Post by littlemisssunshine on Jan 9, 2013 10:52:21 GMT -5
We saved for two years until we had a 20% down payment for an awesome 'forever' home. Housing costs here are very low, but it would have still taken us 8-10 years to save up cash for the type of home we wanted. We have a 2.875% mortgage at 15 years. At this point we have 30% equity and no real desire to pay it off early. With an interest rate that is below average inflation, why would I throw all my money into a home? I'd rather invest my money else where.
Post by sillygoosegirl on Jan 9, 2013 10:53:52 GMT -5
We really wanted to pay cash. I hated taking on debt, even though it's our forever house and at a very low interest rate, and it's really hard to say anything rational against it, except that DH and I might not always be high income earners. We could have paid cash if we had cashed out our retirement accounts, but we resisted the temptation to do that. We ended up putting 25% down and held another 15% of the home's value in reserve for renovations.
We did a 30 year mortgage: 80/10/10 and paid off the second loan (higher interest rate) within 3 years. We have refinanced several times and now have a 15 year mortgage at 3.25%. Current equity is about 30% of the house value. We plan to use our equity for 20% down on our next house.
Post by Rachael070707 on Jan 9, 2013 11:07:21 GMT -5
FHA with 3.5% down. We could have put 20% down but we ended up buying a foreclosure for a steal. The only downside is we had to renovate every single room. 17 days after we closed I was laid off and that lasted a sliver under 1 year. It was good we kept the cash reserve to work on the house and gave us piece of mind having a bigger cushion if we had needed it for an emergency (above our normal savings).
We have a few more things to check off the renovation list in the next couple of months but we plan on doing a refi asap to get a lower rate (we got the lowest we could at the time but that was still 5%) and our PMI will drop off at that point too.
Post by runblondie26 on Jan 9, 2013 11:14:29 GMT -5
20% down, coventional loan
We had some money from our wedding, some gift money from both our parents, and were DINKS paying $350 in rent in the year leading up to us buying. We were able to sock away a lot of savings in that time.
I'm going to guess a lot of the "we bought a house in cash" people can buy a house for well under $200K.
My friend's first house cost $32,000. She didn't get a mortgage, she got a line of credit. It was in a rural town and small but totally liveable. It would cost around $150K in the city.
I have had clients who paid cash for homes over 200k. Against advice from me of course. Just had one last week. Interest rates are so low!! I die.
Next house-- We planned on 20%. We have 65K saved, which is a little bit more than 10% for the type of house we'd buy in NJ. We keep debating if we want to rent our house out and just put down the 10% and move---- or stay and wait until we have 20%.
Yeah, in the DC area, it would take me maybe 20-30 years to save enough to buy a house outright.
We've been saving for 3-4 years to put 10% down. Of course, having DS didn't really help us save that money with daycare costs. But we didn't want to wait to live our lives until we bought a house. Also, we really like our neighborhood so we were content to stay and just rent.
Post by countthestars on Jan 9, 2013 11:22:13 GMT -5
We had to put down 20% of the amount we asked for for our construction loan. If we end up not borrowing the full amount at the end of the construction process we will have put down a little more than 20%.
House #1 - 1% down (seller paid 4% down for us + closing costs), first home program with no PMI House #2 - exactly enough down to avoid a jumbo, bought out PMI
We didn't put anything down. we bought what we could at the time and now 7 years later still living in the house. It not our forever home and we would of never been able to come up with 300k+ in cash at 22 years old, DH and I had our jobs for less then year right after college, not like we rolling in the dough. I don't know anyone that paid for their house in cash, I doubt that will ever happen for us. For us anyway, having just a mortgage and SL's debt is fine.
We used to look at our home as an investment and now with the housing market not so much, I doubt we will recoup the costs at this point, buy what you can afford with your income and work from there..that is what we did.
FHA Mortgage and 7% down. 4 years later, we have refinanced and gotten rid of PMI.....and we have used our savings for home improvements and emergency funds as opposed to sinking it into the house. If we had waited to pay cash for a house, we would have been priced out of the market.
If I'm lucky we'll have 10% by the time we're ready to buy our first home in our mid-30's. And by most standards we're fairly smart with money. But we live in a HCOL area and went to grad school and have SLs and work at non profits.
House #1: cash ($40K condo - people drive cars more expensive than my condo)
House #2: Conventional mortgage, 20% down
House #3: Conventional mortgage, 20% down
We're renting now, trying to save for a house in DC. My parents may help us with the DP, but we plan 20% down here as well. We have about 15% DP saved right now.
We're in LCOL, and we saved to have 20% down plus closing costs, and financed the rest with a 30 year mortgage. We've since refinanced and now have a 12 year mortgage.
We put down 20% cash (about half was loaned to us by my dad and the other half we saved for the 6 months before and 6 months while we were building our house). We had a 30 year mortgage at 5% in 2009. We refinanced a couple months ago to a 15 year loan at 3%. Out house is worth about $215,000. I would say we live in MCOL.
We put about 20% down on the first house, and 20% down on our rental unit. We are in a MCOL so it wasn't too hard to do.
I'm one of the only realtors I know who thinks that banks should STOP letting people put less than 5-10% down on a home - they need some "skin in the game" to prevent people from walking away. That being said, there are some markets where to save 10% down would be almost impossible.
We bought our first house in 2004 with 10% down. We sold it in early 2008 and made over $100K in profit. We put the profit from our first house plus some additional money we had saved in the intervening years down on our current house, which allowed us to put about 40% down on a significantly more expensive and larger home.
Basically we just got really lucky in terms of timing. When we sell our current house, we will likely sell at a bit of a loss.