I'd just sell some stock, assuming the capital gains hit isn't too bad.
You can always do some really low DP loan and refi when your old house sells, of course.
You don't have any other assets available? I mean, if I were looking at half million dollar houses, in your shoes, I'd be hoarding up cash in a boring savings account. And if you can't save up $50-100k pretty fast (a year or two at most) you probably shouldn't be buying a $500k house in the first place.
-W
@waltworks - do you have a rule of thumb for this? As in, don’t by a house that is more than 5x-10x your annual savings? Would it only include saving outside of retirement accounts?
There are a zillion rules of thumb for how much house you can afford, of course. Lending caps out at around 31% of pre-tax income, so if you make $100k a year, you could be spending $31k a year on a mortgage. At current rates, that would be somewhere in the ballpark of $500k (assuming some minimal DP loan).
That's a bit crazy, though, IMO. Post tax you are going to be blowing more like 50% of your take-home on the mortgage. Not a great formula to get to FIRE.
If we assume as 50% savings rate is the baseline FIRE goal, and you can minimize taxes to the extent that you take home $90k of that $100k (so budgeting $45k/year spend), I'd say you want to be spending no more than $1500/mo on your mortgage. Call it a $250k house give or take a bit for property tax and insurance rates.
So Waltworks rule of thumb, at current interest rates: your maximum is 2.5x your annual pre-tax income. Obviously YMMV and you should run the numbers yourself, though.
-W