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A post went around last week with a checklist for buying a house: stable income, a paid-off car, a credit card cleared every month, 20% down in savings, and $100,000 invested in stocks. Miss any one of those, it said, and do not go buy a house right now.
It picked up 13,000 views and a lot of people nodding along. Then I ran the numbers on it.
Run it on a real house
Take a $350,000 house. Twenty percent down is $70,000, and once you add the $100,000 sitting in a brokerage account, you need $170,000 liquid before you're even allowed to start looking.
The Federal Reserve's most recent Survey of Consumer Finances puts the median family's financial assets at $39,000. That figure already includes retirement accounts along with every dollar in checking and savings; the median in checking and savings alone is $8,000.
So the bar is more than four times what a typical household holds in financial assets. Before anyone signs a mortgage.
The people actually buying houses are doing something very different. NAR's 2025 buyer profile found the median first-time buyer put down 10%, the highest since 1989 and still half of what that post demands. Same report: the median first-time buyer is now 40 years old, the oldest NAR has ever recorded.
Tell a 40-year-old to wait until they've got 20% down and six figures in the market, and a lot of them will be pushing 50 by the time they get the keys.
I help sales reps build a plan for their commission, so they know what they can count on and what a house payment can actually handle. If some version of that checklist has been keeping you on the sidelines, grab 30 minutes on my calendar and we'll build yours together.
What the post got right
There's a good idea buried in that checklist, and I don't want to toss it out with the rest. Don't drain yourself to zero at closing.
Owning a house moves every repair onto your bill. The furnace, the roof leak the inspector missed, the fridge that quits in August; there's no landlord to call anymore, so the cash has to come from you.
Paying your card in full every month is also right, and I'd say the same thing to someone who plans to rent forever.
Where it breaks is the flat number. $100,000 is the same for everybody reading that post, and nobody's situation is the same as the next person's.
How I build the number instead
When a client tells me they want to buy, I start with what the payment does to their month, then work backward to how much cash they need to walk into closing with and still be covered on the way out. A few pieces go into it:
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The payment gets tested against your planning income. That's base salary plus half of your variable. A full-cycle AE with a $130,000 base and $130,000 in commission at plan gets planned on $195,000, because if the house only works in your best year, it doesn't work.
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The down payment is a trade-off you get to choose. Put down less than 20% and you'll pay PMI, which Freddie Mac estimates at roughly $30 to $70 a month for every $100,000 you borrow. On a $315,000 loan, that's somewhere around $95 to $220 a month. Sometimes that's worth paying to get in years earlier, and sometimes it isn't.
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Closing costs. People forget these until the week before.
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The reserve after closing. I start with a 3-month floor of expenses at the new payment, then scale it up for how much of your comp is commission, whether there's a second income, whether you have kids, and how shaky your industry has been lately.
Take two made-up buyers looking at the same $350,000 house, both putting 10% down ($35,000) and budgeting about 3% for closing costs ($10,500).
The first is a salaried nurse whose spouse also works, spending $6,200 a month once the mortgage kicks in. Two steady paychecks make a bad month unlikely, so her reserve stays at the floor: $18,600. All in, she needs about $64,100.
The second is a full-cycle AE in SaaS, single income, with half his comp riding on commission and $7,900 a month in expenses after the move. His floor is $23,700, but one soft quarter can cut his take-home in half, so I'd double it to $47,400. All in, he needs about $92,900.
Neither one is anywhere near $170,000. The AE needs almost 50% more cash than the nurse for the exact same house, and a flat rule has no way of seeing that. I build this number for people every week, and it has never once come out to a flat $100,000.
Who answers for the advice
I'm licensed, and everything I publish goes past a compliance officer before it goes out. If I get something wrong, there's a paper trail and there are consequences.
A viral account can post arithmetic that locks out most of the country, and nothing happens to it if it's wrong. That bothers me more than the math does.
Somewhere there's a 38-year-old who could comfortably afford a house, read that post, and decided they aren't ready yet. Maybe they're right. They should find out from their own numbers, though, and not from a checklist written for everyone.
So I'm curious: has a rule like this ever talked you out of a move you could actually afford?
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