Confused by conflicting advice on down payments, loans, and affordability? This episode clears it all up with real answers to the most common first-time buyer questions flooding the internet. In Part 1 of this myth-busting series, David Sidoni addresses the chaos of conflicting homebuying advice from Google, Reddit, friends, and even real estate pros. He explains why different sources offer wildly different answers—and how that noise keeps first-time buyers frozen with doubt. With zero sales agenda and a mission to empower, David breaks down the real facts on how much home you can afford, what kind of loan you need, and how to separate helpful guidance from harmful myths. This is your reset button for homebuying clarity.
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Real Answers To The Most Asked Homebuying Questions (Part 1)
Is this a good time to buy a home? How much down payment do you need? How do you get the best loan for you? What do you need to do to get approved for a loan? How much home can you actually afford? Let’s get some clarity on these questions and a whole bunch more, so we can crush the confusion of the complexity of your first-time home-buying planning. Let’s do it.
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Welcome. What is up in your world, my How to Buy a Homies? I’m working very hard to start a revolution. This is more than an education and empowerment show. There is an urgent need for the entire first-time home-buying experience to be radically overhauled. If something’s going to be done radically, you know I’m in on that. It’s time to strip this process away from the real estate corporations, take it away, and put the power back in the hands of the people. Welcome to the revolution.
I get it. Maybe that’s a bit too dramatic for some of you. Another way to frame it is that here on this show, we offer a no-pressure and no-BS learning environment. You can finally get the inside scoop on how buying your first home goes down and what you can do to maximize and protect yourself throughout the process. You can’t stop me from trying to say that I’m starting a revolution, one buyer at a time, because I want to change this warped system, and I’m going to do it from the inside out.
Addressing The Conflicting Solutions In Homebuying
One of my biggest frustrations that pissed me off and made me quit my broker and start this show is that for twenty years, I’ve been helping first-time homebuyers. Every question that I see first-time homebuyers asking different people, they end up getting five different answers. Every person who gives them an answer says they are correct, whether it’s Google, Reddit, YouTube, a comment section, your family, your friends, or even different pros from the real estate industry.
They’re going to give them different answers. All of them come in with such certainty that they’re correct, and yet their answers are polar opposites and conflicting. It’s like, “Always do this. Never do that. This is going to save you thousands, but this is a sure way to get scammed and ripped off.” Sometimes, that’s the exact same thing. You’re going to hear people say, “You always do this,” and then someone else says, “There’s no way that someone in your position can do this.” Which is it?
I feel your pain, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to address your most-asked questions. There’s no agenda for me except to turn anyone who tunes into this into the most knowledgeable and educated first-time homebuyer that they can be. Buying a home for the very first time can feel overwhelming. I use overwhelmed all the time, but that’s not a big enough adjective. It truly doesn’t cover all of it.
Buying a home for the first time can feel overwhelming, and that is not even a big enough adjective to describe its huge scope.
Think about it. Between the economic news, you’ve got inflation, tariffs, healthcare concerns, debt, both national and personal, and then the economy, in general, up in the air. That’s going to drive you crazy. Let’s drop on top of that, specifically, some of the home-buying things that are freaking you out. High prices, low inventory, and high mortgage rates. Not to mention even getting a mortgage and all the headaches and complexities that come with that. I feel it.
First-time homebuyers have a lot of questions. What I’m going to do is I’m going to cover the biggest and most frequently asked questions in this series. I did a version of this back in 2024. That’s episodes 241 to 244. I highly recommend that you go back and check those out. It can be a great supplement to this series. You can get deeper into some of your more burning questions.
What I’ve done for this series of questions is I’ve compiled the twenty most frequently asked questions and concerns from first-time homebuyers over the last couple of months. Why that timeframe, you ask? If you weren’t aware, post-pandemic, mortgage rates dropped to 3%, sometimes a little even below 3%. They slowly went up to 5% in 2022.
In 2023, inflation caught up to the post-pandemic bailout economic situation that we had. A couple of months ago, we saw rates shoot from 5% to 8% for a home loan. People are seeing 7% looks like a new average for a mortgage. All the while during that time, home prices were continuing to rise. If you’re sitting there thinking, “How the heck do I do this?” Trust me. You’re not alone.
Since when you buy a home can sometimes affect major portions of the entire process, that’s why I looked at the last couple of months. What questions are people asking in this market? These questions were identified by analyzing search trends from Google queries, popular discussions on forums, and social media. We also looked at places like Reddit, Quora, and real estate Q&A sites.
Not to mention, we threw in a whole bunch of surveys of homebuyer concerns. Using that data, I ranked them by overall frequency as well as the popularity across both search behavior and the online discussions. For you, reading, if you’ve read a few different episodes, you might be further down the rabbit hole than the rankings of these questions. They might prioritize them a little differently than where you’re at.
Considering the fact that most people start with the basic questions online, and a lot of them drop off before they get into the deeper questions. Maybe they bail before they go any further down the rabbit hole, in which you are way down. Don’t worry about it. It’s all good. I’ve got you covered. If you already have a clear answer to some of the more popular initial internet inquiries, let the answers I give here reinforce your decision to dig deeper into your own research.
With that in mind, these twenty questions might not even answer everything that you need to know. If you’re looking for something specific, go back and check out the show library. Anytime, you can scroll through the titles. Look at the topics. There are 350 episodes, goodness’ sake. Detailed information is there. You can find what you’re looking for.
If you can handle reading my signature old man, classy, cringey style, then starting way back at episode 94, the glossary of real estate terms from A to Z, can give you a leg up, feeling like you understand the lingo. As always, check out the Real-Life Buyer interviews. That’s where you read tons of real-world tips from people who did this.
For this episode, what we’re going to do is we’re going to get into this list of questions, reflecting the most common homebuying inquiries in aggregate. The cool thing is these answers come directly from the leader of your revolution, with only 1 answer to each of them and only 1 goal in mind. That is to lift the people up by simply downloading everything that I have learned, everything that has ever come from my experience over twenty years as a full-time first-time homebuyer real estate nerd who studies this stuff 24/7. I’m looking to get you the crucial edge in your own personal process.
Think of this information as if when you googled a question, the first page that came up had color coding all the way down it. There was red on the results that were BS. There was orange on the results that were a straight-up sales pitch. There was blue for outdated, brown for wrong, and so on. On that first page, you see one bright flashing gold recommendation shimmering with all kinds of streamers and stuff coming out of it. That is the actual answer that you’re looking for. Wouldn’t that be nice? That’s what we’re going to try to do here.
Twenty years of seeing the right and wrong way to do this. Twenty years of not just thinking everything that is correct was in my brain, but listening to hundreds of other realtors that I deal with, going to hundreds of seminars, continually reading thousands of articles, and keeping up with what’s going on. Not to mention, thousands of successful first-time homebuyer consultations, coaching, and strategy planning. That’s where we work through and find the actual answers that aren’t theoretical and have helped put people in the right position to buy their own home the right way and best way. That’s the source material to answer all these questions. Enough with the preamble, let’s get to the questions.
Is Now The Good Time To Buy A Home?
Question number one, “Is this a good time to buy a home or should I wait?” Almost every prospective buyer initially struggles with whether it’s the “right time” to buy. I get it. Over the last couple of months, that has intensified. I’m hearing buy now or wait a lot. In fact, when I did the research, we found that that inquiry is the most searched and discussed thing online. Nobody out there wants to make a mistake. Everyone wants to do this at the best time. It’s a perennial favorite in searches and conversations.
Personally, helping tens of thousands of first-time homebuyers myself, I can report that I, too, get this question a lot. People are like, “Should I buy now or wait?” It can be answered with one simple follow-up to your question, which is, “If you do want to buy a home someday, what’s your biggest fear now?” How you answer that’s going to determine if buying now is better for you or maybe if you should wait. No matter what is going on with the housing market, your fear determines your correct answer.
That was very important, so let me say it another way. If you’re a homie and you tolerate me on the way to work or when you’re walking the dog, you know I’m a slave to the math of the rent replacement strategy. The answer to, “Should I buy now or wait? does not come immediately. It doesn’t come from a definitive response from some real estate guru who can help you predict where the housing market is going, nor does it come from an economic forecaster who helps illuminate and predict the perfect ups and downs of the lines on the graph. The answer lies in what you fear in purchasing sooner rather than later.
Your personal fear or reason for thinking that maybe you want to wait, for some of you, it could mean maybe you should. Maybe your fear has some complexities, some personal things, or some job issues. Maybe you should wait. For many of you, the reason you’re asking is fear of making a mistake. Especially when your fears are revealed, one fact mathematically points to the fact that not waiting, even in precarious and unaffordable times like 2025, is still the better equation for you.
That mathematical fact is that since the Revolutionary War, there hasn’t been a ten-year period where buying a home was a losing proposition. It’s based purely on the price tag of the home. It’s not going to be worth less than when you bought it. That math doesn’t even take into account the enormously favorable math regarding if you wait, how much rent you are going to be paying that will continually increase versus your time as a homeowner holding an appreciating asset with a fixed monthly payment.
I’m on your side. I’m not stupid. I know that when any first-time homebuyer reaches out and talks to anyone in the real estate or mortgage industry, those professionals shower you with the catchy little mottos for first-time homebuyers, like, “The best time to buy your first home was yesterday. The second best time is today.” They tell you things like, “It’s not how you time the market. It’s your time in the market.”
I even say those things. The problem is, most other people drop those sayings to you with no real explanation. They make the people who are still renting feel less than. If I were being harsh, I’d say sometimes, they make people feel like losers. That sucks. Suddenly, nobody trusts these statements because they feel like the people who have said them are pressuring them. They’re not properly guiding those people with their best interests at heart.
Let’s fast forward to 2025, where we have all those things I talked about, like the rising interest rates, high home prices, and some guy on YouTube yelling that the crash is coming. It’s way intense. Suddenly, there’s more doubt than confidence. You’re wondering if you’re about to make the biggest financial mistake of your life. Here’s a little tidbit for you. The market doesn’t care about your fear or your feelings. We need to learn to get past that.
The market does not care about your fear or feelings. Learn how to get past them when buying a home.
If you’re financially ready, you have good credit, you have low debt, a solid income, and a realistic idea of what you can afford, that’s your green light. That’s your confidence. You have to remember. Rates and prices are the weather. You need to simply dress accordingly, not sit there, and wait for the clouds to depart. Here’s the truth that I’ve learned from helping thousands of buyers and tracking the market for years. You don’t buy based on the market. You buy based on you. If you pulled back and looked at everything in the last couple of years, the absolute best time to buy would’ve been 2012.
Back in 2019, I told buyers, “Look at the math. Look at the data. I know that homes have gone up in price from 2012 to 2019. I know you might be afraid. I know you might be trying to time the market right now, but mathematically, it’s going to cost you more to keep renting if you wait for prices to drop.” The naysayers came screaming at me, telling me, “No way. The market crashed in 2008. It has been going up now for 6 or 7 years. It’s going to crash again.” I had the data on my side.
That data and analytics were based on one thing. Say it with me. Low inventory. Back in 2019, when I was brand-new on the air, some listeners listened and bought. Others waited. Unfortunately, guess who’s happy? The people who bought. They’re sitting on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity. Let’s not forget their monthly payment hasn’t increased since 2019. In fact, for most of them, it probably decreased with a refinance, so it’s even lower than where they were in 2019.
How would you like to still have the same rent you had in 2019 or perhaps even lower? For anyone who’s thinking they’re going to time it because it’s going to be better once they figure out when things go down, let’s not forget. Those people in 2019 went through a global pandemic, and their home values are still better now than if they’d waited. That leads us to trying to time the market. Where are we?
The reason I use that example is that, looking at all the data, I figured out we are right here in 2019 all over again. Remember. It’s going to be a correction, not a crash, because the inventory’s too low. I’ve gone into those numbers in past episodes. In fact, so much low inventory is a saying on the show. We hit a correction in 2019 because of the global pandemic. If we hit a correction in the next six years, as we did from ‘19 to ‘25, the math is still better with a rent replacement strategy. Starting as soon as you can and putting your money to work for you as soon as you possibly can, then it would be trying to time the market.
If you’re a nerd yelling at your phone saying, “They didn’t have the same high-interest rate problem back in 2019,” first of all, what’s up, fellow nerd? Can we be friends? I love that you think that way. Secondly, you’re right. The rate in 2019 was lower than it was in 2025. Even with that change in interest rate from 2019 to 2025, the long-term math still works out in your favor when you factor in the money lost to renting and the money gained in equity, both of which you can put on the positive side of your financial leather. Leather? Let’s try ledger. Come on. I don’t want to edit that, JT. I’m not giving you an option. You have to keep it in.
For many of you out there, your fear of waiting has got you trying to time the market instead of you breaking down the true math of whatever your fears are about. The most valuable thing I could say from years of experience is that there is no perfect time to buy. For almost everyone, no one is better off waiting, paying rent, and trying to save money because the gains that you make if you stop renting are exponentially larger the sooner that you start to own.
No one is better off waiting and paying rent. The gains you make when you stop renting are exponentially larger the sooner you start to own.
I get it. 2025 is not the perfect time to buy. I’m not Doc Brown, Marty, and I can’t DeLorean you back to 2021 or 2019. We need to make the best of things here in the present. One of the biggest mistakes I see isn’t mistiming the market. It’s missing getting into the market. People have paralysis by analysis. They read every article and binge every show. Thanks for doing that. Make sure you leave a written review and five stars. I’d appreciate that.
They try to gain the system like it’s Las Vegas. Spoiler alert. In Vegas, the house always wins unless the house is yours. If you’re planning to buy this home as your primary residence and you’re going to stay put for 5 or 10 years, you’re not speculating. You’re investing in a place to live. The rent replacement strategy is going to help you grow while you build equity. That’s a win no matter what the headlines are telling you.
Question. Should you buy now or should you wait? If you’re ready, yes. If you’re not, then get ready. Get in there. Do the work. Build your credit. Evaluate your debt situation with a professional, and then start saving up that down payment. Talk to a unicorn team. Don’t sit on the sidelines forever waiting. Especially don’t sit there waiting and doing nothing because you’re preparing for nothing.
Will Home Prices Drop Or Crash Soon?
Question number two on the top things asked by wannabe first-time homebuyers. Question number two by first-time homebuyers in the last couple of months is, “Will home prices drop or crash soon?” Are you sensing a theme in the first most searched questions out there? In the past couple of months, would-be buyers frequently searched whether home prices are expected to drop in the near future.
We already talked about this. I fully empathize with the fact that most people out there thinking about buying a home are desperately hoping and praying for a correction or, better yet, a crash. If I had $1 for every time that someone told me they were waiting for the housing crash, I wouldn’t need a mortgage myself. I can tell you that.
I’ve said it over and over again on the show. A crash requires high inventory and major distress. We’ve got the opposite. Inventory is redonkulously low, and sellers are the opposite of distressed. I saw something like $17 trillion worth of equity was reported in the 1st quarter of 2025. The average homeowner in the United States has over $300,000 worth of equity. That’s not distressed. The bummer is we’ve got these high interest rates. Buyers still want to buy homes, but the sellers aren’t flooding the market, even though they’ve got all that equity. The simple answer to, “Why not?” It’s because they’re sitting on a 3% mortgage, and they don’t want to mess with that.
Where are the cheap homes supposed to come from? Here we are, sitting in a position where supply and demand are pent up. That’s it. It’s pent up. We’ve got too many buyers salivating. If we see even the slightest dip in interest rates or prices, they’re flying out there. When they come flying out, that means prices will go back up.
The people who are brave, well-informed buyers are the ones who are getting the less competitive deals. I don’t think we’re going to see a crash anytime soon. Straight up, in June 2025, we are beginning to see prices dip in some areas and beginning to see sellers make some concessions. This is not signaling the beginning of a downward spiral. We’re not going to be heading towards a crash in six months or a year. You are not going to be able to buy a $400,000 house for $325,000 in 2026. It’s not going to happen.
I say this to you, not expecting you to trust me because I have a show. Trust me. Any idiot can have a show. If you go back, you can verify all my past forecasts and data-driven predictions. I am basically saying that if you want to figure out if you should trust me, it’s not because I have a show. It’s because of the content on the show that I’ve put out since 2019. I’ve been advising first-time homebuyers for the last couple of years with loads of historical, current data, and analytics. Back then, I was telling people who were scared in 2019, because things had been going up since 2012, that it still made mathematical sense for them to buy. I’m paralleling 2025 to the same thing.
In 2020, on my show, everyone was freaking out. We were all freaking out. I was showing buyers homes who thought, “We’re going to get through this.” We were out there in full hazmat suits because I believed that the data would still be on their side. For most people, if they’re going to stay there for 5 or 7 years, I figured we’d have this figured out and prices would go back up.
You can go back and check out the show in 2021 when everyone was peering out of their bunkers. Suddenly, rates dropped to under 3%. I screamed so loud that I broke JT’s eardrums. Many people still let fear and ignorance hold them back. Remember. Ignorance isn’t a dirty word on this show. We all have areas where we don’t have expertise, or sometimes, not even casual knowledge. That’s okay.
The fear and the not knowing kept them renting in 2021. Imagine a reader who paid attention to me in 2019. Maybe they paid attention to me in 2021. They could have bought a home in 2021 at 2021 prices with a 2.75% interest rate. I didn’t think about that. What if you’re out there? You should go to HowToBuyAHome.com and ask for help. Moving on, if you are out there, 2021 reader, who didn’t buy, you’re not going to like where this is going.
You can go back and check in 2022 when I told the homies that there won’t be a post-pandemic crash because we still have low inventory and prices are going to keep going up. They did. In 2023, with prices still continuing to jump up, we suddenly hit a record increase in prices, as I had told everybody it was going to be coming. I still told people back then, “Don’t freak out if you missed it. The market’s not going to crash because interest rates are starting to creep up. I still see the low inventory.”
When rates started creeping up, suddenly, my comment section was full of people telling me, “Whatever, you realtor telling everyone to buy a home no matter what. Wait until the interest rate hits 6% and the market tanks. I’m going to sit back and buy deals in all the carnage.” I politely replied to all those comments with, “I get it. You do you. I’m looking at the inventory numbers and the actual data, and that’s going to dictate where the market goes.”
Later that year, when rates kept going up, I got new comments from new haters. They would come in and say I was the worst type of person, telling everyone they should buy a home because prices are going to tumble. They’re going to be able to buy homes for hundreds of thousands of dollars less. All it’s going to take is rates hitting 7%. They did, and nothing happened. Other people came in and said, “All it takes is rates hitting 8%.”
Different trolls, same answer. Say it with me. Low inventory. At the end of 2024 and early ‘25, on the show, I told people, “There’s still not a crash coming because we still have low inventory.” There was a window of opportunity. In the winter of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, I told homies, “We can’t go back in time, but this could be a frigid opportune time for you to take advantage.”
With all that history, I’m not telling you to listen to me and buy a home because I don’t have a clue if a crash is or isn’t coming, and I want someone to buy a home so that I can pay my mortgage. That’s not what’s happening. I’m giving all this away for free. It’s up to you. You can go out and find your own unicorn. You can go out and do nothing. You can take all this information and have your uncle sell you a home. You can ask for a unicorn. Whatever. I don’t care. My track record is fully on display for all the world to scrutinize.
I’m curious how many of the other people who are online screaming defiantly and definitively with the most confidence ever have been advising first-time homebuyers for more than three months or three years. Have they been walking you through it with the data? You don’t win by waiting for the storm to pass by. You win by learning how to move within the weather. Said more plainly, it will not financially benefit you to wait for a crash.
It will never financially benefit you to wait for a crash period.
See You On Part Two
30 minutes in, and I only got 2 out of 20 questions. Not to worry. Tune in for the next episode, and I’ll jump right into question three. There won’t be any preamble. I’m going to spit out as many of the next questions as I can in a 30-minute episode. Part two is coming next. Visit How To Buy A Home if you’ve got questions of your own. Don’t forget, you can do this.
Important Links
- Ep. 241 – 10 Listener Questions ANSWERED: How to Buy Your First Home Pt 1
- Ep. 242 – 10 (MORE) Listener Questions ANSWERED: How to Buy Your First Home Pt 2
- Ep. 243 – EVEN MORE Listener Questions ANSWERED: How to Buy Your First Home Pt 3
- Ep. 244 – Details Matter: What Realtors Should Ask YOU About Buying Your First Home
- Ep. 94 – First Time Home Buyer Terms And Definitions From A-Z…Well, Just A, Actually