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I don't know anyone that lives in the Boston area (where I live) that has come up with it on their own. Everyone has either borrowed money, been gifted money or has inherited the property from family. Or they rent, like I do.

That's sad, when you think that we're hardworking folks in our mid-thirties.

Anyone that I know that has come up with the payment themselves has moved either out of state or to a more affordable town.

We put some down, but not 20%. Because of that, we pay private mortgage insurance until we have at least 20% equity in the house. Honestly, I think that a lot of people pay PMI for a period of time since they cannot come up with the $$ for a downpayment.

@JenGirl: Fingers crossed - the one saving grace is that our rent is really affordable at the moment and we continue to save. Slowly but surely!

Sad part though - we owned and sold a home in NY (upstate, second home) and kept our investment and still come up short with buying a property in this area! Lol

It's very hard. Most everyone I know has been gifted or loaned the money from their parents. I did not put a down payment on my first house and had PMI on it. We got a loan for our second house (bought before selling mine) and paid it back after we saved it up. We bought below our means.

@math.nerd: I totally feel the same way as you. I was able to buy because it was at the bottom of the market and I only put pretty much the minimum down through an FHA loan. I have to PMI but was able to get it off because the home value rose fairly quickly. I had saved work bonuses for two years and then just other money I was able to save. Now, several years later, I have a ton of equity that I will use to move up to a bigger house. However, I don't think I will be able to quite put 20% down so I will still be stuck paying some amount of PMI which will suck, but I'm not willing to go to a smaller house just to avoid PMI.

ETA: after I see what @catlady: wrote, then I can add that I, also, did not save for retirement while I was saving up my down payment. I only paid minimums on my student loans and had to call two of my student loan companies and ask them to rearrange my payment structure. It lowered my monthly payment, but totally f*cked up the loan. I don't care because I needed to do it to get approved for the mortgage. And, in full disclosure, I was only a couple of years out of college and living at my parents house and not paying rent so that made saving up a lot easier, even though I found it to be tough at the time.

I'll be honest DH had money for a lawsuit that happened when he was young!

I live in Boston and am buying a house in the burbs. I was able to do it by putting only 5% down. I mean I guess I could do 20% over a longer period of time. There are a lot of low down payment options. We could do even as low as 3%.

Also, we:
- saved our income tax return
- don't contribute to retirement at the moment
- pay lowest amount on loans
- took out part of my retirement.
- live in a cheaper rental, have one car, got rid of cable.
- I also got a new job that had a huge pay increase (50%).

We were able to save 5% in 4 months by doing that.

I feel you! I'm in the CA Bay Area (Silicon Valley) and unless ur making big bucks with high tech it is very difficult to buy especially now. My husband barely makes 6 figures and while it's enough for me to be a SAHM it's barely enough. No vacations big spendings, we cheaply eat out mate once or twice a month.. No goodies or toys for the kids, we need to be frugal to make it work!

But I guess I do have to mention we faithfully tithe to our church and give to some organizations and that's over 10% gross of his income.. And we have been always doing that. So maybe for others making the same amount and living frugally it would be feasible to come up with a down payment..

But everyone I know who bought
-got help from parents
-lived with parents for years without paying rent so we're able to save a lot
-bought with putting VERY LITTLE down (foreclosure or some other unique situation.)
-moved out of the bay!!

Even though I still have no idea how we can buy I am so content renting til the kids are older and if we really can't at that point I guess husband will have to look for a job in a different cheaper area.. Or my father in law (who likes us living close to them) will offer help hahah

a note on PMI and not putting 20% down on a conventional mortgage. If you can afford to even put 5% down and your credit is good there are programs out there that allow you to take a slightly higher interest rate and drop the PMI off your monthly payment saving a couple hundred dollars a month. its cost is now built in for the life of your loan or until you have over 20% equity and choose to refinance. but thats another way to make it more affordable.

We live in Boston so its $$$. We were able to buy our "starter" condo because I received a small inheritance from my grandmother and we did not put down a full 20%. We had PMI for a little while but we bought at the pit of the market and were able to refinance quickly and get rid of the PMI once we had the equity. From that sale, we were able to roll the equity and more savings into our new house. I don't know what we would have done without my "small" inheritance to give us a boost. I would guess that we would have still been renting and trying to scrape together the 10-15% we put down.

We bought our first house just after we got married and about 3 years before having LO. We only put down 5%, but only took a 15 year loan. So by the time we sell in the next year or so we will have a good amount of equity in this house which will pay for the down payment on our next house.

@math.nerd: I know it feels hard, but his recommendation is to literally stop every single non-essential, and just do everything you can to save up the $1000. Then, leave it alone (unless you have a bonafide emergency) and start tackling debt.

I feel like his plan worked for us because it allowed us to focus on one thing at a time. It gets hard when you are trying to save for things, pay bills, pay medical costs, and live your life. Focusing on one goal at a time really helped us find success, even if it feels kind of "odd" in the middle of it because you have all these things you want to focus on at once, and you opt not to.

We started thinking about buying a house at a time when our incomes were going up. We were used to living on pretty low salaries (we both were grad students living off stipends) and when we got real jobs we didn't allow ourselves to up-scale our life-styles at all and just basically saved our raises. We were lucky that due to our income increasing quite a bit in a short time, we were able to save pretty quickly (we're in OC, so a similar housing market). That said, we only put 10% down. If we would have waited we could have saved 20% but it wasn't worth it to us. We'll refinance when we're ready.

@math.nerd: I'm not sure exactly what I would do in your situation. I'm currently taking Dave Ramsey and love everything he has to say. But its tough to follow. I have LARGE student loan debts so it would take me quite a while to pay them off, and i wasn't comfortable putting EVERYTHING on hold to do so. I have been throwing a lot at them, but I really wanted to buy a property rather than rent. Once you are in the real estate game, its great. its just hard to get in. So in addition to work bonuses, I also saved my tax returns. So those were two chunks of money that i received each year that enabled me to get a good amount. But again, I only put something like 3.5% down so I didn't need to save too much. But its got me in a great spot now with 6-figure equity in my house. My mortgage has always been cheaper than anything we could rent in a decent area. But my house is a total starter home. It would be hard to put two kids in it, but I would do it rather than rent if I had to. I'm in Southern California, too!

My husband lived very frugally all through his 20's before having kids. He had a good job but lived out in the suburbs ina small apartment and drove older cars he bought cash.

When we moved to a more expensive area, he sold some stocks and took some money out of of his savings to pay pur 20% down payment and closing costs. He also paid for my e ring and 65% of our weddings that same year. Thank goodness he'd been saving up.

I sort of just ride his coattails, haha.

The first house we bought together the down payment came from me. I lived at home for several years after college and saved alot. Even still we only put 10% down so we had cash to furnish & update the new house. By putting less than 20% down we had to carry PMI. We always paid a little more than our mortgage required to improve our equity situation faster. Once we thought we were in a 20% equity position we had to pay for an appraisal, but we no longer had to carry PMI.

@math.nerd: yep. Hospitalized at 27, born at 30, 4 weeks NICU, 4 weeks heart monitor, cross country move delayed, lost 3 unexpected months of income, didn't go back to work for a year...

@math.nerd: I'm in Canada so I can't imagine the implications of a preemie birth on your finances but I am so sorry, it just doesn't seem fair. We are currently saving up for a down payment after depleting a huge amount of what we had so that we could do IVF after 3 years of trying to have our daughter.

We have become very disciplined about our finances, we use YNAB. My DH was NOT interested at all in budgeting when we first started so I did all of the leg work to set it up and track everything and just asked that he use his debit card 100% of the time so that he didn't have to worry about saving recipts. Once I was able to show him a couple of months worth of expenses and areas where we were burning through money he got on board with the program.

It is hard to have a reluctant spouse. Any chance either of you could increase your income?

If it makes you feel better, we were gifted 125k from two people and were able to use that. If we hadn't been gifted that money unexpectedly, we would no doubt be still renting.