Wow, I haven't posted in quite awhile!

Lots of Ideas - I noticed your comment below in Petunia100's last post and I'm wondering if would elaborate?  I'm going to need to get a mortgage at some point in the near future and am curious about the two scenarios you described.  Thanks!

As far as financing, if the bank won’t finance such a small amount, you could reserve the cash, borrow a larger amount, then use the reserve to pay it down. You would earn interest on the reserve and because the mortgage would be in ‘future’ dollars which will most likely be worth less than ‘current’ dollars, you might save money.

And I know it is counter intuitive, but taking a long mortgage to lower payments - the bank doesn’t care how old you are - can leverage the ‘future dollar’ strategy so it is worth playing with the numbers.

The advantage to this is you would start with a substantial emergency fund.