[sweetfeet]

and closing costs. We could afford a house if we financed it at 100% and somehow didn't have to pay a lot of earnest money, closing costs and other fees. We have some savings and are looking at cheap houses but geesh I can't ever see having 20% or close to it unless a rich relative* dies. So how is it done? We want a house now and have good credit but don't see how to get one without seriously creative financing which we won't do (balloon payment, adj rate etc).

*There aren't any rich relatives on either side.

 

[SAHMinHawaii]

We got our money from a previous real estate investment property that we sold. My dh is in the army and doesn't make much money but we put $54 K down on the house and paid off both of our cars.

 

[becoming]

I would love to know the answer to this, too. We too can afford the payment on the kind of house we want, but we would have to spend 5 years saving money to be able to pay 20% plus closing costs upfront. I hope someone knows a loophole!

:

 

[onlyzombiecat]

We got help through a first time home buyer program.

http://banking.about.com/od/mortgage...ttimebuyer.htm
http://www.money-zine.com/Financial-...uyer-Programs/

 

[camprunner]

Don't forget to add in taxes and homeowners insurance into those payments. We were putting a good chunk of change away every month. Almost one of our paychecks (and we don't make much, we're just cheap). We also had some help from the inlaws. I personally would live way way below your means for a year and see what you can afford after that. You might be surprised.

 

[shelbean91]

We bought our house with an FHA loan, which required only 3% down. We lived w/MIL while it was being built and used what we had been paying for rent (took 6 mos for our house to be built) for our down/closing costs, which totaled about $5k

 

[Juvysen]

There *are* loans out there that require 0% down... special ones for first time homebuyers, not those adjustable rate ones which I DO NOT recommend.

We got a loan that required only 5% down. That helped us a lot. Most of it was from tax return money from a few years straight. It was probably about another 5% for the closing costs and taxes and fees, for us.

I would recommend the "everything Homebuying book" (one of those "for dummies" looking books) for a lot of information on different kinds of mortgages and such, there really are a lot of options out there. You just need to know where to look. It really helped me to get an idea what we needed to do and where to go.

 

[touka]

Ugh, I wonder about this too. My BIL just bought a house in Staten Island and paid 22k in closing costs on top of the massive downpayment.

!!!

We're YEARS away from even being able to consider purchasing a home and his situation makes me even more nervous.

 

[mamaveggie]

We did a little creative financing. We have 4% saved up and took out a personal loan for the remaining percent, which was paid off in a few months. It took us 3 years to save that much, so I have no idea what it would have taken to get 20% down.

 

[mightymoo]

Dh owned a condo before we got married, he had a decent amount of money saved as well. We lived in that condo until after DD was born, on two incomes - we saved a lot of my income, and I made as much as DH almost. Additional money came from stock option sales, bonuses, etc.

At this point, on one income if we had to pay what we pay in mortgage in rent, I couldn't imagine being able to save up a 20% down payment in a reasonable amount of time, it would have to rely almost entirely on bonuses or on not contributing to retirement (which I consider #1 priority, so I wouldn't do that).

 

[scrapadoozer]

We qualified for a 0% down rural development loan. The closing costs weren't bad and the sellers helped pay for them as part of the agreement. We bought a house for about 20% less than the max of what we qualified for so the payments have never been too difficult to make.

 

[Poddi]

Our first home was very cheap and we used our wedding gifts for the 10% down payment. We didn't have much stuff inside our home and didn't have a fancy honeymoon, but thought it was a good choice. Our second home was a lot easier since we saved more and got money from the sale of the first one.

 

[sweetfeet]

Quote:

At this point, on one income if we had to pay what we pay in mortgage in rent, I couldn't imagine being able to save up a 20% down payment in a reasonable amount of time, it would have to rely almost entirely on bonuses or on not contributing to retirement (which I consider #1 priority, so I wouldn't do that).

My dad took out a loan against his 401k to put a down payment on a house at 40. He just now paid it back at 50 and they foreclosed on that house 5 yrs ago. No way am I touching retirement money for a house. We're forced to contribute to retirement because he's a gov't employee.

Le sigh. The house I love is only $74k. Not like I want a mcmansion.

 

[Sharlla]

DH's parents owed us 5k, when they paid us back that is how we bought our hoouse. After closing it was $4700.00 total.

 

[Neth Naneth]

:

 

[boogiemonster]

Maybe our situation was unconventional but it worked for us and I know others who have taken advantage of similar opportunities...

We were the resident managers of our apartment building for about a year and a half. We pretty much did everything as the owner lived out of town including cleaning, collecting rent, managing incoming and outgoing tenants, repairs, etc. I'm not going to kid you...sometimes it really sucked. But I was self-employed at the time and could do the apartment work on my own schedule (for the most part) and it was a pretty good WAH opportunity.

We didn't get paid, but we also didn't pay any rent. The rent for our suite would have been $725 a month, and we packed away that money every month into our savings account.

It paid for our (modest but lovely) wedding and honeymoon, plus the downpayment for our house. The damage deposit money we used to install new flooring in our place.

HTH! Good luck!

 

[mhurst]

Does anyone seriously put 20% down?

We put 5% down and got 2 loans (one for 90% and one for 5%) to avoid PMI.

I'm not being sarcastic, does anyone these days really put 20% down? No one I know.

 

[sweetfeet]

Ok, well 5% plus closing costs would take us awhile to save, like years. My dh's income will go up quite a bit when he gets his masters in 3 years so I don't worry about affording the home, we can do that. It's all the moolah up front.

 

[phathui5]

We put 5% down and that was only because dh's mom told him that she would rather give him his inheritance and see us use it than have him get it when she dies.

 

[abbylotus]

: You know what, I have NO IDEA how we bought our house. We saved up about 5K while living with the In-laws and bought our house (a duplex) and rented it all out for about a year before we could even begin to afford to be able to live in it ourselves (we still rent out the other half). That's about five years ago. I do know we couldn't own a non-duplex. Our mortgage is only a little over $200/mo after you deduct the rental.