As much as an ass as walter comes off, he is right with most fiancial advice, along with joe. For the rest of advice in this thread, boarderjnky and jack,.dont take financial advice from them
Go here: http://www.belmonthousingwny.org/ and go the to first time home buyer class. Its 2 days, but on the first day, they go into all the financing programs to help first timers. They themselves have a program, you can dump like 2k in an account and they instantly add 3k.
There is so much free money out there, you can easily get 20k in free stuff if you work it right.