Boilermaker Rick wrote:
Bagels wrote:
I'm aware, i paid it myself for i think 2 years or so. We put 5% down if i recall. After 2 years there was at least a decent amount of principal paid down so i had an appraisal done and between the two was able to get rid of it.
We did it similarly though our big issue was that we were required to have a certain amount of money in the bank after we paid the down payment so getting to 20% was difficult. We saved enough over the first two years to then pay down the rest to get rid of it.
Rent in NY was really high though so even with PMI we were paying roughly the same so it wasn't really much of a choice.
Yea, honestly I think one of the best decisions we made (getting married certainly wasn't one) was not getting the max we were approved for. The house we ended up getting was probably 50K less than what we could have purchased. But with the PMI and like you mention, various repair (this wasn't a fixer upper but of course any place has things you need to do immediately) I couldn't have imagined paying too much more on the mortgage. I think that's another issue aside from putting no money down, just because you're approved for a 300K mortgage doesn't mean you necessarily should buy the most expensive house you can afford
On top of that, if you are looking at the top of your budget, you'll get a lot of rejected offers. If you're approved for $200k and make an offer on a $200k house, you'll lose in any case where there are multiple offers on the table. That's becoming more common in the current market as there is a housing inventory shortage.