[ozzyoli]

I have a friend who worked in the past five years for two tech companies that IPOd and has lots of vested stock.

She wants to buy a house in San Francisco but doesn’t want to sell her stock to make the downpayment. She plans to use a collateral-loan offered by ETrade (who manages her employee stock plans).

[iancarroll]

Would mortgage lenders allow this? I was under the impression that they trace the origin of the down payment for this reason (to prevent it from originating from another riskier loan), but I have no expertise here.

[bombcar]

One trick is to go to margin with your broker:

1. Transfer $500k in stock to TD Ameritrade (a stock transfer is not a sale/buy so it's not taxed) 2. Withdrawal $100k without selling anything (now you're $100k into margin. 3. Wait about 6 months. 4. Now you can use that as a down payment, and they'll just consider your margin balance as part of your overall debt picture.