One really good tip is to live now as if you are already paying your mortgage and put the extra money you would be paying into your savings - that way you know for sure that you can afford the mortgage and while you are doing it you are saving for your deposit. So you need to be banking $342 a f/n for a year and you will add $8892 to your deposit plus any additional money you can spare.

I also agree that you need to do a very detailed budget covering all incoming and outgoing money - you will need to add things like rates, repairs etc to your expenses when you get a place so it would be good to save for these too.