Pay down loans vs. mortgage down payment

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Would you:

  • Use money as down payment

    Votes: 4 30.8%
  • Pay down existing mortgage

    Votes: 2 15.4%
  • Pay down student debt

    Votes: 6 46.2%
  • Rent; put windfall on the craps table and let it ride

    Votes: 1 7.7%

  • Total voters
    13

Mr. Freeze

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Having a hard time wrapping my non-financial brain around this.

I am potentially going to come into a windfall. I am trying to apply for a mortgage and running into brick walls. I own a home that I am renting out and we have found a home to purchase. However, between existing mortgage, student loans, and payments on new house, debt:income is too high for anyone to finance us.

We'll call it a gift, which represents:
76% of existing mortgage payoff (@6.25%),
37% of purchase price of new home (high 5ish%), and
32% of student loan payoff (@6.8%)

I plan on doing IBR and PSLFP (if it is still around...)

WWYD?
 
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As you probably suspect, you could use some professional advice. It's a little hard to tell from your post what your major goal is: is it to maximize eventual return or just to get the new mortgage approved?

For what it is worth: I was in a similar situation last year: new mortgage company balked at my carrying two mortgages and I couldn't sell the old house before having to buy the new house (long story). I got a short-term loan from a family member that paid off the old mortgage. Then I got the new mortgage and paid back the family member a month later when the old house sold. That worked for me, but I knew the old house was under contract and it was just a timing issue.

In your case, I'd be candid with the mortgage sales guy and ask "what is going to make my application look best?" That person has a lot at stake in getting you approved and knows the guidelines.

One warning, also from my own experience: The banks' income-to-debt ratios work to protect you from yourself as well as protect them. If your windfall is, for instance, a loan you will have to pay back, then you might not want to get into that situation. While I'm satisfied with the way things worked out, being right on the edge of the accepted income-to-debt ratios is not a comfortable place to live. You'll really want to run the numbers because even if you can get the new loan, you might not want to.
 
Yeah, I guess a little bit of detail might help:

I am not overly concerned with maximizing return. I am entering a specialty in which I will be more than comfortable, eventually and God-willing. I just don't want to do anything stupid until then.

Said windfall would be a no-interest gift, aside from my own moral stance in adding some when it is paid back.

I am only on the cusp of D:I requirements for one of two reasons depending on what type of loan I pursue: either no one can seem to look beyond my student loans which they view as going into 10 yr. repayment after my grace period is up 5 months from now (either because forbearance is incremental and/or Gov can't provide a piece of paper that states what IBR payments will be), or they can't use the fact I've got rent income to offset my existing mortgage. So I feel like I am artificially close to the cutoffs, I just can't prove it to a lender. They think I am going to be paying >2K/month on loans and 2 house notes as a resident. 🙄

Waiting to buy until after I consolidate and have a set IBR amount is an option but with my personal situation, not to mention being a intern, shopping for, buying, and moving into a house 6 months from now seems impossible.
 
Use it to pay off the student debt...here's why:


*Student loan interest is not tax deductible once your income exceeds $75k a year (correct me if I'm wrong). You're a resident now and I have no idea when you will be an attending making $75k+. Heck, maybe you're moonlighting now and hitting that limit anyway.

*Mortgage interest is tax deductible so by paying down the mortgage now by that amount and keeping your student debt, you're losing out on the "savings" by having tax deductible debt.

*the obvious one shows that the rate on the student loans is higher than the mortgage so you pay down the higher rate (most cases) and this is even the wiser decision since you can't even write off the interest on student loans.

Those are the main reasons I would pay off student debt first.
 
This situation is actually fairly simple. The nice part about your question is that popularity of a given answer doesn't matter. As of this moment, all respondents on the poll voted for paying your loans, and mathematically speaking all of them are utterly wrong. Since you stated that you want to maximize the financial returns from your windfall, you are asking the following question :

between these three choices, which maximizes the expected value of my future wealth?

Well, with IBR (Income based repayment) and with PSLF (public service loan forgivness) it makes 0 financial sense to pay any of this money towards your loans. As I have said in other threads, it is a bad choice on the part of the federal government to have instituted this program, but the government cannot renege on a written contract except in circumstances where national security is at stake. Thus, it is in your best interest to NOT pay a penny beyond the minimum payments required under IBR (hopefully this windfall showed up BEFORE the tax year being considered for IBR payments) because that maximizes the amount of money you will have forgiven when you receive public service loan forgiveness. To receive PSLF, you merely have to complete residency while making IBR payments and then work at least 30 hours a week directly for a nonprofit (like nearly all hospitals) until 10 years have passed, again making IBR payments. After that, zap, your debt is gone - and any money you paid now from your windfall would have been totally wasted.

As for the rest of it, this is also trivial. Allocate your windfall between your new house and your old house, keeping in mind the interest rates and incentives for making a large downpayment. For example, if there were no incentives, then you should make the minimum downpayment on your new house and put the rest towards the mortgage on the old one. However, I bet if you make a 20% downpayment on the new house, that will substantially reduce certain costs, and so it's worth more than paying down that 6.25% loan. Find out if there are any incentives for making an even larger downpayment, since the larger the payment, the less the risk the bank is exposed to for making the loan.

One quick note for the uninformed : expected value = probability of event A * financial change of event A + probability of event B * financial change of event B and so forth. This is important, because IBR/PSLF might not pay off like the government is currently promising. But, under this 'windfall situation', this is trivial. Assume there's a 90% chance of the government paying the debt under PSLF, and a 10% chance of it reneging. You choose to invest by paying down the bank loans for a guaranteed annual return of about 6% (a rough estimate, since you've got 2 loans to split the money up between). Then the expected value = .9*(~6% compounded return on investment over 10 years * amount of windfall) + .1*(6-6.8% compounded * additional student loan balance you would have paid with amount of windfall). I hope you can understand my math, but the interesting part is that in the worst case scenario where the government reneges, you lose 0.8% * windfall with some compounding over 10 years, or about 15% of your windfall.

However, if you dump all your money into the student loan balance, you lose 100% of that money if the government doesn't renege. Thus, there would need to be a very high chance of the government reneging (more than about 80%, but I don't feel like coming up with exact numbers right now) for it to make financial sense to invest in your students loans instead of your house. I don't trust the government's motives and I believe it makes one colossal screwup after another, but the historical record shows that the government is probably going to pay out on the PSLF 'entitlement' program, and it would be stupid to bet against it.
 
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This situation is actually fairly simple. The nice part about your question is that popularity of a given answer doesn't matter. As of this moment, all respondents on the poll voted for paying your loans, and mathematically speaking all of them are utterly wrong. Since you stated that you want to maximize the financial returns from your windfall, you are asking the following question :

between these three choices, which maximizes the expected value of my future wealth?

Well, with IBR (Income based repayment) and with PSLF (public service loan forgivness) it makes 0 financial sense to pay any of this money towards your loans. As I have said in other threads, it is a bad choice on the part of the federal government to have instituted this program, but the government cannot renege on a written contract except in circumstances where national security is at stake. Thus, it is in your best interest to NOT pay a penny beyond the minimum payments required under IBR (hopefully this windfall showed up BEFORE the tax year being considered for IBR payments) because that maximizes the amount of money you will have forgiven when you receive public service loan forgiveness. To receive PSLF, you merely have to complete residency while making IBR payments and then work at least 30 hours a week directly for a nonprofit (like nearly all hospitals) until 10 years have passed, again making IBR payments. After that, zap, your debt is gone - and any money you paid now from your windfall would have been totally wasted.

As for the rest of it, this is also trivial. Allocate your windfall between your new house and your old house, keeping in mind the interest rates and incentives for making a large downpayment. For example, if there were no incentives, then you should make the minimum downpayment on your new house and put the rest towards the mortgage on the old one. However, I bet if you make a 20% downpayment on the new house, that will substantially reduce certain costs, and so it's worth more than paying down that 6.25% loan. Find out if there are any incentives for making an even larger downpayment, since the larger the payment, the less the risk the bank is exposed to for making the loan.

One quick note for the uninformed : expected value = probability of event A * financial change of event A + probability of event B * financial change of event B and so forth. This is important, because IBR/PSLF might not pay off like the government is currently promising. But, under this 'windfall situation', this is trivial. Assume there's a 90% chance of the government paying the debt under PSLF, and a 10% chance of it reneging. You choose to invest by paying down the bank loans for a guaranteed annual return of about 6% (a rough estimate, since you've got 2 loans to split the money up between). Then the expected value = .9*(~6% compounded return on investment over 10 years * amount of windfall) + .1*(6-6.8% compounded * additional student loan balance you would have paid with amount of windfall). I hope you can understand my math, but the interesting part is that in the worst case scenario where the government reneges, you lose 0.8% * windfall with some compounding over 10 years, or about 15% of your windfall.

However, if you dump all your money into the student loan balance, you lose 100% of that money if the government doesn't renege. Thus, there would need to be a very high chance of the government reneging (more than about 80%, but I don't feel like coming up with exact numbers right now) for it to make financial sense to invest in your students loans instead of your house. I don't trust the government's motives and I believe it makes one colossal screwup after another, but the historical record shows that the government is probably going to pay out on the PSLF 'entitlement' program, and it would be stupid to bet against it.

Under what amount of debt would IBR become a "profitable" option? If you have $20,000 in debt, I doubt you will save anything, but if you have $300,000k...makes sense.
 
I guess it is all moot. Apparently you cannot use gift funds to pay off a mortgage in order to qualify for an additional property.
 
As I have said in other threads, it is a bad choice on the part of the federal government to have instituted this program, but the government cannot renege on a written contract except in circumstances where national security is at stake.

WTF are you smoking? Remember deference lasting all through residency? Yeah I do too. where did that go? oh yeah! gone. Maybe they didn't realize that it was illegal to change the rules like that.
 
I guess it is all moot. Apparently you cannot use gift funds to pay off a mortgage in order to qualify for an additional property.

I don't see how this policy could ever be enforced since it seems to require an interpretation of your intentions. Who are they to say that you paid it off "in order to qualify for an additional property" vs "I had extra money and I had debt ergo I used said money to pay on said debt." I can see how it might make a bank nervous if you applied for a mortgage, didn't qualify because of debt, then suddenly received a gift and paid it off, and wanted the mortgage again. Solution? Pay off the mortgage, then apply with a different bank who sees things starting with a fresh perspective.
 
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