What’s the Downside of Putting Less Than 20% Down on a Home?

Ramsey Everyday Millionaires

Ramsey Network

Careers, Investing, Business

4.6 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by SmartVestor.
0:07.0	Connect with an investing pro near you at Ramsey Solutions.com slash SmartVester.
0:12.0	Brandon is in Atlanta. Hi, Brandon. How are you?
0:16.0	Good. How are you doing?
0:18.0	Better than I deserve. What's up?
0:19.0	Awesome. Yeah. So quick question. My fiance and I just got engaged and we're looking to buy our first home.
0:25.2	And I was trying to understand the – so basically we have the ability to put 20 percent down on the home.
0:31.6	But based off of all the math behind the numbers, I've seems more optimal to possibly put down less and have
0:38.7	more liquid cash available to invest, call it maybe 10% down with having the extra cash
0:44.1	you're able to invest long term and say Voo or QQQ or like a large cap ETF or index
0:49.6	fund.
0:50.0	Yeah.
0:51.0	But what if you get your thoughts on it?
0:52.0	It's not optimal.
0:53.4	Your formula left out something called risk,
0:56.5	and it left out something towards good nights' sleep when your home is steady.
1:01.9	We studied 10,167 millionaires.
1:06.1	89% of them were first-generation rich,
1:09.0	meaning they started where you are and became wealthy.
1:12.0	The number of them that said we were, we optimized our home mortgage by putting as little
1:17.2	down as possible to invest and became a millionaire that way, the number of them out of 10,000
1:23.7	that said that was precisely zero.
	...

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