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for my first house, I worked with a broker my brother knew and they calculated closing costs upfront when figuring out what I could afford vs. what I was approved for.

For our second house, we not only had to figure in our own closing costs, but also those of the person buying our house (because it was very much a "starter" house and first time buyers often expect them to be covered). The house we were buying was a steal for the neighborhood, so we didn't want to risk asking for them to be covered for us.

we are planning on buying a house soon and DH totally didnt think about it, but I reminded him because interned in a real estate office as a student and was surprised by how much people spent on closing

We asked with some assistance with closing costs, but it was minimal. Instead we opted to ask the sellers to pay our HOA fees for the 1st year. They accepted. That has been a much bigger help than the proportionate amount paid in closing costs. For this next year all HOA fees we would have paid are instead going into a house savings account.

Builder paid all closing costs ! But, before we knew that we had budgeted 3% for closing costs.

Our closing costs were covered by the seller.

@Raindrop: bought cash, didn't have closing costs. never thought about it! i wouldn't have been able to afford it if that had just shown up at the end...

Wow, so many people have gotten the seller to pay closing costs! We live in a hot market and that wasn't going to happen. However, we used Redfin and they gave us some money back for using them. We ended up applying those to our closing costs and I believe it covered most or possibly all of it.

We typically request seller to cover closing costs in our initial offer when purchasing a home and we expect to be asked to cover closing costs out of the proceeds when selling a home.

The beauty of a VA loan was that we were not allowed to pay for many of the costs associated with closing. So we paid a 1% "origination fee" (1% of our loan amount) and that was it. We knew about it ahead of time and budgeted for it, but it wasn't really a huge amount of money like it can be for conventional loans, so we were lucky.

in your offer packet, your realtor or broker should include a one-sheet of your estimated closing costs, based on the sales price!!! this will include down payment (less your deposit) as well as title insurance, mortgage origination fees, and reimbursements to the seller (like if they prepaid their taxes for the year).

Somehow on our first house we ended up leaving closing with a $1000 check. I honestly can't remember on the house we bought 3 months ago what happened with closing costs. It was all figured in to the buying price, so I don't know what portion was closing and what was down payment (I mean, they gave me a nicely figured sheet, but I ignored that part.)

For my first house pre marriage, I bought through a program for public teachers, police, and firefighters that gives 3% of the sales price to the buyer for closing costs. So I personally didn't pay closing costs.

For our second place, post marriage--we were buying in a hot market so sellers paying for closing costs is not a thing, and we paid them.

With our first house, we didn't factor it in but obviously were made sure those costs were covered. When we moved to Toronto, the land transfer taxes were significant enough that it did have an impact for us in determining our down payment, which we were trying to make as significant as possible.

@Mrs. Lemon-Lime: honestly I don't know, my house cost what most people's down payment is, so maybe the seller ate that cost and didn't say anything?

i forgot about them when saving and then when we actually went so seriously look, remembered and factored it into our downpayment options. as it stands, we'll end up with more than we realized because we have some repairs to do and negotiated money back from the seller.

We knew about closing costs generally, but were pleasantly surprised to see how low ours were. I have no idea why, since our city has been a sellers' market for years and a buyer's offer would get laughed off the table if they asked for them to be covered (so obviously we didn't)...I guess it must have been something on the bank's end? Who knows, all I cared about was that they were negligible.

I didn't really think about it on our first house and the seller paid them because the market was depressed at the time. For this house, I guess because we rolled our equity, I didn't really think about it as much? I don't know what they even were!

When we were looking into buying a house, I was told we could ask the sellers to pay for part of our closing costs.