If you’re sick and tired of bad landlords and having to move your stuff every few months, and you long to buy your first home, you’re going to need a decent down payment. In the US, at least, the average down payment is equal to around six percent of a home’s value. That may seem like an impossible sum of money for you to save any time soon, but with a few simple tweaks to your lifestyle, you could get there sooner than you think. Here are five things you can do to help save for your first down payment.
Be smarter with your money
Whether that means cutting the cable cord and switching to Netflix or streamlining your business expenses by leasing that new truck you need with Flex Fleet instead of buying one outright, anything you can do to use your money more wisely is going to help you make lots of small savings that will add into a whole bunch of money. Other things you can do include switching from brand names to generic and buying clothes from thrift stores instead of getting them new – you know the kind of thing.
Move to a cheaper apartment
You might think the apartment you’re living in now sucks so much that you couldn’t even think about moving to a cheaper place, but what about if it meant you could save enough money to make that down payment in the next 12 months? You could probably get by right, so find the cheapest safe apartment you can and stick it out for a little while, save the difference, and in conjunction with some of these other ideas, you could be living in your very own home within a year.
Downgrade your vehicle
Or get rid of it completely. By selling your more expensive vehicle, not only will you get a cash lump sum to play with, but if you choose a more economical car, you could save a ton on fuel and other associated costs too. If you can do without a car for a while, perhaps by cycling instead, you could save, potentially, thousands of dollars on that alone.
Rent a room
If there are no rules against subletting, you could rent out any spare rooms you may have in your apartment to make an extra few thousand dollars. Even renting out a garage for storage could net you $50 per week so see what is possible and make it happen.
Automate your savings to help save for your first down payment
If you set it up so that your savings are automatically deducted from your pay, not only will you not miss that money as much, but you also won’t be as tempted to spend it when you know you should be saving for a house. So, if you’re the kind of person who spends even when you know you should be saving, this is a good trick to bust out.
These may seem too simple as to be effective, but if you think about all of the money you’re spending on this stuff now, it’s not too difficult to see how making these very simple changes could net you the money you need to move to the next stage of your life, which is buying your own home. Doing some or all of these things will help you save for your first down payment.
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