Saving for a house deposit, together

The down payment is the headline figure, and it's also the one people quote most loosely. "You need 20% down" is the version that scares people off; "you only need 3% down" is the version that gets them in over their heads. Both are true and neither is the whole picture. On a conventional loan you can put down as little as 3%, and an FHA loan run through HUD allows 3.5% down for borrowers with a credit score of 580 or higher (and 10% for scores between 500 and 579). So no. You do not strictly need 20% to buy.

But the 20% number isn't folklore. It's the threshold at which you escape private mortgage insurance. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is blunt about it: PMI "is a type of mortgage insurance you might be required to buy if you take out a conventional loan with a down payment of less than 20 percent." PMI protects the lender, not you, and it typically runs somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.5% to 1.5% of the loan amount per year, bolted onto your monthly payment until you've built enough equity. Under the federal Homeowners Protection Act you can request that it be cancelled once your balance reaches 80% of the home's original value, and the servicer must terminate it automatically at 78%. So the real trade-off isn't "can we buy with less than 20%" (of course you can), it's "do we want to pay an insurer every month for the privilege of having saved less."

Then there's everything the down payment conversation conveniently forgets. Closing costs typically add another 2% to 5% of the purchase price: lender fees, title insurance, appraisal, prepaid taxes and insurance. On top of that sits the move itself, plus the depressing discovery that an empty house needs a refrigerator, a bed that isn't on the floor, and curtains so the neighbours can't watch you eat cereal. The honest planning number for a couple is the down payment you're targeting plus closing costs plus a few thousand for the unglamorous rest. Aim only at the down payment and you'll hit your number and still not be able to actually close.

A goal without a number is a mood. "We're saving for a house" describes a feeling, not a plan, and feelings don't compound. The first job is to turn the wish into three concrete things, in order: the number you're aiming at, the date you want to hit it by, and the automatic transfer that connects the two. Skip any one of them and the whole thing quietly stops happening.

Start with a realistic target home price for where you actually intend to buy. The U.S. median sales price was around $417,000 in early 2025, but your city and the kind of place you want matter far more than the national figure. From the price, derive the down payment percentage you're targeting (which tells you whether you're buying your way out of PMI or accepting it), add closing costs and a buffer, and you have your number. Then pick a date that isn't fantasy. Divide the number by the months between now and then, and you've got the monthly contribution the goal actually requires, not the one that sounds nice.

The arithmetic is humbling and it's supposed to be. A couple aiming for roughly $90,000 (a 15% down payment on a $417k home, plus closing costs and a cushion) saving $1,000 a month will take a little over seven years even with interest helping; at $2,000 a month it's closer to three and a half. The lever that moves that timeline is almost never the interest rate. It's the size of the monthly contribution, which means the real work is on the spending side of your budget, not the savings rate you can find. And the contribution has to be automatic. Manual saving ("we'll move whatever's left at the end of the month") fails for the same reason manual flossing fails: it depends on willpower you've already spent on everything else. Set a standing transfer for the day after payday, into an account that isn't your checking, and let the decision make itself 12 times a year.

Once the money starts accumulating, the question of where to put it becomes the most consequential decision you'll make, and it's the one couples most often get wrong in the most expensive direction. The instinct, especially for the more financially confident partner, is: it's a lot of money sitting there, shouldn't we invest it so it grows? On a house-deposit timeline, the answer is almost always no.

The reason is the horizon. Money you'll need within roughly five years has no business in the stock market, because the market's whole bargain is higher returns in exchange for not knowing what it'll do over any short window. Stocks can fall 20%, 30%, more, and stay down for years. That's survivable for a retirement fund you won't touch for decades. It's a catastrophe for a house fund, because the moment your timeline arrives is exactly the moment a downturn can vaporize a chunk of your down payment, and the house you wanted doesn't wait for your portfolio to recover. The classic version of this story is the couple who were "ready to buy this year" and are now "hoping to buy once things bounce back."

For a short, fixed horizon the boring instruments are the correct ones: a high-yield savings account, a money market account, or a CD that matures around when you'll need the cash. They won't make you rich and they're not supposed to. Their job is to keep your deposit intact and growing modestly while you finish assembling it. As a practical matter, keep the fund somewhere with a little friction: a separate high-yield account, ideally not at the same bank as your everyday checking. House money sitting in your main account doesn't read as "the house." It reads as a comfortably large balance, and comfortably large balances get spent on things that are not houses.

If you both earn roughly the same, splitting the house contribution is easy: go halves and stop reading this section. Most couples don't earn the same, and that's where the fairness question gets real, because a house fund is the rare shared goal big enough that the split genuinely changes each person's daily life for years.

The default move is an even 50/50 split, and it has the advantage of looking fair on paper. The problem is that identical dollars take very different bites out of different incomes. If one of you earns $90,000 and the other $50,000, asking each to contribute $1,500 a month leaves the higher earner comfortable and the lower earner with almost nothing left to live on. They end up unable to participate in the relationship's ordinary life (every dinner out, every weekend, becomes a quiet calculation) all in service of a house they're supposedly buying together. That's not partnership; it's the lower earner subsidizing the appearance of equality.

The split most couples land on once they actually sit with it is proportional: each of you contributes the same percentage of income, so the dollar amounts differ but the pinch is equal. In the example above, the higher earner covers roughly two-thirds of the monthly contribution and you both feel the same squeeze. A gentler middle path is a threshold split: the lower earner puts in a fixed, comfortable amount and the higher earner makes up the rest. Whatever you choose, two things matter more than the formula. First, the split should equalize the sacrifice, not the sum. Second, and this is the part the proportional model can quietly get wrong, a bigger contribution must not buy a bigger vote. If one partner ends up feeling like a minority shareholder in the home because they put in fewer dollars, the math won. This is where keeping shared goals genuinely shared, rather than tracked as two private ledgers, does real work: in DuetWallet a house fund lives as one goal you're both pointed at, not as a scoreboard of who paid for which brick.

Here's the part the spreadsheets don't prepare you for: a house deposit is not a sprint you can grit your way through, it's a multi-year grind, and motivation that runs hot in month one will be stone cold by month thirty if nothing keeps it alive. The danger isn't a dramatic blow-up. It's quiet erosion: a raise that silently becomes more spending instead of more saving, a few months where you skip the transfer "just this once," the slow forgetting of why you were depriving yourselves in the first place.

Three things keep a long save alive. The first is making progress visible, because a number you can watch climb is motivating in a way an abstract goal never is: the same reason a progress bar that's 60% full makes you want to finish. Mark milestones out loud: the first $10,000, the halfway point, the month the balance crosses into five then six figures. The second is protecting the contribution from lifestyle creep, which is the single most common way house funds die. Every raise arrives as a fork: it can become a bigger life or a bigger house fund, and if you don't consciously route at least part of it to the fund, it will silently become takeout and subscriptions you won't even remember signing up for. The cleanest defense is to increase the automatic transfer the same week any raise lands, before the money has a chance to feel like normal income.

The third is keeping the why in the room, and this is where a regular shared check-in earns its place. A multi-year goal needs re-deciding, gently, on a schedule: a few minutes every week or two where you look at the climbing number together and remember out loud what it's for. Some couples build this themselves; a recurring DuetWallet Money Date is one structured way to do it without it becoming a budget summit. The mechanism matters less than the fact of it. The couples who reach the closing table are rarely the ones with the highest incomes. They're the ones who never let the goal go quiet.

This is the section nobody wants in the guide and everybody needs, and skipping the conversation doesn't make the risk go away. It just guarantees you'll have it at the worst possible time. A house fund is, by design, a large pile of money built up over years, and if the relationship ends before you ever reach a closing table, that pile has to go somewhere. Couples who never discussed it discover, mid-breakup, that they have radically different assumptions about whose money it actually is.

Start from the uncomfortable default. For an unmarried couple, money in a jointly held account is generally treated as belonging to both account holders regardless of who deposited what, which means the partner who contributed 70% of a joint house fund can, in a bad breakup, walk away with half or find the other person has already withdrawn it. Married couples face a different framework: in most of the U.S., money saved during the marriage is marital property to be divided in a divorce, while the handful of community-property states have their own rules, and a deposit that came from one partner's pre-marriage savings or a family gift may be treated as separate rather than shared. None of this is legal advice, and the specifics genuinely depend on your state and your situation; a fund of this size is a reasonable thing to ask a professional about. But the principle is simple: the structure of the account quietly decides the outcome, so decide it on purpose.

The protective move is not romantic and it's worth it anyway: agree, in writing, while you still like each other, what happens to the fund if you don't make it to the house. The fairest arrangement most couples reach is that each person gets back what they actually put in, which is only enforceable if you've kept a clear, shared record of who contributed what, rather than reconstructing it bitterly from old bank statements. Some couples keep house savings in proportionally-owned individual accounts earmarked for the goal precisely so the ownership is never ambiguous. This is exactly why we treat a shared goal as a transparent, jointly-visible record rather than a black box: not because we expect couples to break up, but because the couples who can calmly answer "whose money is this" are the ones who never have to fight about it. Saving for a house together is an act of trust. Trust is easiest to extend when both people know, precisely, where they'd stand if it didn't work out.