The Gift Of Home: Crowdfunding The Best Present Of All

Written by Jaymi Naciri on Wednesday, 10 December 2014 12:56 pm

At the holidays, everyone is thinking of creative and meaningful gifts to give to their loved ones. You’re probably also fielding a number of requests from family who want to know what you want!

This time around, tell the truth. You don’t want a new pair of slippers. Or a Blue-ray player. Or another annual membership to the Beer of the Month club. Well, you might actually want that one. But not as much as you want a house.

More specifically, you want the down payment for your house. And as lovely as it would be for a big fat check covering a minimum of 3.5 percent of the purchase price of the house you want—plus closing costs, cause, hey, we’re just dreaming here, right?— to show up under the tree, that’s pretty unrealistic. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get there. This year, crowdsource your down payment and get the gift you really want this year. Here’s how.

Hatch My House

Hatch My House is an online gift registry that is free to use and allows anyone to give funds toward the registrant’s down payment.

Our favorite new online registry is HatchMyHouse.com. which lets you save for a down payment on the house of your dreams, said Serendipity Magazine. Whether you’re thinking mansion or cottage, we love that this website involves your closest friends and family in helping you build your nest.

The size of the gift is up to the gifter, and Hatch My House can also be used for home renovations in lieu of or in addition to down payments.

To date, Hatch My House has hosted registries for more than 2,000 couples and reached more than $2 million funds donated, according to Interest.com .

Down Payment Dreams

Typical wedding registries filled with housewares are seeing competition from sites like Down Payment Dreams. created as a unique wedding gift registry that gives couples an opportunity to collect down payment funds for a new home. However, Down Payment Dreams does not require registrants to be engaged couples. Anyone can create a registry as long as they are willing to pay the $50 registration fee (the fee is refundable with use of their real estate agent referral service for purchase of a home).

Feather The Nest

Feather The Nest brands itself as a place to fund your home improvement dreams, but this new player in the real estate crowdfunding game is also a place to build a nest egg to buy a house. Feather the Nest, the latest in a line of real estate crowd funding sites designed to allow ‘nesters’ to set a financial goal online and ask friends and family to contribute, said ABC News. It’s certainly an option at traditional gift-giving times of life— like a wedding for a couple already fully stocked with kitchen gadgets—but increasingly, couples whose weddings were many years and several kids ago are using the site as a way to ask for funds without, you know, asking for funds.

Feather The Nest offers enhanced social media accessibility, with shareable pages including pictures and videos, and updates when funds are added.

If you’re planning to build a registry for a down payment, make sure you look into what your loan allows, said Interest.com Depending on the type of mortgage you apply for, there are different rules for applying gift money to the down payment, they said. With FHA and VA loans, all of your down payment can be from gift money, but with a conventional loan, you can only use part of the gift money if you put down less than 20%.