Easiest way to clone over an existing directory?

Currently, every time I set up a new system, I run the following:

git clone $MY_HOMEDIR mv home/.git . rm -r home git checkout -f

This seems like an odd dance to go through. But I can't just git clone into ~ directly, because git clone will not clone into an existing non-empty directory.

(I could use "git clone -n" to avoid the unnecessary checkout, but the files are small, and it wouldn't remove the need to rmdir so the number of commands would remain the same.)

Does some better way exist to handle this? And if not, would it make sense for git clone to have an option to clone into an existing directory (which should also avoid setting junk_work_tree)?