Buying A Home
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
How long did you save?
[Poll]
Re: How long did you save?
It took us one year to save what ended up being ~10% down plus $10k closing costs. We fell in love with our "dream house" and figured it was worth it to buy then with a great interest rate and not having the full 20% than waiting until we did, taking the gamble on interest rates and missing out on the house.
We still love the house and it will be our "forever home" barring any drastic circumstances. No regrets.
Life and Love at #16 | our married life blog
We bought our first home in 2005 and it was kind of on a whim, to be honest. We went to the open house just because we drove past it, fell completely in love with the house, called a realtor and made an offer that day.
So we pulled the money out of savings and managed 10% down. But we had been contributing to that savings account for 2 years.
We bought our first home in a HCOL area and even with the equity from one property, money from a wedding and a sizeable contribution from my parents, there's no way we would have come up with 20%.
We put 10% down plus paid $25K in closing costs which amounted to about $80K out of pocket. Our mortgage was an 80/10/10 back in 2003.
Luckily it was before the boom and we were able to pay off the smaller mortgage within 5 years in addition to paying double the mortgage payments for the first year. We did a refi 2 years later to a lower rate and although we ended up selling at a loss, we still had enough equity and savings to do the standard 20% on the home we're now building.
My original down payment was gifted to me by my dad. I owned that condo on my own before I even got engaged to my DH.
He also owned his own condo. Most of his downpayment was money he had earned all through high school, college and after. He had money he could have used from his parents (they gifted the money they had saved for college to their kids and paid for college outright) but he didn't.
We lived in my DH's condo after we got engaged. We were there for about 4.5 years and we just bought our house in October of 2010. We saved for all 4.5 years we were in the condo, but didn't use the entire amount for a 20% downpayment. We put about 80k down.
In the beginning, we literally saved my entire salary and lived off my DH's, so we were saving approx. 50k a year. At that rate, we would have had our DP money in less than 2 years.