Both can work. The financing structure matters less than your life circumstances and whether the payment is comfortable. Our bias leans toward using a mortgage rather than paying all cash, even when you could pay cash. A loan keeps the rest of your money working (short-term treasuries, for example, have at times paid rates in the neighborhood of mortgage rates), preserves the tax treatment of a home loan, and lets you capture appreciation from the day you own rather than years later once you have saved the full amount. Waiting carries its own cost: even a modest 3% a year on a $600,000 home is about $18,000, which can outpace what you would bank over the same stretch. If you have the cash and simply prefer less debt, a middle path works well, something like putting enough down to land around 50 to 60% loan-to-value. And nobody goes broke paying cash for a home, so we will not argue hard against that either. The right structure is the one you can sleep with once you have seen the trade-offs. One honest check before you lean on a save-and-wait plan: whether you actually have a track record of saving at that pace. Even six to eight months of hitting the number makes the plan far more credible than assuming you will start now. To see how the two paths pencil out for your situation, the free Roadmap conversation (about 20 minutes) is where we run your real numbers.