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The average down payment for the typical US home is now over $127,750: Zillow

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The average down payment is closer to 35% now, instead of the typical 20%.  (iStock )

Every aspect of homebuying has gotten more expensive in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic. Home prices have been hitting new record highs for most months and mortgage rates are still hovering in the high 6% range. All these factors have added up to pricey down payments. The average down payment needed needed for a median-income family to afford a typical home reached $127,750, according to Zillow.

Instead of the typical 20% suggested by many lenders for conventional mortgages, prospective buyers are now saddled with a 35.4% down payment in order to make an average home affordable. This down payment is necessary for homes valued at about $360,000.

The down payment needed in today’s housing market is in stark contrast to five years ago when buyers could put down nothing and still be able to afford a median-priced home.

“Saving enough is a tall task without outside help — a gift from family or perhaps a stock windfall,” Zillow Chief Economist Skylar Olsen said. “To make the finances work, some folks are making a big move across the country, co-buying or buying a home with an extra room to rent out. Down payment assistance is another great resource that is too often overlooked.”

Saving for a $127,750 down payment is no small feat. It would take a household with an average income nearly 12 years to save, and that’s assuming a 10% monthly savings rate with at least a 4% annual return.

Just 10 of the country’s 50 biggest housing markets have buying options that require 20% down or less. Pittsburgh is one of the more affordable markets. Buyers in the city can often secure a home without any down payment.

On the other end of the spectrum, most markets in California are unaffordable for average buyers. In San Jose, households with median incomes often need to put down more than $1.3 million to secure a mortgage on a typical home, according to Zillow.

If you think you’re ready to shop around for a home loan, consider using Credible to help you easily compare interest rates from multiple lenders without affecting your credit score.

SELLING A HOUSE COSTS AN AVERAGE OF $54,000 – HERE’S HOW YOU CAN CONTROL COSTS

Average monthly housing payments drop $115 below highest record

Although current buyers are struggling with high down payments, homeowners are seeing mortgage payments drop on average. In the four weeks ending July 14, the average house payment was $2,722, $115 lower than the all-time high, Redfin reported.

Thanks to dropping mortgage rates, buyers and variable-rate mortgage borrowers are paying slightly less in monthly payments. For example, a buyer with a $3,000 monthly budget can afford a $450,000 home at a 6.8% rate. That’s an additional $25,000 in buying power compared to April when the same buyer could have bought a $425,000 home at a 7.5% rate.

Many sellers are tired of waiting for mortgage rates to drop more significantly, so they’re begining to list their homes on the market. This has led to a 6.4% increase in listings, one of the highest levels in nearly four years, lessening some of the pressure on buyers. How the market will look moving forward remains uncertain, however.

“Now that it’s looking increasingly likely the Fed will cut interest rates by the end of the year, some house hunters believe mortgage rates will fall more and are waiting for that to happen before they buy,” Redfin economic research lead Chen Zhao said.

“But they may be waiting in vain; it’s unlikely mortgage rates will drop much lower in the next few months, as markets are already pricing in the expectation of a rate cut in September, followed by several more at the end of 2024 and into 2025,” Zhao said. “In fact, now may be the right time for house hunters to get serious about making offers before prices increase even more and they lose some power. Plus, there are more homes to choose from, and many listings are growing stale, giving buyers an opportunity to negotiate.”

If you’re looking to purchase a home, you can check out Credible to find the best mortgage rate for your financial situation by comparing multiple lenders at once.

HOUSING MARKET SHORT 4.5 MILLION HOMES – HERE’S HOW THAT IMPACTS YOUR HOUSE HUNT

Homeowners insurance companies ask for increase in rates in a few states

One of the home expenses that continues to trouble consumers is homeowners insurance. States throughout the country are seeing major homeowners insurance premium increases.

California has been facing a particularly difficult home insurance crisis in the last few years, largely due to damaging wildfires that have caused insurance claims to skyrocket. Insurance companies are struggling to handle this sudden influx of claims.

State Farm recently requested the largest increase in rates California has seen yet. State Farm General, which is the company’s California branch, just submitted a request to raise rates for owners of single-family homes and condos, as well as for renters. The increase would potentially raise rates by 30% for homeowners, 36% for condo owners and 52% for renters.

Allstate is also asking for a home insurance rise in California this year. The company is hoping for an average raise of 34.1% across the state, down slightly from the initial 39.6% increase they wanted last year.

Higher repair costs and more frequent severe weather are the main reasons Allstate is asking for the increase. Paired with legal system abuses, these issues are causing the company to struggle to meet demand.

With different coverage amounts, it’s important to shop around to find the right home insurance plan that fits your needs. Visit Credible to start the process and maximize the value you gain from your homeowner’s policy.

FIRST-TIME HOMEBUYERS ARE OFTEN OVERWHELMED BY UNEXPECTED HOMEOWNERSHIP COSTS: STUDY

Have a finance-related question, but don’t know who to ask? Email The Credible Money Expert at [email protected] and your question might be answered by Credible in our Money Expert column.

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How China’s exporters are scrambling to mitigate the impact of punishing U.S. tariffs

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A large number of machinery and vehicles are ready for shipment at the dock of the Oriental Port Branch of Lianyungang Port in Lianyungang, China, on September 27, 2024. 

Costfoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

BEIJING — U.S. has raised tariffs on Chinese imports to triple digits. For China’s exporters, it means raising prices for Americans while accelerating plans to diversify operations — and, in some cases, stopping shipments entirely.

U.S. consumers could lose access to certain products in June since some American companies have halted their plans to import textiles from China, said Ryan Zhao, director at Jiangsu Green Willow Textile.

For products that continue to be shipped from China, “it’s impossible to predict” by how much their prices will rise for U.S. consumers, he said Thursday in Chinese, translated by CNBC. “It takes two to four months for products to be shipped from China’s ports and arrive on U.S. supermarket shelves. In the last two months tariffs have climbed from 10% to 125% today.”

The White House has confirmed the U.S. tariff rate on Chinese goods was effectively at 145%. Triple-digit tariffs essentially cut off most trade, a Tax Foundation economist told CNBC’s “The Exchange.”

But U.S.-China trade relationship won’t change overnight, even as American companies that source from China are looking for alternatives.

NEC's Kevin Hassett on 90-day tariff pause: Treasury market helped make decision with more urgency

Tony Post, CEO of U.S.-based running shoe company Topo Athletic, said he is planning to work more with suppliers based in Vietnam in addition to his existing China suppliers.

When the initial two rounds of 10% U.S. tariffs were imposed this year, he said his four China suppliers offered to split the cost with Topo. But now “more than the cost of the product itself has been added in import duties just in the last few months,” he said.

“I’m going to eventually have to raise prices and I don’t know for sure what impact that is going to have on our business,” Post said. Before Trump started with tariffs, Post predicted nearly $100 million in revenue this year — primarily from the U.S.

Economic fallout

Hopes for a U.S.-China deal to resolve trade tensions have faded fast as Beijing has hit back in the last week with tit-for-tat duties on American goods and wide-ranging restrictions on U.S. businesses.

With steep tariffs, China’s shipments to the U.S. will likely plunge by 80% over the next two years, Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China economics at Capital Economics, said late Thursday.

Goldman Sachs on Thursday cut its China GDP forecast to 4% given the drag from U.S. trade tensions and slower global growth.

While Chinese exports to the U.S. only account for about 3 percentage points of China’s total GDP, there’s still a significant impact on employment, Goldman Sachs analysts said. They estimate around 10 million to 20 million workers in China are involved with U.S.-bound export businesses.

As Beijing tries to address already slowing growth, one of its strategies is to help Chinese exporters sell more at home. China’s Ministry of Commerce said Thursday it recently gathered major business associations to discuss measures to boost sales domestically instead of overseas.

But Chinese consumers have been reluctant to spend, a trend reinforced by yet another drop in consumer price inflation, data released Thursday showed.

“The Chinese domestic market can’t absorb existing supply, much less additional amounts,” said Derek Scissors, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank.

He expects Beijing could follow its playbook of making concessions to the U.S., dump products on other countries, subsidize loss-making firms and let other businesses die. Diverting goods to other countries would likely increase local trade barriers for China, while subsidies would exacerbate debt and deflationary pressures at home, Scissors said.

China has made boosting consumption its priority this year and has expanded subsidies for a consumer trade-in program focused on home appliances. Tsinghua University professor Li Daokui told CNBC’s “The China Connection” Thursday that he expected measures to boost consumption would be announced “within 10 days.”

Hard to replace

While the U.S. government has strived over the last several years to encourage manufacturers to build factories in the country, especially in the high-tech sector, businesses and analysts said it won’t be easy to develop those facilities and find experienced workers.

“We cannot obtain comparable equipment from sources in the U.S.,” Ford said in a U.S. tariff exemption request last month for a manufacturing tool used to make its electric-vehicle battery cells. “A U.S. supplier would not have the specific experience with the handling and heating process.”

Tesla and other major corporations have also filed similar requests for exclusion from U.S. tariffs.

A large chunk of goods can mostly be sourced from China alone. For 36% of U.S. imports from China, more than 70% can only come from suppliers based in the Asian country, Goldman Sachs analysts said this week. They said that indicates it will be hard for U.S. importers to find alternatives, despite new tariffs.

On the other hand, just 10% of Chinese imports from the U.S. rely on American suppliers, the report said.

The world’s second-largest economy has also sought to move into higher-end manufacturing. In addition to apparel and footwear, the U.S. relies on China for computers, machinery, home appliances and electronics, Allianz Research said last week.

Diversification

China was the second-largest supplier of U.S. goods in 2024, with imports from China rising by 2.8% to $438.95 billion last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Mexico climbed to first place starting in 2023, while U.S. imports from Vietnam — which has benefitted from re-routing of Chinese goods — more than doubled in 2024 from 2019, the data showed.

Several large Chinese textile companies have been moving some production to Southeast Asia, Green Willow Textile’s Zhao said.

Tariff situation 'calls for us to move quicker' to diversify outside Asia: Lever Style

As for his own company, “this year we are developing customers in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe in order to reduce our reliance on the U.S. market,” Zhao said, noting the company could not bear the cost of the additional tariffs given its already low net profit of 5% last year.

China’s trade with Southeast Asia has grown rapidly since 2019, making the region the country’s largest trading partner, followed by the European Union and then the U.S. in 2024, according to Chinese customs data.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to visit Vietnam on Monday and Tuesday, followed by a trip to Malaysia and Cambodia later in the week, state media said Friday, citing China’s foreign ministry.

“I suspect that we will have a bit of a whack-a-mole situation where there will be new rules coming to crack down on Chinese content in products that ultimately end up in the United States,” Deborah Elms, head of the Hinrich Foundation, said on CNBC’s “The China Connection” Thursday.

Trump on Wednesday paused plans for a sharp hike on tariffs for most countries, including in Southeast Asia, but not for China.

That pause has offered a brief relief to people like Steve Greenspon, CEO of Illinois-based houseware company Honey-Can-Do International, whose company has moved more production from China to Vietnam since Trump’s first term.

“The pause allows us to continue with business as usual outside of China, but we cannot make any long term plans,” said Greenspon. “It’s hard to know how to pivot as we don’t know what will happen in 90 days.”

The economic realities could push the U.S. and China toward a deal, some analysts predict.

Gary Dvorchak, managing director at Blueshirt Group, pointed out Thursday that the latest tariffs have only been announced in the last several days and he expects ratcheting up of duties is likely posturing ahead of a deal — potentially as soon in the next few days.

Despite aggressive rhetoric, he thinks both countries have much to lose if the tariffs are made permanent. To have the U.S. cut off from Chinese goods would plunge China into a deeper depression, he said.

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JPMorgan Chase (JPM) earnings Q1 2025

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Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaks during the 2025 National Retirement Summit in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.

Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images

JPMorgan Chase is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings before the opening bell Friday.

Here’s what Wall Street expects, according to LSEG:

  • Earnings: $4.61 a share
  • Revenue: $44.11 billion

JPMorgan Chase will be the first major U.S. bank to report earnings for the most recent quarter in a time of rising economic uncertainty.

Investors will want to know how consumers, businesses and corporations are faring after President Donald Trump escalated global trade tensions starting April 2.

Jamie Dimon, the longtime JPMorgan leader, said Wednesday that he thought aggressive tariff policies would likely trigger a recession. Trump on Wednesday lowered his proposed tariff rates on most countries, except China, for an initial period of 90 days.

While bank executives are sure to focus on the quarter, which ended before Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” announcement last week, bank stocks have swung wildly on recession fears, making backward-looking discussions less relevant.

The lack of certainty in the business environment for many companies was expected to cast a pall over some investment banking activities, including IPO listings and merger advice.

But it was also expected to provide a good environment for Wall Street trading desks to print money.

Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley are also expected to report Friday, with Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup coming next week.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

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Trump pivot on tariffs shows Wall Street still has a seat at his table

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Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, testifies during the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing titled Annual Oversight of Wall Street Firms, in the Hart Building on Dec. 6, 2023.

Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

With each passing day since President Donald Trump‘s sweeping tariff announcement last week, a growing sense of unease had begun to pervade Wall Street.

As stocks plunged and even the safe haven of U.S. Treasurys were selling off, investors, executives and analysts started to fret that a core assumption from the first Trump presidency may no longer apply.

Amid the market carnage, the world’s most powerful person showed that he had a greater tolerance for inflicting pain on investors than anyone had anticipated. Time after time, he and his deputies denied that the administration would back off from the highest American tariff regime in a century, sometimes inferring that Wall Street would have to suffer so that Main Street could thrive.

“It goes without saying that last week’s price action was shocking to see as the market has begun to rewrite completely its sense for what a second Trump presidency means for the economy,” said R. Scott Siefers, a Piper Sandler analyst, earlier this week.

So it came as a huge relief to investors when, minutes after 1 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Trump relented by rolling back the highest tariffs on most countries except China, sparking the biggest one-day stock rally for the S&P 500 since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.

Despite a presidency in which Trump has tested the limits of executive power — bulldozing federal agencies and laying off thousands of government employees, for example — the episode shows that the market, and by proxy Wall Street statesmen like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon who can explain its gyrations, are still guardrails on the administration.

Later Wednesday afternoon, Trump told reporters that he pivoted after seeing how markets were reacting — getting “yippy,” in his words — and took to heart Dimon’s warning in a morning TV appearance that the policy was pushing the U.S. economy into recession.

Dimon’s appearance in a Fox news interview was planned more than a month ago and wasn’t a last-minute decision meant to sway the president, according to a person with knowledge of the JPMorgan CEO’s schedule.

Bond vigilantes

Of particular concern to Trump and his advisors was the fear that his tariff policy could incite a global financial crisis after yields on U.S. government bonds jumped, according to the New York Times, which cited people with knowledge of the president’s thinking.

“The stock market, bond market and capital markets are, to a degree, a governor on the actions that are taken,” said Mike Mayo, the Wells Fargo bank analyst. “You were hearing about parts of the bond market that were under stress, trades that were blowing up. You push so hard, but you don’t want it to break.”

Typically, investors turn to Treasurys in times of uncertainty, but the sell-off indicated that institutional or sovereign players were dumping holdings, leading to higher borrowing costs for the government, businesses and consumers. That could’ve forced the Federal Reserve to intervene, as it has in previous crises, by slashing rates or acting as buyer of last resort for government bonds.

Ed Yardeni on tariff pause: This is a positive development for the economy

“The bond market was anticipating a real crisis,” Ed Yardeni, the veteran markets analyst, told CNBC’s Scott Wapner on Wednesday.

Yardeni said it was the “bond vigilantes” that got Trump’s attention; the term refers to the idea that investors can act as a type of enforcer on government behavior viewed as making it less likely they’ll get repaid.

Amid the market churn, Wall Street executives had reportedly worried that they didn’t have the influence they did under the first Trump administration, when ex-Goldman partners including Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn could be relied upon.

But this last week also showed investors that, in his mission to remake the global order of the past century, Trump is willing to take his adversarial approach with trading partners and the larger economy to the knife’s edge, which only invites more volatility.

‘Chaos discount’

Banks, closely watched for the central role they play in lending to corporations and consumers, entered the year with great enthusiasm after Trump’s election.

The setup was as promising as it had been in decades, according to Mayo and other analysts: A strengthening economy would help boost loan demand, while lower interest rates, deregulation and the return of deals activity including mergers and IPO listings would only add fuel to the fire.

Instead, by the last weekend, bank stocks were in a bear market, having given up all their gains since the election, on fears that Trump was steering the economy to recession. Amid the tumult, it’s likely that reports will show that deal-making slowed as corporate leaders adopt a wait-and-see attitude.  

“The chaos discount, we call it,” said Brian Foran, an analyst at Truist bank.

Foran and other analysts said the Trump factor made it difficult to forecast whether the economy was heading for recession, which banks would be winners and losers in a trade war and, therefore, how much they should be worth.

Investors will next focus on JPMorgan, which kicks off the first-quarter earnings season on Friday. They will likely press Dimon and other CEOs about the health of the economy and how consumers and businesses are faring during tariff negotiations.

Wednesday’s reprieve could prove short lived. The day after Trump’s announcement and the historic rally, markets continued to decline. There remains a trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies, each with their own needs and vulnerabilities, and an unclear path to compromise. And universal tariffs of 10% are still in effect.

“We got close, and that’s a very uncomfortable place to be,” Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic advisor of Allianz, the Munich-based asset manager, said Wednesday on CNBC, referring to a crisis in which the Fed would need to step in.  

“We don’t want to get there again,” he said. “The more you get to that point repeatedly, the higher the risk that you’re going to cross it.”

The Fed got very close to having to intervene due to market malfunction, says Allianz's Mohamed El-Erian

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