Australians who get loans from their parents to buy their first property are twice as likely to later encounter financial stress, ask for help from friends and struggle to pay their power bills.

In research released on Monday, the Reserve Bank's economic research department used figures from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) survey of 17,000 Australians to find that 30 per cent of people who needed help from their parents to pay for a deposit found themselves in financial stress.

Of those, 20 per cent would later ask for more help from family and friends, twice the rate of those who funded their deposit independently.

More than 15 per cent who received help from their parents later struggled to cover power bills, compared to 10 per cent of those who paid their deposit independently.