Before the bank meltdown you could use your own appraiser is you knew one. I had my buddy appraise it for over 20% for what I was buying it for. I only had to have him bump it like an extra 5%. I was already actually 15% on the good side.

Dammit, that would have bought my first house, new truck and Ranger bass boat back in 1985.

Katelyn is awesome and I feel bad for her troubles. That's downright funny though.

Not a typo. I didn't buy my first home until I was 40.

VA loan...

my first mobile home? $500 down, $500/month and they threw in a new set of tires.
That was my starter trailer, just a single-wide.

The big mistake a lot of folks make is they buy way too much first house. Twice your annual income is a good rule of thumb for the max price of the homes you should be looking at. If your family makes 120K a year and your trying to buy a 500K house... Yeah it's going to take a long time so scrape up $100K for a 20% down payment.

Either very few people follow that rule or there are a lot more people making $300K+ per year than I would have thought.

$10k down payment. We had $20k saved up but had to cover closing costs. Was able to save up because our income was a lot higher than our costs.

We paid $21,000 for a newly built home back in 1970. I used my military benefits to get a zero down VA loan. House payments (including interest, taxes and insurance) were $285/month and I thought we had lost our minds buying such an expensive home.

We sold that a few years later at a nice profit because I got a promotion and we had to move to East Texas. We rented there for a few years and saved for the next one, in Rockwall (when I got promoted and transferred back to the MetroMess). It was about $40K and we put $8K down.

Yeah that's not a mistake we're gonna make. We both want to live out in the country on an acre or more so we'll probably get a manufactured home. I've never thought about it in terms of "twice the annual income", but I guess we're looking to spend about 175-185% of our combined annual income.

Did you live in your parent's basement?

No. I rented, lived within my means and saved my arse off. I don't like being in debt, although I was big time after I bought the house. Still in the same home but it's paid for now and worth a lot more than I paid for it.

we bought our first house (still in it) a year after we graduated from college so we didn't know what savings were. We got an fha loan and the sellers put down the 3% for us.

I got married in 1994. I took my 1992 year end bonus and bought AT&T stock. When I got married in 94 it had doubled in price.