Where to Stash Your Deposit if You Didn’t Buy a House This Year
A guide for would-be buyers who are putting off the hunt for their dream home.
A guide for would-be buyers who are putting off the hunt for their dream home.
With home prices climbing to a record, this year’s housing boom left some hopeful buyers frustrated, discouraged and stuck with a big lump sum of cash.
Home buyers typically save between 5% and 20% for a down payment, with extra for closing costs. This year, many would-be buyers were met with bidding wars, stumped by historically low inventory or priced out of red-hot locations.
Now, they are sitting on thousands of dollars they had otherwise earmarked for a down payment on a house, and they are wondering where to stash the cash until the market cools off or their dream home becomes available.
This question is particularly tough because of the low rates on savings accounts, paired with inflation pressures. Yet with an expensive stock market and a continuing pandemic, many savers are also loath to invest their hard-earned down payment in the broad market. Cashing out investments can also come with tax consequences.
Here’s what to consider when parking a down payment for the season.
Taking a break from a house hunt can mean different things for different people. Some wait six months, others a few weeks, others an entire school year. Knowing when you might need to access this cash—and how much you will need to access—will help determine where to stash it.
“Money has to be invested or put somewhere in accordance with your time frame,” said Charlotte Geletka, managing partner and owner at Silver Penny Financial. “Time frame is more important than yield.”
If you have yet to find the perfect house but want to be able to move quickly should it pop up on the market, you will want to keep your down payment accessible and liquid, Ms. Geletka said. That means keeping 100% of the down payment in a savings account.
Ms. Geletka also recommends keeping that down payment separate from your other savings—even at a different bank—so it won’t be eaten up by an emergency, or everyday spending.
Holding off on a home purchase for 12 months might feel demoralizing, Ms. Geletka said. But waiting for housing prices to cool, the perfect house to come on the market or some household timing and life issues to settle can all be net positives.
As Blair duQuesnay, a financial planner at Ritholtz Wealth Management, points out, there is another upside to waiting longer to buy: You can grow the original amount by ramping up your savings.
“If they’re still earning, that could add to the down payment,” she said. “And the low interest rates we’re all complaining about? That’s how you’re going to get a low mortgage rate.”
For savings accounts with higher yields, look for products that pay a little more but come with high minimum deposit requirements.
“The more significant the amount of money, the more opportunity to make money,” said Nina O’Neal, partner and investment adviser with AIM Advisors.
For this same reason, however, Ms. O’Neal said she is seeing clients working with higher sums who are less willing to simply put that money in a savings account.
“We have a lot of clients who are concerned about inflation and they’re hesitant to leave the money in cash,” she said. “If someone is looking to wait for 12 to 18 months, that inflation factor weighs a little more heavily, because the home they want may require more funds.”
Ms. O’Neal’s clients who are hesitant to leave the money in cash have instead opted to invest a portion of their down payment, considering again how to best manage volatility and time horizon.
The median U.S. home price was $359,900 in July 2021, according to the National Association of Realtors, up 18% from a year earlier. In 2020, the median down payment was 12% for all buyers ($43,188), 7% for first-time buyers ($25,193), and 16% for repeat buyers ($57,584), according to the Home Buyers and Sellers Survey.
Those contemplating where to put larger sums of money have more options to split up the down payment, said Sahil Vakil, founder of MYRAwealth.com. Splitting up the payment allows clients to stash one portion in a savings account, where it stays accessible and liquid, and put another portion in a money-market fund, bonds or another low-volatility investment strategy.
Mr. Vakil recommends thinking in three-month increments. If you need the funds in three months, keep 100% of the down payment in savings. If you need it in six months, put 75% in savings and 25% in investments, and if you will withdraw in nine, then keep half in savings and half in investments.
The allocation can also adjust depending on an individual’s risk tolerance and other needs, said Ms. duQuesnay. She recommends that those looking at a time horizon longer than six months keep at least 80% in cash, allocating 15% or 20% of their down payment to investments.
“That’s only for people who just can’t take it and are willing to accept the downside, should that result,” she said.
Should someone want to wait longer than 12 months, this could enable them to put 100% of the down payment in a market fund with low volatility, Ms. O’Neal said. The longer time horizon is crucial to this strategy, she said. If a buyer wanted to split the down payment and invest a portion in the market, they shouldn’t do so for a period shorter than six months, which could then lead to troubles come tax time.
Mr. Vakil said some of his clients are eager to chase yield, wanting to invest as much as 100% of their down payment and leave none of it sitting in a savings account. These clients are putting their down payment in municipal bonds, he said, sometimes even adding a municipal-bond exchange-traded fund to their portfolios for greater diversification.
Those with a high appetite for risk are looking for an even greater yield by pursuing risky investments such as cryptocurrency and SPAC—or special-purpose acquisition company—funds.
“These are the clients who say, ‘I can’t just get 2% on this. I need more,’ ” he said. “These are our forward-looking investors who say, ‘Well, our cash may not grow, but if this SPAC blows up…’ ”
Alternative investments come with greater volatility, which might eat away at a significant chunk of the saved down payment.
Market investments come with their own tax considerations, Mr. Vakil said, so he advises clients to keep long-term and short-term capital-gains taxes in mind, or work with an adviser to learn about how tax-loss harvesting can offset trading gains.
“Taking on more risk can extend your time frame,” Ms. Geletka said.
Although it might not be satisfying, where to put a down payment is ultimately more about playing defence than offence. In a low-interest environment like the one we are in, there aren’t many options.
“There’s no free yield,” Ms. Geletka said.
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: August 31, 2021.
Early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month.
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Early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month.
OTTAWA–The nascent recovery in Canada’s housing market has become a casualty of the trade dispute with the U.S.
The latest national home-resale data are due out Tuesday, but early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month as many prospective buyers exercised caution.
The recent weakness in home sales has dimmed the previously brighter outlook for the property market coming into 2025, when buyers were encouraged by the Bank of Canada’s aggressive interest-rate cuts.
“The chills the U.S. trade war has sent through participants in the housing market are getting frostier,” said Robert Hogue , assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada.
Hogue said resales are down materially in a number of markets two months running, and home prices in several markets are coming under pressure as inventories rise. And although Canada was spared additional levies when President Trump unveiled so-called reciprocal tariffs on dozens of countries earlier this month, no meaningful rebound is likely so long as trade uncertainty lingers, he said.
Home buyers in Toronto, Canada’s most populous city and the country’s financial hub, aren’t turning up for the usual spring pickup in property-market activity.
Sales in the Greater Toronto Area slumped 23.1% in March from a year earlier, as new listings for the region jumped close to 29%, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. That marked the worst month of resales since 1998.
The board’s chief information officer, Jason Mercer , said many potential home buyers were likely taking a wait-and-see approach given the economic worries as well as a pending federal election. “Homebuyers need to feel their employment situation is solid before committing to monthly mortgage payments over the long term,” he said, adding that ownership has become more affordable and prices in the area fell about 3.8% year on year in March.
Uncertainty is also weighing on the housing market in Calgary, the biggest city in oil-rich Alberta. The city’s real-estate board said realtors reported a 19% drop in sales of existing homes from last year, with a similar trend of improving supply and a sharp increase in the average number of days that homes were on the market.
On the West Coast, home sales registered in the metro Vancouver area of British Columbia were the lowest for March since 2019, falling 13.4% on a year earlier and coming in close to 37% below the 10-year seasonal average, while active listings continued to rise.
There are some areas of resilience. The Quebec Professional Association of Real Estate Brokers said total sales in the province were up 9% year on year in March. Still, RBC’s Hogue estimated Montreal sales in March were down about 15% from December seasonally adjusted, effectively rolling back the advance since the end of last summer.
The most recent national data for the country, from the Canadian Real Estate Association, showed resales dropped 9.8% month over month in February, when homebuyers may also have been put off by harsh winter storms in parts of the country. That marked the sharpest fall since May 2022 and brought the level of sales to their lowest level since November 2023, snapping signs that activity had been picking up in recent months.
Rishi Sondhi , an economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank, in a recent report estimated the country was tracking toward a double-digit quarterly decline in Canadian home sales and a mid-single-digit drop in Canadian average home prices for the first three months of 2025. That is much weaker than a pre-Trump inauguration forecast made in December that projected a loosening in federal mortgage rules, lower interest rates and continued economic growth would fuel a modest gain in sales and prices.
Central-bank officials are set to decide Wednesday on monetary policy, but they have signaled a cautious approach to rates as they balance the prospect of tariffs stoking price pressures against the likelihood that they will dampen demand and weigh on the economy. That could mean the Bank of Canada will pause after seven straight cuts to its policy rate.
Housing is a hot topic for party leaders campaigning ahead of the April 28 election, with both the incumbent Liberal Party and opposition Conservatives proposing tax cuts and incentives to encourage buyers and builders.
The outlook for new homes has also dimmed with the tariff threat. The value of residential-building permits issued in February fell 2.9% from a month prior, adding to a retreat in January that took back some of the surge in intentions in the final month of last year, Statistics Canada data last week showed.
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