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0 pointsmauvehaus2y ago0 comments

Was your <$30K down a <20% down payment and are you paying PMI as a result? I totally understand that %20 down is a big pile of money to conjure up, but PMI wouldn't have been cheap for us had we been unable to conjure it.

Our cost to close was under $100k with a 20% down payment, but still substantial. And yes, we were first time homebuyers. Obviously we did not buy anything approaching 2M.

With closing costs of $10k-15k, 100k doesn't even break a half million at 20% down. That's (sadly) not even table stakes in e.g. most parts of Boston.

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Spivak2y ago

We were ready to drop 20% on the house because like you I was also scared of PMI but when we ran the numbers with the bank the cost was small enough that it didn't make one iota of difference in the long run so we paid 5% down and have a very flush emergency fund.

Someone with good credit and currently renting would be nuts to "wait and save" for even 1 year because the total cost of PMI was like 6mo of our rent and accounting for paying it off over time with inflation it's probably even less than that in real dollars.

Maybe we got lucky with PMI but googling a bit it doesn't seem that out of line with the calculators.

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0 pointsmauvehaus2y ago0 comments

Our cost to close was under $100k with a 20% down payment, but still substantial. And yes, we were first time homebuyers. Obviously we did not buy anything approaching 2M.

With closing costs of $10k-15k, 100k doesn't even break a half million at 20% down. That's (sadly) not even table stakes in e.g. most parts of Boston.

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Spivak2y ago

Maybe we got lucky with PMI but googling a bit it doesn't seem that out of line with the calculators.

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