24-year-old bought a house in New York for $750,000 with her brother

Although their homebuying journey ended happily, the search started off rocky.

Initially, Kim, her brother and his wife thought they would be to secure a home within their ideal price range with a 3.5% down payment. They weren’t picky about location either, looking for “any place that wasn’t more than an hour outside of Manhattan.”

However, they faced stiff competition from other eager homebuyers. “There was one home we were looking at that had over 100 visitors in the span of two hours for an open house,” Kim says.

They also realized a 3.5% down payment wouldn’t cut it against other buyers who outbid them or made all-cash offers on the homes they were considering, she says.

The trio knew they needed to make more compelling bids, so they pulled additional money from their savings and investment earnings to bump their down payment offer up to 10%, which came to a little over $77,000. Kim contributed $23,000, about a third of the total.

“We anticipated that things could always be more expensive than we thought, but we didn’t realize just how much more we’d have to give,” she says. “I definitely felt a lot more stressed.”

The increased down payment gave them the leverage they needed.

After several months spent viewing over 200 dwellings online, attending 20 open houses and bidding on three of them, they found the one. In addition to offering plenty of space, the home has an abundance of natural light and an open floor plan. But the main selling point was the safety of the neighborhood, Kim says.

Three months later, they closed on the property for around $750,000 with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and an interest rate of around 6.9%. Kim owns 30%, while her brother and sister-in-law own the other 70%. And since they put less than 20% down, a portion of their mortgage payments go toward private mortgage insurance.

“It felt unreal to me, and I felt like I was living in a dream,” she says. “It still doesn’t feel real to me.”

Ownership was just the beginning for Kim and her brother. Next came renovations on the nearly 70-year-old home.

“We didn’t really go for homes that were fully renovated because some of the renovations may not be personalized to our tastes,” she says. “We’d rather handpick everything ourselves and do the labor ourselves.”

With their apartment lease up in two months, they quickly got to work installing new flooring throughout the home, adding decorative crown molding and replacing kitchen appliances, including the sink and refrigerator.

“Every weekend, we would go to the house…from 7 a.m. all the way to 9 p.m. at night,” Kim says. “Between me, my brother and sister-in-law, we did about 80% of the renovations on our own.”

While YouTube tutorials allowed them to do much of the work themselves, they hired contractors for more complicated projects, like installing the kitchen countertops.

Kim estimates they’ve spent around $40,000 on renovations so far. She decided to open a credit card with a 0% introductory annual percentage rate for 12 months to cover her portion of the renovation costs, which came out to about $7,755.

“Considering what we would gain from having a bit of credit card debt for the short term, we still thought it was very much worth it,” she says.

Kim has a remaining balance of around $6,995 on that card, but is working to pay if off by cutting back on dining out and purchasing clothes, she says.

Kim contributes $2,500 toward the mortgage each month, which is proportional to her 30% stake in the property.

Otherwise, Kim, her brother and his wife aim to split costs evenly. “For the sake of sanity, we do everything three ways to keep things easy,” she says.

Here’s how Kim spent her money in July 2024.

• Housing and utilities: $2,876 for her portion of the mortgage, water, oil, electricity and Wi-Fi
• Discretionary: $636 for new bedding, bedroom fixtures and tithe to her church
• Home upgrades: $533 for paint, baseboards and a new showerhead
• Food: $404 on groceries and dining out
• Student loan repayment: $285
• Retirement savings: $216
• Subscriptions: $116 on her gym membership, Spotify, Amazon Prime and Apple Cloud storage
• Phone: $64
• Insurance: $41 for medical, dental and vision

Kim also has nearly $600 in a high-yield savings account.

She acknowledges that she could probably live with a roommate in Manhattan or Queens for the same amount as her mortgage payment, but enjoys knowing her money is going toward a home she owns. It “feels more worth it,” she says.

However, living in the suburbs means being further away from her friends in New York City and New Jersey. “Adjusting my social life to be more in the suburbs has definitely been a bit more of a challenge,” Kim says.

Since it takes more effort to coordinate meetups, she likes to splurge on outings such as her birthday dinner, which cost her $100 this year, she says.

“I was able to see all of my closest friends at this Italian restaurant in New York City, and from there we went to a different couple of bars,” she says. “Spending the whole night with the people that are closest to me and that I love was definitely money worth spending.”

Looking ahead, Kim hopes to be able to purchase another home with her other brother when he returns from living overseas, she says.

In the meantime, she plans to continue making renovations and upgrades to her current home with her oldest brother and his wife. Eventually, they hope to give the home to their parents when they retire, she says.

“We’re really looking out for our parents, who gave up a lot to move from South Korea to here,” Kim says. They want to gift the house to them “as a thank you.”