Hellobee Boards

We had zero. My mom actually helped us to make the down payment.

I'm having a hard time remembering, but I think we had about 25% of our down payment left in savings. But when moving from a tiny one bedroom to a moderately sized house, quite a bit of the leftovers was used quickly to set up the home.

We had enough to fix up quite a few things and we've always made sure to have enough in thr savings for a couple extra mortgage payments.

Dh had downpayment saved all on his own... We had our savings to fall back on.

We don't want to drain our savings putting own a payment...since we could always refinance later if needed. Our main deal is making sure we would have 3-6 months emergency living expenses still left over.

We're probably going to purchase a fixer-upper. So after we pay the down payment, we want to have enough left over to actually do the fixing up!

We used most of ours for a 20% down payment. Would have liked to have some left, but putting 20 down eliminated the PMI which saves nearly a 100 a month.

We haven't bought our home yet, but the plan is to have 9 months of living expenses plus $10k for furniture and new appliances. We don't have a ton that we have to buy, most of my stuff is in storage.

We got an FHA mortgage which means we put down 3.5%. Luckily our closing costs were completely covered by the seller, so I believe we had a bit over one mortgage payment left in our main savings account (we have retirement accounts & a Health Savings Account as well). We are currently working on having 3 months of mortgage payments in one of our savings accounts, and working on a year's worth of daycare in the other one Oh, and it's only been 6 months since we bought our house, so we don't have quite as much saved as I'd like so far.

We had about 20% of our savings left, after putting 10% down. We stretched to buy our house and it needs a lot of cosmetic work (every single room has wallpaper) so we feel pretty broke, knowing most of the money we have left will still be going into the house via Home Depot.

We got an FHA loan so we only put down 3.5% and then our closing costs were mostly paid by the seller. We ended up with $5,000 left in savings which was a comfortable, although not ideal, cushion for us.

We were lucky and able to take out a 401K loan for our down payment. We paid that off last year with our tax refund. Whew!

We made sure that we had 3 months of living expenses (including mortgage payment) left in our savings after the down payment.

Our downpayment was $120K so not much left after that! Over time we were able to rebuild our savings without sacrificing too much.

We put down 20%, and still had 15K in savings left, which is about what we were comfortable with.

@Mrs. Jacks: My husband was able to borrow up to 50% of the amount in his 401K account. We were charged a small fee and paid interest but the interest just goes back into the account so essentially we were just paying ourselves the interest. It was a fantastic option for us because we knew it was the better decision to buy rather than rent but we felt very strongly about having a down payment.

@MrsJacks, there's a small (?) risk of a 401k loan to put towards your house, and that is if you leave your job (e.g. fired or quit), you immediately have to pay back the entirety of the loan otherwise it will be considered an early withdrawal and you'll be penalized.

Also, I would not count on being able to refinance down the road. Interest rates are at historic lows... there really isn't anywhere else to go but up. With my refi, my lender required at least 20% equity in the home for the best rates, so if your home loses any value between purchase & refi, you'll have to borrow less than your mortgage (e.g. come up with cash to pay the difference) or not be able to refi at all and be stuck paying PMI, etc.

We had absolutely no savings after we put down 20% on our home. We didn't even have money to buy new furniture right away. While it was pretty scary to see our savings go from a substantial sum to nothing, we really wanted to stick to a conforming loan with no PMI so it was worth it to us.

I think we'll probably have about 50% of our down payment left as savings after putting down 20% on the house. We'll probably burn through some of that with work on the house right away. We also have some stocks that I'm not counting as part of our house savings. If we do it right, we won't have to go near those.

@Mrs. Jacks: Thanks for the update! I was wondering what you decided. Very cool.

Nvmnd. Old thread.