The Baglady’s First Financial Goal With Hubby

The hubby and I have been married for almost a month now, and we are sort of getting our finances together. I opened a joint account at Vanguard with the new hubby. I told him that we should name the account the Baby + Downpayment Fund. We both would like to purchase a home sometime after we have our first kid. However, babies and houses both cost a lot of money and we need to prepare. So I set up a chart at the No Credit Needed Network for this fund and set an arbitrary goal of $100,000 with a deadline of two years from now. Two years is a good timeframe for this goal because I think the housing market will continue to decline until at least 2009, and also, we would like to have a child two to three years from now so we have a bit of time to ourselves in our marriage. $100,000 isn’t really enough for a downpayment on a median priced home in the Bay Area right now, but maybe in two years there may be some bargains as sellers become more desperate and more ARM loans are reset. There may also be a infinitesimally small possibility that we no longer live in this crazy place and the home prices will be much more reasonable. Either way, $100,000 seemed like a nice round number to work towards.

We’re both putting $10,000 in this account now as a start. The new contributions will be whatever we manage to save together as a couple after we take our individual 401k contributions. Right now all the funds are in the Vanguard California Tax-Exempt Money Market fund so it’s pretty safe. Eventually I may move some of the cash to other funds. We are $80,000 short right now, and that means for us to achieve the goal in 24 months the account has to grow on average of $3,333 per month. Can we do it? We will see, but I think it’s very possible.

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