How long until you have the deposit?

Closer to 28% of the price than 20%. A lender will normally fund up to 80% of the property value for a loan above ₹30 lakh, so 20% is the part you must find. Stamp duty, registration and associated charges add roughly another 7% to 8%, and none of it can be borrowed.

On an ₹80 lakh property that is about ₹22.4 lakh in cash rather than the ₹16 lakh the headline implies. Buyers who plan on 20% are routinely ₹6 lakh short in the month it matters, which is the most common way a purchase gets delayed by a year.

₹38,391 a month at an assumed 10% a year, against a target that has grown to ₹29.97 lakh by the time you buy, because the property and the duty on it inflate while you are saving. That inflation step is the one most deposit calculators leave out, and it understates the requirement by about a third over five years.

Stamp duty is a state subject and commonly runs between 5% and 7% of the higher of the transaction value and the circle rate, with registration charges of about 1% on top. Several states charge one to two percentage points less where the buyer is a woman, which on an ₹80 lakh property is worth over a lakh and is a genuine reason to think about whose name the property goes in. Check your own state’s current rate rather than the national average, because the spread between states is wide.

A larger deposit means a smaller loan and less interest, and lenders sometimes price a lower loan-to-value slightly better. Against that, every rupee of deposit is a rupee not invested, and a home loan is usually the cheapest borrowing available to an individual, with interest that is deductible up to ₹2 lakh a year under the old regime. There is no universal answer. What is not sensible is emptying an emergency fund into a deposit, because the first year of ownership is when unplanned costs arrive.

That depends almost entirely on how firm the date is. Money needed at a fixed point inside three years has no business meeting a bad equity year, and the difference between 6% and 10% over that period is far smaller than the difference between having the deposit and not having it. Where the horizon is five years or more and the date is flexible, a growth allocation becomes reasonable. This is the part worth a conversation rather than a slider.

More than people budget for. Beyond the deposit and the duty there is normally a legal and technical verification fee, a loan processing fee of up to 1% of the loan, any brokerage, the society’s transfer and corpus charges on a resale flat, and then the actual cost of making the place liveable. A working rule is to have three to six months of the new instalment set aside on top of everything above, so the first year does not run on a credit card.

Sometimes, and less than people expect. Lenders price on loan-to-value bands, so moving from an 80% loan to a 70% one can be worth a small reduction, but the larger determinant is your credit record and your income. Half a percentage point on a ₹50 lakh twenty-year loan is worth ₹3.83 lakh in interest, so it is worth asking the question, just not worth wrecking your liquidity for.