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Not a ton. We hated to even touch our savings/emergency fund to buy our house, but closing costs were way more than we anticipated. We did know we would get an escrow overage check back to us, so that helped a little in replenishing our savings.

I'm pretty sure it was the lowest amount required by our lender. They wanted us to have a cushion. I think it was 3 months or less.

Literally zero, until we got our next paychecks.

@Plumeria: I don't know if all do. I think ours did. This was right around the housing bubble burst. Like the week before or after and everything started getting super strict so maybe it was just a case by case basis.

I don't really remember the specifics, but it was more than 6 months and less than a year so I split the difference and voted 9 months. DH wanted to put more down on the house but I was afraid of not having sufficient cash reserves if we did that.

ETA: I might have misread the question. We had 9-ish months of net income (not counting deductions like taxes and health insurance) left in savings. That equates to somewhat more than a year of actual expenses.

We still had a lot of savings the first time because we only put 10% down so we could quickly furnish the house, plus we didn't touch certain savings just to buy the house. This time we put 20% down and that all came from the proceeds of our other house. In our situation with a corporate relo (both times), so much is covered and incentive money that moving hasn't effected savings. If we had to move on our own I am sure savings would take a big hit, heck just the moving costs this time was the same as our down payment on our first home together.

Well the day we bought the house we had several months savings but then we redid the floors and put up a fence right away, then we had a couple months of savings I'd say. Within 3 months, I needed a new car, we had 2 out of town weddings and an out of town funeral, things were getting interesting.

We just passed our one year anniversary in the house and we've almost reached the goal I set for savings. We haven't tried as hard as we could so I'm overall feeling ok. Owning a home is overwhelming to me but we're pretty level headed and we do enjoy the space we have.

So we bought our first house in Nov 2009. We were given some money from my inlaws after my husbands grandmother passed away, but it was also meant to be used towards our wedding the following year. We had some savings in addition to that. We did FHA so we only had to put 3.5% down and we asked for some assistance with closing. What really helped us was that following winter when we did our taxes and got the $8k credit for first time home buyers. That really boosted our savings. We didnt buy any new furniture until after our wedding and used gift money to buy new couches and a new bed.

We just sold that home last week and we were lucky enough that the proceeds from the sale will cover the cost of down payment,closing on the new house plus add a couple thousand to savings. We got a lower interest rate and will only be paying a couple hundred more a month in payments.

Immediately following buying our home we were probably down to 1 mos savings. We did extensive renovations which drained our savings. Thankfully we got them back double in equity.

Now - 2 years into this house we have built our savings back up to 3 mos of our mandatory expenses. This is literally our "emergency" fund which we do not touch.

We have other savings for trips/househould items/house repairs. Those go up and down with our spending and whatnot.

@Chillybear: This was exactly our situation but we had a traditional mortgage. It was kinda ok to wipe out savings because the $8k credit really boosted savings back up and we had our wedding to help furnish the new house.

We hope to sell soon and use that for the next house but I'm afraid it wont be enough.

We took out a 401k loan to keep our emergency savings at 3 months of expenses. That was not the plan, but we got handed a 30 day eviction notice/invitation to buy our house, so we had to work with what we had on hand.