me_irl

Basically, yeah. If you don't already have money saved up, and you don't have someone who can cover the down payment for you, you need some method of living rent free for enough time to get $15-20k, at least in Minneapolis, where I live. The starter home I got for $200k in 2020 is now worth $250k, so the $10k down payment I saved up would now need to be $12.5k for first-time homebuyers.

Crazy that such a piece of crap house is worth so much more when the neighborhood has only gotten worse, but it shows that even just sitting on the house for a few years doing nothing to it like I did will net you some hefty capital. I sold my house after only 4 years, and after paying off the rest of the mortgage and the realtor fees, I had a nearly $50k check to show for it, thanks to what little of the mortgage I'd managed to actually pay down combined with the $30k increase in the price of the house in that time.