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Comment by madengr | Hacker News Reader

How are they getting over the $15k gift limit for federal taxation?

If the dude can’t cough up $10k for a $375k house, he has no business being in that house. I wonder if these mortgages are ARMs, or > 30 years.

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This is a commmon misconception: there is no $15k gift limit. There is a $15k annual exclusion of gifts that do not need to be reported. If you want to gift more than that, you simply file a form and the excess about the annual exclusion counts against your lifetime exclusion. The lifetime exclusion in 2017 was $5.49M (if you're married it effectively doubles). Oh and as of 2018 it is now $11.18M thanks to the tax "reform" bill.

In addition to this, it's per person. If you have Mom + Dad in the picture, each can gift 15K, and if it's to a couple, they can each gift 15K to each member of the couple. Thus you can pass down 60K each year without any sort of forms/taxes.

I sold my house in the bay area a year and half ago. Mine was bought by a young Indian family and funded by their parents who were both fancy doctors and 1+ million in liquid assets (asset proof was provided to me by the sellers as part of their initial offer).

I asked my realtor because I was very curious. Folks can also gift against a lifetime limit not just the yearly. There's just some extra forms the donor needs to file with the IRS but it is possible. The limit there is something like 5 million

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