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You’re really interested in buying a house, but, oh shoot, you don’t have 20%. As you hopefully know, you do NOT need to put 20% down on a house. Many loans can go as low as 3 or 3.5% down (and VA loans can sometimes be 0%!) What happens instead, though, is you’ll incur a PMI (private mortgage insurance) payment if you don’t put 20% down. How could you do this to me, PMI? But wait! There’s a way you could mitigate the PMI payments AND avoid putting 20% down. If you’re getting

I recently worked with a client who had never heard of PMI. That’s not crazy – I had never heard of it either until I was buying my own home. It’s sort of skirted over in a lot of the homebuying process, even when talking to banks. So what is this dastardly acronym? PMI stands for Private Mortgage Insurance. What that amounts to is that if you are not able to put 20% down on your purchase, the bank adds an additional level of insurance to protect their asset. This is generall