How much money did you have for a down payment?

How did you save the money?

How much money did you have for a down payment?
Right now we only have the 3% necessary for the loan but we have a few months until we do our final paperwork since we're building.

How did you save the money?
We got the 3% from the sale of our house (so we don't technically have it yet) and we are hoping to save the rest by paying off cc debt with the rest of the profit and staying with my parents until the new house is done.

For our first home purchase (a condo) we had 3% to put down (so just a few thousand dollars) which was fine because we did an FHA loan using just my husband's income to qualify for the loan. (Adding in my salary would have meant we exceeded the salary cap for FHA loans.) That was just money we saved.

We were VERY fortunate and our condo value increased by 50% in less than two years so we got a TON of equity out of it when we sold it this fall. Additionally, we were doing a coporate relocation, so my husband's company covered our closing costs on our condo AND the closing costs on our new house--that saved us thousands and thousands of dollars.

With the equity out of our condo and the reimbursed closing costs, we had the full 20% to put down on our house to avoid PMI--so about $45,000. We actually started off doing an 80-10-10 where we had one mortgage for 80% of the house price and one for 10% and then we put 10% down. Then one month after we bought the house and after all of our bank accounts had been consolidated, we wrote a BIG check and paid off the 10% mortgage--now we just have the 80% mortgage.

Hope that made sense!

We had 12,000 total to put down...That money all came from CDs I inherited upon the death of my great-grandfather....We used 9 of it for the down payment and the rest for closing costs...We got a rural development loan, which has no PMI no matter how much you put down (you can put down 0 and still pay no PMI)

we put 20% down on this house, approx 74k :owow:


we used the profit from dh's condo, plus about $20k or so of our savings.

how did we save the money? we actually never had a joint account till we got married. after the wedding we saved all our wedding $$, and then just started pouring money into the savings. we both work, have decent salaries and we were living well below our means, the mortgage on the condo was cheap and we had no car payments or cc bills. i think we managed to save approx $30k in one year.

by our first anniversary we were in this house :)

For our current house, we put down 5%, which we had saved. During the first year and a half of our marriage, we pretty much banked my paychecks and lived on DH's, so we saved quite a bit. For our next house, we're putting down 20%, all of which will come from an inheritance DH just received. We'll use the equity in this house to pay closing costs on the new house, and that's about it, because we pulled equity out last summer to pay for some of my medical expenses.

Well, we haven't bought yet, but we are planning to start house hunting soon. We will have about $30K of equity in our current house, and (by the time we buy) about $20K in savings (we're living off of one salary and banking the other). We're not planning on spending more than $250K on our next house, so we should have 20% to put down.

For our first home, a condo, we put 10% down ($34K). About a third came from my severance package after I got laid off, but then got another job right away. The other two thirds was from a gain on some stock. My mom gave us the stock as a wedding gift. She paid only $2K for it and it went through the roof (back in 2000).

For our new house, we do have over $40K to use, but we are going to put 0% down and use the money to pay off credit cards and fix up the new house. Of the $40K we have, $11K is all that's left after we sell the condo. The rest is from my contributions to my company's ESPP. I put 15% of my salary in there. And I had been saving for a while.

For our first house we just put 3% down. We made a nice profit off of that house & put 10% done on our this house we just bought. That 10% was nice considering the price of our first house to our second! We did an 80-10-10 loan for this one. We are considering selling one of our rental properties & paying off the second mortgage but as it is we could sell this house today & making a nice profit as it is in a very growing area!

Tina

We're putting 20% down on our new house, so about $52,000. Nearly all of it is equity from our current home!

OK, this is depressing.

Well, house prices here are MUCH different. :lol: We're buying our first house now. We're putting down 5% which is only $4500. :lol: It's a first house, not our dream house, but it's in great shape. :nod: Sadly, we've still gotten most of our money from gifts from my grandma and mom.

How much money did you have for a down payment?
20%. I was very intent on not ever paying PMI.

How did you save the money?
I wound up with a fairly decent-paying job at an early age. I had a premonition that job wouldn't last long, so I worked my a$$ off and saved a lot while I was single, child-free and had the opportunity. I knew someday I'd want a house and kept that goal in mind when things got tough at the office.

For our second house, we used proceeds from the sale of the first.

This is so depressing..but for us we only had to put down 3% (FHA LOAN)..and we didn't save that money on our own at all. IT was our wedding gift from my parents. I couldn't emagine what some of you have been able to save. Heck ..some of you have put down almost all of what our home cost (70K)

Jayne

We only put 10% down on our condo, which was about $20,000 - we did a special loan to avoid PMI (I can't remember what it was called though).

We are putting this place on the market in the next few weeks and are hoping to get enough to put 20% down on our next place. The last unit in our complex sold for $100K more than we paid for our place, so we are hoping ours will sell for that much as well. Sadly that will only be 20% of the value of the house we want. Housing prices here are ridiculous!!!

We are planning on buying this time next year, but not quite sure yet how much we are going to put down. We will probably have about $25-30k available (plus or minus $5k), but do we put that all toward the down payment? Save some out for house repairs? We are looking at buying in an really high priced area and buying a house we will have to fix up. So, we don't know what is the best use of the money... SO CONFUSED!!!

Can I also ask.... where did you all go through to get your mortgages? Banks? Other places??? What is the best???

I'm a house buying IDIOT!!!!

I think we put down about $8,000 (5%). We just saved the money.

Rebecca, we found our mortgage by calling around to a TON of places to get their rates and promotional deals. We looked online (including at realtor.com) as well as in the phonebook and I think ended up calling 30+ places.

Our real estate agent hooked us up with our mortgage bank.

This is our third house. With our first house, we decided on a whim to buy a house. We hadnt saved much money at all, but we were both in grad school. So we both took out the max student loans offered and used mine to pay our tuition and his for a down payment on our first home. It was 5% that we put down.

When we sold that house two years later, we made a $22,000 profit. So we used part of it to pay off a large home equity loan and the other as a downpayment on our new house. Unfortuantely, it was still only 5%.

House #3....we took what we made and used it as the down payment for this house....still only 5%, as we had only owned house #2 for 2 years, as well.

Rebecca--
we shopped a few mortgage brokers (including 2 friends we have in the biz who own their own firms) but ended up using the one that was thru our realtor, as they gave us the best interest rate & lowest costs.

we know several people who didnt put everything they had saved as a down payment. instead, they put some of it down..like 5% and then did an 80/15 loan and then used the rest of the money they saved to do home improvement. Most mortgage brokers can play with all the different situations so you can see what is best for you.

On our first house, we put down 10% (approx $11k) and did an 80/10 mortgage so we could avoid PMI. The second mortgage (the 10%) had a pretty high interest rate, but we refinanced after a year and got rid of that mortgage. As for the 10% that we put down, we just slaved away and saved pretty aggressively.

We got very lucky that we bought when and where we did and made a very nice profit on the sale of our first house (approx $100K!! :eek: ) and used that towards the 20% down payment for this house (plus socked a little away for retirement and whatnot).

Rebecca -

We also shopped around with a few mortgage brokers and ended up using one that a friend recommended. We used her for both house purchases as well as the refi on our first.

Our first house we put down 3% or $3,000.

For our second, we put down 10% or $35,000. We used money we made off the old house and could have put down more but we know we won't be here very long, 4-6 years, so we put down the minimum amount without having PMI and that would keep our payments somewhat low.

We use the mortgage company we used for the 1st house and it happens his uncle works there also.

We put down 10%, $39,500. About half was what we had saved and the other half was a "loan" from DH's parents which we will pay back when we sell or refinance.

We put down 10%, $39,500. About half was what we had saved and the other half was a "loan" from DH's parents which we will pay back when we sell or refinance.
Kristen, I wanted to let you know that I might steal your idea about a "loan" from my parents. I just talked to my dad and he has some money that isn't doing anything so he might help us out :banana: ! I just wanted to thank you for telling me what you did!

Our down payment was mainly NOT out of our pockets. We went FHA too, which meant we only had to put 3% down on our $272K townhome. One of the benefits at my husband's company is what the EAH loan, where they give their employees a predetermined amount for the purchase of thier first home. In our case, the loan was in the amount of $18,500 which we were able to use for our downpayment, closing cost, and we bought down our points, too. The best part of the loan, though, is that it's "forgiveable", so we've only got to pay back the interest on the $18,500 over 5 years, so long as my hubby stays with the company.
We didn't shop around, though, on our mortgage broker, though...we went with the financial services through our realtor and they sucked, sucked, sucked! Hubby works in the industry (hardly, but he's around the rates all the time, so he sees them going up and down) and told our lender to lock us in with a really low rate. The guy waited almost to the end of the month to lock us in, to a higher rate.

We put 20% down (approx $20k) and it was money DH had in his college savings account. He didn't want to go to grad school so he used it for our house.

We put down 20%-- using monies from sales of stock investments

We're working on saving for a house. We put money from our savings accounts into mutual funds and growth and income accounts. The G&I accounts give us a better interest rate than saving accounts. We hope to have around 20% when we are done.

DH was able to save a ton before we were married. He would take his paycheck, send a couple hundred to his mother to buy savings bonds with, and just put the rest in his savings account. Since he is in the Army, he hasn't had to pay rent out his own pocket, and he could eat in the mess hall instead of needing to buy food.

Since we live off of a military base, Reed gets a housing allowance. His allowance is a lot more than what we pay for our apartment so we sock away the extra.

90,000 (choke!)

90,000 (choke!)
gotta love massachusetts :rolleyes:

We are going to be putting 20% down on our new house in Atlanta. We had an investment property that we sold in February and we'll be making a lot off the sale of our townhouse here in Northern Virginia. After we put the 20% down we'll still have A LOT of money leftover that we'll reinvest once we're settled and have jobs in Atlanta. We've been very fortunate with real estate in this area.