When million-dollar-plus homes are purchased, do people put more than 20% down?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have about $900,000 in equity in our current home. If we were to trade up, we would put all that down.

I have $1,300,000 equity in my current house (the lot really) but no cash. If I want to build an $800,000 house on my lot, will I need cash?

[Anonymous]

We bought 1.1 and put $600k down

[Anonymous]

$4.3MM house. We put $3MM down

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:$4.3MM house. We put $3MM down

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not always. We were planning to put 10% down but got a loan that allowed us to put 5% down. My husband was nervous that the economy was going to be such that we would not be getting raises in the near future so we decided to keep the money in cash. Later, as our house value appreciated, and we felt a bit more comfortable we were able to refinance both mortgages into a single 20 yr fixed and put in more of our cash. Of course this was only done b/c we had sufficient cash.

I don't understand your logic. Seems like you would want to put more down to keep the mortgage payments low. We wanted to put more down so that if we went down to one salary, we could still afford the mortgage. We were able to do about 50% down.

We didn't have enough for 20% at the time, and we had not yet had kids so not clear how much we would need to dip into our savings. Given that we have relatively stable jobs (mine's in fed govt and DH's is not federal but works with feds) we didn't feel as much risk about losing our jobs. We just didn't know whether we'd have any significant way of getting our hands on cash should our salaries stay flat and we put a huge chunk of our cash into the house. We never had huge bonuses or really high salaries and it took DH quite a bit of time saving up more than $100K of his own money since he as a young man before we amassed enough together as a married couple to take the plunge. Unfortunately we missed the market in Arlington so we bought our house that we are staying in to raise our kids as opposed to our first starter house (didn't think we'd see much appreciation and would lose out w/ transaction costs.).

Was your 50% down purely from savings? Or did you use some of your equity from a previous home sale? We couldn't have afforded 550K (50% down) at the time we bought our house. But if we had waited about 2 yrs we would have saved more than $300K cash except the house we wanted would probably not have been available.

[Anonymous]

We put 800 done on a 1.3 mil dollar home.

[Anonymous]

We bought a $1.05 million home and took out a $625k mortgage. Got in when interest rates were crazy low.

[Anonymous]

This is basically what we did too. Could have paid cash, but the returns to housing are generally garbage, so we wanted to keep a significant chunk of money elsewhere. Gotta diversify!

Anonymous wrote:We bought a $1.05 million home and took out a $625k mortgage. Got in when interest rates were crazy low.

[Anonymous]

We bought a $900k house with about $150k down. We have a $750k mortgage at 3.5% fixed which is how we're making it work. We expect we'll live in this house for a few years and then, hopefully, generate enough equity (through paydown and market) to have a bigger down payment on the next house (thinking around $1.2M). Slow and steady is how we look at it.

[Anonymous]

"Slow and steady" is not betting on riding price appreciation for a few years to trade up to a home that costs 33 percent more. High-value homes (even in DC) tend to appreciate very slowly relative to cheaper homes. Unless you got one helluva deal when you bought the 900k house, chances of you generating a large return on equity in the short run (especially when you tack on transaction costs) are low.

Anonymous wrote:We bought a $900k house with about $150k down. We have a $750k mortgage at 3.5% fixed which is how we're making it work. We expect we'll live in this house for a few years and then, hopefully, generate enough equity (through paydown and market) to have a bigger down payment on the next house (thinking around $1.2M). Slow and steady is how we look at it.

[Anonymous]

We put 1/2 down on $1.4m house.

[Anonymous]

$1.2 mil home. Put 10% down.

[Anonymous]

$900k home, $600k down.

[Anonymous]

We are extremely debt adverse. We are buying a $835K home with $710 down. We plan to payoff the mortgage in less than 10 years. We prefer no mortgage, but we have to fund college 529 for next 10 years and we max comp our retirement accounts.

[Anonymous]

We did 450k down on a (then) 800k house. We could have afforded a higher priced home with a larger loan but decided we would rather have a small monthly payment.