Can I ask about how you saved up for your home? Got any good websites or tags? I've found down payment calculators which seem like massive amounts to save. But there's always phrasing about needing to keep some cash but never how much. And creepily enough most the websites about it seem to be operated by the lenders. Who I'm less inclined to trust as they're the ones who are going to make money from this.
Oh man, I'm not gonna lie, I could never have bought my home without money from my parents, who inherited it.
We're not a particularly wealthy family and for much of my life we were on the poor side of middle class, but my stepfather's father made some strong investments in the 70s that started to pay off in the 90s, and when Mama Tickey died she left a fairly significant amount of money to be split among her children. So my parents and I made a deal: they would make me a no-interest loan of $10K (it ended up being $12K when all was said and done) to make a down payment on a home, and I could pay it back when I sold my home. Since then I have actually managed to start paying it back sooner (The price of the fridge I bought them is getting knocked off my debt, for example, at my suggestion) but yeah, if I'd had to save $12K up myself I would only just now be actually hitting that goal.
Now, all that said, I CAN offer you some advice! What you want to look into are the special deals that first-time homebuyers can get, like FHA loans that require a much lower down-payment as long as you live in the home for at least five years (to prevent house flipping). If I had gone with one of those loans I would possibly have paid more in interest in the long run if I didn't refinance, but I could have made a down payment of only $3K. You will probably need to talk to lenders to get this kind of information, but I would also check any local housing authorities or HUDs, and look around in your area for housing assistance programs.
I found my housing assistance program through a lender, who said "You'll need to take two workshops, one in fiscal responsibility and one in homebuying, before you can apply for a mortgage." You should NEVER have to pay for this kind of workshop, and they gave me a list of places that offered them, and my assistance program was the first one that offered them free. The program helped me determine what I could afford, found me a lender that would work with me as a first-time homebuying and offered special loans for those, helped me get a realtor to find the home and a lawyer to get all the paperwork done. (For reference they are the Resurrection Project.)
My best advice is to go to wherever you do banking, as long as they're not horrible and offer mortgages, and ask to speak to a mortgage advisor. (I would also recommend finding a local credit union that offers mortgages and talking to them because they tend to be less predatory than banks.) Explain that you're super new to home buying and need some guidance in how to get a good mortgage with a low down payment, and ask what kind of loan options there are for first time buyers. If they can't help they can probably send you to someone who can.
And good luck! It's a heinous journey, trying to buy a home, but three years on I really think it was worth it for me, and I'm happy I went through it regardless of what a pain it was at the time.
Readers, feel free to chime in, just remember to comment or reblog rather than send asks in response to this ask!
I recently bought a house (not in Chicago, username is out of date) and the reason I could do so is that my parents started a mutual fund in my name when I was a baby. I think they only put a couple thousand dollars in it, and added a little bit maybe once or twice while I was growing up. It was meant to be a college fund, but I got scholarships. So I never touched the fund and it just kept getting bigger, so that when buying my first home at nearly 40 it way more than covered the down payment on a standard mortgage.
Alas this advice won’t help the op, but if any readers are parents of young kids and can scrape together a few hundred or thousand dollars, start a mutual (or some other kind of investment) fund for your kids. I’m so grateful my parents did for me.
