Getting together enough money to buy a house can take years to do.
Get a second job, eat out less, downgrade your technology – these are just some of the things you can do to save.
Or you can do what this woman did and come up with an ingenious plan to get someone else to pay for it.
The woman, known only as Xiaoli, from Shenzhen in China, managed to raise around £14,000 by convincing her boyfriends, all 20 of them, to each buy her an iPhone 7.
She then sold the phones via the website Hui Shou Nao and made 115,010 Chinese yuan (£13,991), which she then used to buy a house in the countryside.
The woman is believed to be from Shenzhen in southern China
Sharing Xiaoli’s story on a blogging forum, a user called Proud Qiaoba, said: ‘Everyone in the office is talking about this now.
‘Who knows what her boyfriends think now this news has become public.’
According to Proud Qiaoba, who appears to work with Xiaoli, the woman is not from a wealthy family and her ‘mum is a housewife and her dad is a migrant worker, and she is the oldest daughter.’
‘Her parents are getting old and she might be under a lot pressure hoping to buy them a house… But it’s still unbelievable that she could use this method!’
The woman allegedly sold the 20 iPhone 7s to the website for around £700 each, which Hui Shou Bao confirmed to the BBC.
The story was widely shared on the Chinese social network Weibo, where more than 13 million comments were posted using the hashtag ’20 mobiles for a house’.
Some people criticised her and called her ‘shameless’ but most praised her for her ingenuity.
One woman wrote: ‘I can’t even find one boyfriend. She can actually find 20 boyfriends at the same time and even get them to buy her an iPhone 7. Just want to ask her to teach me such skills.’
