timeline and the exac
What was built
Built this after watching a close friend spend AUD $900 on two financial adviser sessions and still not have a clear answer to the question she actually came in with — am I ready to buy yet and if not exactly what do I need to do to get there. The workflow answers that question in about 8 minutes. Step 1 — Financial situation intake A simple form collects 8 inputs. Annual income before tax. Current savings toward a deposit. Monthly savings rate. State or territory. Target property price range. Whether buying solo or with a partner. Existing debts including HECS, car loans and credit cards. Whether the First Home Super Saver Scheme has been started. Step 2 — Situation analysis via Claude Claude analyses the inputs across 4 dimensions simultaneously. Deposit readiness — how far away is a 5 percent deposit with LMI versus a 20 percent deposit without LMI at the current savings rate, and which path makes more financial sense for this specific situation given current Australian lender conditions. Borrowing capacity estimate — a conservative estimate of what Australian lenders are likely to approve based on income, existing debts and current serviceability calculations. Flagged clearly as a planning estimate not a pre-approval. Government scheme eligibility — every relevant scheme checked against the inputs. First Home Guarantee, First Home Super Saver Scheme, state-specific stamp duty concessions, the Help to Buy shared equity scheme, and relevant state-level grants. For each scheme the output explains what it does, what it is worth in real dollar terms and what the catch or limitation is. Timeline projection — based on the current savings rate a month by month milestone plan from today to a realistic settlement date, with specific milestones for when to talk to a broker, when to get pre-approval, when to start serious property searching and what to expect between exchange and settlement. Step 3 — Action plan generation Claude generates a personalised action plan with three sections. What to do this week — one specific concrete action that will meaningfully move the person forward. Not research more — a specific task with exactly how to do it. For most people this is logging into myGov to check their HECS balance and getting a free credit score check. What lenders will actually look at — the 5 things Australian lenders focus on and what this person specifically can do in the next 3 to 6 months to strengthen their application before approaching a broker. Questions to ask a broker — 3 questions specific to this person’s income, debt and state situation that will reveal whether the broker is giving advice suited to their actual situation rather than generic first home buyer advice. Step 4 — Plan delivery via Gmail The complete plan gets emailed to the user in a clean formatted document they can save and refer back to. The email also includes links to the relevant government scheme pages for verification. Step 5 — Milestone tracking in Airtable An optional Airtable tracker logs the person’s savings balance monthly and sends a reminder when they hit each milestone — 5 percent deposit reached, 10 percent reached, pre-approval recommended timing, auction and private treaty season timing in their target area. Why this matters for Australia specifically: The First Home Guarantee has limited places each financial year and they consistently run out in the first quarter. Most first home buyers find out about this after the fact. This build flags the timing risk and gives people a specific date to have their application ready before the new financial year opens. HECS debt affects borrowing capacity significantly and in a way most first home buyers do not know about until they are already in front of a lender. Identifying this early gives people 12 months to structure their approach differently if needed. The stamp duty concession amounts vary dramatically by state and price bracket and change regularly. Perplexity verifies the current figures at the time of the query rather than relying on potentially outdated training data. What broke during development: Grant eligibility was the hardest thing to keep accurate because the schemes change regularly and the rules have exceptions that are easy to miss. Fixed by adding a Perplexity verification step that pulls current information from the official government scheme pages rather than relying on static knowledge — and by flagging every scheme result with a link to verify directly rather than presenting it as definitive. The borrowing capacity estimates were initially too precise which gave people false confidence. Fixed by always framing the estimate as a planning guide only and building in a visible explanation of how actual lender assessments work and why the real number could be different. Results after 6 weeks: Used by 34 people in testing. 28 of them said the output gave them more clarity than previous conversations with financial advisers or mortgage brokers. The most common feedback was that nobody had ever laid out the government schemes and what they are actually worth in dollar terms in one place before. 6 people discovered they qualified for a scheme they had never heard of. Will share the full n8n workflow, Claude prompt structure and Airtable milestone tracker template in comments for anyone who wants to deploy this.