My mom’s smart investment helped me buy my first home in my 20s. I want to give my kids the same financial head start.

• My mom put money into an investment property, and later gave me the original money and the profit.

• At 23, I used it as a deposit for a home. I loved getting a head start in the real estate market.

• I want my kids to get the same financial head start I did.

I bought my first property in 2009, when I was 23. It was a cute two-bedroom townhouse in a complex on the Gold Coast, in Australia, where I’m originally from.

My circumstances were a bit unusual. As a little girl, I’d almost died after being prescribed a medication that caused me to have a seizure and stop breathing. My mom took legal action and won $20,000 in damages, which she put toward buying an investment property (co-owned by my parents and myself).

When I turned 23, she paid me the original $20,000 plus the profit, which worked out to $40,000 in total. I was able to use it as the deposit for a home. I was the first of my friends to enter the real estate market, and it felt incredible to get a foot up on the property ladder so young.

At the time, I was working full-time as a newspaper journalist, but it wasn’t paid very well. I think the most important lesson I learned from buying a property at an early age was how to save and budget, even on a meager income.

I knew that I had to cover the mortgage, water, council rates, electricity, and insurance on the property, so I made sure I set enough money aside each week to do all of those things before I splurged on nice-to-haves. When my friends were buying designer dresses or flashy cars, I told myself that I was working toward building something more important for my future.

Having said that, I still did what I wanted to do, for the most part. When I was 25, I rented out the property and took off overseas for three years. I spent part of that time living in Canada and London, and traveled around North and South America, then Europe and Africa.

Again, my friends were gobsmacked that I could afford to live and travel abroad and still own a property back home in Australia, but I’d learned good savings habits. I worked three hospitality jobs at times in order to reach my earning goals, avoided eating out, and shopped secondhand for clothes. While living in Canada, my partner (who eventually became my husband) and I moved in together, and that helped cut costs.

I’ll admit that it wasn’t all smooth sailing — there were definitely stressful moments. Once, when I was just about to leave my base in Canada and embark on a three-month trip around South America, my real estate agent emailed to say my tenant had trashed the property.