What do you think of taking out a loan from a 401(k) plan to buy your first home? From my understanding, there wouldn’t be any penalties as a first home buyer, correct? Are there any negative impacts by doing this?

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You would lose years - decades - of compounding growth.
Better to save up for down payment, if you can bear to, and not cannibalize your retirement

likehelpfulsmart

This assumes there is compound growth above the 3.5% in interest you'd already be paying back to yourself.

It all depends on how 401k assets performed compared to the asset that you used the proceeds of the loan to purchase. Generally, I wouldn't recommend 401k loan if you were using it to buy a luxury item that you don't need.

There are definitely negatives and people usually say just don't do it, but I did it for my first home back in 2016. I paid everything back within a couple years, and I got lucky that the home appreciation was high, and I turned the proceeds of selling that home into a down payment for my current home, which has had crazy high appreciation over the last two years. There's no guarantee it'll work out, but I would never have been able to get into real estate at all without doing a loan to myself.

likehelpful

I did a 401k loan to lock in crazy high capital returns over the past few years. Now I'll be paying that back to myself plus interest and averaging my cost into the market index at lower prices over the loan repayment period.

If you want to buy a house, then do it. Too many people get caught up with optimizing money instead of optimizing happiness in my opinion. And who knows, maybe it will be a more optimal path for building the assets on your balance sheet; only time will tell.

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Should be an absolutely last resort. Not my area of expertise and there’s a lot of financial advisors on here but I think doing 5% down and taking PMI is a better option then paying up to 20% as quick as possible to get rid of PMI.

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Thanks everyone for the insight! Planning to buy a property at the end of the year with hope that the housing market starts to decline. I’m saving to put down 10%, wait a couple years after purchase of the house for the interest rates to go back down and then refinance for a lower rate while getting ready of PMI.

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