Can I buy and sell a house quickly to access the money in a LISA?
"I've got £476,000 but the maximum house price is £450,000. What   happens to the £26,000. Does it stay there with ~6% interest (and no bonus of course), and would be available when I retire at around 75 (there would be about £106,000 by then)? Yes, anything you don't withdraw for your house purchase stays in the Lifetime ISA and keeps growing there. Also you do keep the bonus on it, which was paid at the time you subscribed, unless you make a withdrawal before age 60. After age 60 you can withdraw and keep the bonus. Note that you need to be buying with a mortgage to be allowed to use the lifetime ISA money (without penalty). This is mentioned on the gov.uk website as well as in the actual regulations that establish lifetime ISAs (search for ""first time residential purchase"" and look at clause (6)). That would mean you'd need to withdraw even less than the £450K and artificially borrow the rest. All that said, I suspect the £450K limit would be raised by 2049, given inflation. Can I buy a house and ""quickly"" sell it again, to simply access the money, The regulations say that on completion of the purchase, you must ""occupy the land as their only or main residence"" (there are a few exceptions, such as if it's still being built, or if you are at the time posted abroad by the government, but essentially you have to move in as soon as possible). There's no time limit stated in the regulations, so in theory you could move in and then sell quite fast, but personally I'd be nervous about this being seen as not genuinely intending it to be my main residence. In theory you could be prosecuted for fraud if you claimed a valid withdrawal when it wasn't, though given the wording of the regulations it looks like you'd be complying with the letter of the law." Your first home can be up to £450,000 today. But that figure is unlikely to stay the same over 40 years. The government would need to raise it in line with inflation otherwise in 40 years you won't be able to buy quite so much with it. If inflation averages 2% over your 40 year investment period say, £450,000 would buy you roughly what £200,000 would today. Higher rates of inflation will reduce your purchasing power even faster. You pay stamp duty on a house. For a house worth £450,000 that would be around £12,500. There are also estate agent's fees (typically 1-2% of the purchase price, although you might be able to do better) and legal fees. If you sell quickly you'd only be able to access the balance of the money less all those taxes and fees. That's quite a bit of your bonus lost so why did you tie your money up in a LISA for all those years instead of investing in the stock market directly? One other thing to note is that you buy a LISA from your post tax income. You pay into a pension using your pre-tax income so if you're investing for your retirement then a pension will start with a 20% bonus if you're a lower rate taxpayer and a whopping 40% bonus if you're a higher rate taxpayer. If you're a higher rate taxpayer a pension is much better value.
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If you only have say 10% of the house price you wouldn't actually have a lot of choice in the matter, the mortgage lender will penalise you heavily for low deposits. The practical minimum is 5%, but for most people a 95% mortgage is just silly (albeit not as silly as the 100% or greater mortgages you could get pre-2008), and you should take serious individual advice before considering it. According to Which, the average in the UK for first-time buyers is 20% (not the best source for that data I confess, but a convenient one). Above 20% is not at all unusual. You'll do an affordability calculation to figure out how much you can borrow, which isn't at all the same as how much you should borrow, but does get you started. Basically you, decide how much a month you can spend on mortgage payments. The calculation will let you put every penny into this if you choose to, but in practice you'll want some discretionary income so don't do that. decide the term of the mortgage. For a young first-time buyer in the UK I think you'd typically take a 25-year term and consider early repayment options rather than committing to a shorter term, but you don't have to. Mortgage lenders will offer shorter terms as long as you can afford the payments. decide how much you're putting into a deposit make subtractions for cost of moving (stamp duty if applicable, fees, removals aka ""people to lug your stuff""). receive back a number which is the house price you can pay under these constraints (and of course a breakdown of what the mortgage principle would be, and the interest rate you'll pay). This step requires access to lender information, since their rates depend on personal details, deposit percentage, phase of the moon, etc. Our mortgage advisor did multiple runs of the calculation for us for different scenarios, since we hadn't made up our minds entirely. Since you have not yet decided how much deposit to make, you can use multiple calculations to see the effect of different deposits you might make, up to a limit of your total savings. Putting up more deposit both increases the amount you can borrow for a given monthly payment (since mortgage rates are lower when the loan is a lower proportion of house value), and of course increases the house price you can afford. So unless you're getting a very high return on your savings, £1 of deposit gets you somewhat more than £1 of house, and the calculation will tell you how much more. Once you've chosen the house you want, the matter is even simpler: do you prefer to put your savings in the house and borrow less and make lower payments, or prefer to put your savings elsewhere and borrow more and make higher payments but perhaps have some additional income from the savings. Assuming you maintain a contingency fund, a lower mortgage is generally considered a good investment in the UK, but you need to check what's right for you and compare it to other investments you could make. The issue is complicated by the fact that residential property prices are rising quite quickly in most areas of the UK, and have been for a long time, meaning that highly-leveraged property investment appears to be a really good idea. This leads to the imprudent, but tempting, conclusion that you should buy the biggest house you can possibly afford and watch its value rises. I do not endorse this advice personally, but it's certainly true that in a sharply rising house market it's easier to get away with buying a bigger house than you need, than it is to get away with it in a flat or falling market. As Stephen says, an offset mortgage is a no-brainer good idea if the rate is the same. Unfortunately in the UK, the rate isn't the same (or anyway, it wasn't a couple of years ago). Offset mortgages are especially good for those who make a lot of savings from income and for any reason don't want to commit all of those savings to a traditional mortgage payment. Good reasons for not wanting to do that include uncertainty about your future income and a desire to have the flexibility to actually spend some of it if you fancy :-)" Purchase capital asset (deductible expense). Sell capital asset next year, then use the proceeds of the sale to pay your employees.  Unless you buy in a quickly gentrifying area you'll have a fair amount of unrecoverable expenses like closing costs, repairs, etc that you won't make up with an increase in property value. Plus property taxes, utilities, etc. And who knows how quickly you can sell the place, might end up with a bloated useless asset and no money to pay employees. And in an audit an asset purchased with no actual use to the business will get disallowed.  Either retain the earnings and take the tax hit, or make a deal with your employees to pre pay them their next year's salary. Of course if you fire someone or they quit good luck getting the overpaid portion back. Is this just appealing to potential sellers' need for instant gratification, or am I missing something here? Timing matters for some people. If you are moving cross country, it's important to be able to sell your house quickly if you want to sell. This can also matter if the seller is interested in buying another home. If their existing home takes three months to sell and they have already picked a home they want, it can make the timing of funds transfers quite inconvenient - often people need to sell their existing home in order to make a down payment on a future home. I'm going to make an educated guess on #1. Money markets invest in bonds with a very short time to maturity. An MMA at a bank will be invested in government bonds. Yields on these bonds are really low right now. Thus the yield on that MMA is going to be pretty low. When you make a deposit in a savings account, the bank uses some of that money to lend back out to its customers in the form of car loans, mortgages, etc. These rates are higher, so the bank is willing to pay you a bit more than the yield MMA so they can use your money for these loans. For #2, your time window is short, so there aren't really a lot of options for you. Keeping your money where it is will actually cost you money in fees. You can do as I suggested in my comment above: close the current savings account that's hitting you with fees and open a (free) high yield savings account. You might get 1.1%. If you average $60k in the account over the next 6 months you'll earn $200-250 after taxes. You didn't ask about CDs, but lately shorter term CDs are paying less than savings accounts. Going out to a year will get you just above the rate on a high yield savings account; two years just a little more. These are outside your goal window, so they aren't an option for you. "I've found that once people ""fall in love"" with a home or the idea of a home, there's little chance they will chance course.    I'd implore you to do some reading about individuals and families trapped in an underwater mortgage and having lost a job -- now they can't move for work, and they can't refinance or sell.  In short, they are trapped and will be foreclosed upon (or, at best, will short-sell).  If you want to play knife-catcher (e.g., trying to buy an asset while its value is falling) then at least don't go in blind or kid yourself about the risks.  Of course, many folks believe the housing market has bottomed - if that's true then there's no harm in waiting 6 or 12 months and verifying that premise.  At most, you'll lose a couple of points in equity.    On the other hand, you may well discover that all is not well, and suddenly you can ""afford"" even ""more"" house.  It is not hyperbole to say that the housing market in the USA has financially destroyed millions of people -- be careful out there especially as Europe comes unglued." No, this isn't possible, especially not when you're trading a highly liquid stock like Apple. When you put in your buy order at $210, any other traders that have open limit sell orders with the correct parameters, e.g. price and volume, will have their order(s) filled. This will occur before you can put in your own sell order and purchase your own shares because the other orders are listed on the order book first. In the US, many tax-sheltered accounts like IRA's have specific rules against self-dealing, which includes buying and selling assets with yourself, so such a transaction would be prohibited by definition. Although I'm not entirely sure if this applies to stocks, the limitation described in the first paragraph still applies regardless. If this were possible, rest assured that high-frequency traders would take advantage of this tactic to manipulate share prices. (I've heard critics say that this does occur, but I haven't researched it myself or seen any data about it) "When you say ""apartment"" I take it you mean ""condo"", as you're talking about buying. Right or no? A condo is generally cheaper to buy than a house of equal size and coondition, but they you have to pay condo fees forever. So you're paying less up front but you have an ongoing expense. With a condo, the condo association normally does exterior maintenance, so it's not your problem. Find out exactly what's your responsibility and what's theirs, but you typically don't have to worry about maintaining the parking areas, you have less if any grass to mow, you don't have to deal with roof or outside walls, etc. Of course you're paying for all this through your condo fees. There are two advantages to getting a shorter term loan: Because you owe the money for less time, each percentage point of interest is less total cash. 1% time 15 years versus 1% times 30 years or whatever. Also, you can usually get a lower rate on a shorter term loan because there's less risk to the bank: they only have to worry about where interest rates might go for 15 years instead of 30 years. So even if you know that you will sell the house and pay off the loan in 10 years, you'll usually pay less with a 15 year loan than a 30 year loan because of the lower rate. The catch to a shorter-term loan is that the monthly payments are higher. If you can't afford the monthly payment, then any advantages are just hypothetical. Typically if you have less than a 20% down payment, you have to pay mortgage insurance. So if you can manage 20% down, do it, it saves you a bundle. Every extra dollar of down payment is that much less that you're paying in interest. You want to keep an emergency fund so I wouldn't put every spare dime I had into a down payment if I could avoid it, but you want the biggest down payment you can manage. (Well, one can debate whether its better to use spare cash to invest in the stock market or some other investment rather than paying down the mortgage. Whole different question.) ""I dont think its a good idea to make any principal payments as I would probably loose them when I would want to sell the house and pay off the mortgage"" I'm not sure what you're thinking there. Any extra principle payments that you make, you'll get back when you sell the house. I mean, suppose you buy a house for $100,000, over the time you own it you pay $30,000 in principle (between regular payments and any extra payments), and then you sell it for $120,000. So out of that $120,000 you'll have to pay off the $70,000 balance remaining on the loan, leaving $50,000 to pay other expenses and whatever is left goes in your pocket. Scenario 2, you buy the house for $100,000, pay $40,000 in principle, and sell for $120,000. So now you subtract $60,000 from the $120,000 leaving $60,000. You put in an extra $10,000, but you get it back when you sell. Whether you make or lose money on the house, whatever extra principle you put in, you'll get back at sale time in terms of less money that will have to go to pay the remaining principle on the mortgage."