You have a lot of good suggestions already, so I am going to go big-picture: you are young, you have relatively high incomes and low expenses now, but you also have a lot of major life changes coming up in the next few years. You look like you are doing great, because you are saving more than half of your current income; but that view is a little unrealistically rosy, because your current expenses are artificially low, and it is not something you will be able to maintain once you start to realize those future goals. Specifically:
1. Job change: you are unhappy and will want to change in another year or so. OK. Are there other good opportunities in your area? What do they pay? Will you need to consider moving? And if you would consider moving, what would that do to your wife's income? Right now, you are prioritizing the house savings over your job satisfaction.
This is backwards. Trust me, you do not want to be locked into a house and then discover that all the local jobs come with a paycut that you can't afford to take, or that there are great options elsewhere that you can't move for. You will be working for the next 10-20 years, so find a tolerable job first, and then build your lifestyle around what that job allows you to afford.
2. House: your home price doesn't seem out of whack for your income. But have you priced out PITI, maintenance costs, furniture, and all of the ongoing upkeep? This home price may or may not be reasonable depending on what else you want to do with your money (see below).
3. Kids: so you want kids in 3 years. Will you both still work? If so, where does the daycare/kid costs come from once you buy a house? If not, where do you cut the budget to cover your significant drop in income? And are you going to want to save for their college? If you want kids, you need to structure your life
now so you can afford them.
4. Travel: you have fallen into the common error of assuming that you will turn into a different person once you have kids and lose all desire to travel and vacation and do fun things. Trust me: not the way it works. Your friends/families will continue to have milestones; you will continue to want to be there for them; and when there are grandkids involved, the family will
really want you there for family events even more than they do now (ask me how I know. There are times I have called myself the "grandkid delivery device").
The thing that concerns me the most is that you guys are currently at the lowest-expense part of your lives that you are going to have for decades -- no mortgage/rent, no kids, etc. -- and yet
you still don't think you can afford to save for retirement. So if the retirement savings is the first thing to go when you're
not strapped, what is going to go when you
do add on all of those extra costs? Yes, yes, I understand that you are saving that money, not blowing it at the casino -- but you are saving it for a
short-term consumption reason (you want a house, and you want it now! In a year! Or less!!). The problem is not the overall savings rate or the desire for a home, it is the mindset: you are prioritizing what you
want today over what you will
need in 10 or 20 or 30 years. And that's the kind of thinking that leaves you working until 65, because there's always going to be something out there that you need the money for. If you can't afford something
while saving adequately for retirement, you can't afford it. Period.
So the first thing is to max out retirement accounts -- more specifically, figure out when you want to retire and what savings you need to get there, and sock that away first (see this:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/). After that, I would look at what all of your goals/plans are for the next, say, 5-10 years:
-- House
-- Kids
-- Travel/vacation
-- Job change
-- Car(s) (they don't last forever -- what is your replacement plan?)
-- And don't forget the "oh shit" fund, a/k/a the "what do we do when my company goes under and we have a kid and a mortgage to pay" fund, a/k/a EF
Then prioritize those things. As I and many others here have said, life is an "or," not an "and" -- you can have
many things you want, but you cannot have
all the things you want. You guys are saving $4500/mo. now, which is great -- but you can't add $3K/mo. in retirement contributions + $2K/mo. in house expenses + $1K/mo in daycare expenses + EF savings + [etc.] and still travel + pay $400/mo in car payments + eat out + [etc.].
So set up your lifestyle,
now, in a way that ensures you achieve your most important long-term priorities. E.g.: we want a house most of all, and that house will cost $1800 in PITI + assume another 10%/yr for maintenance; ok, so we'll start putting aside $2K/mo into a downpayment fund now. E.g., we want kids, and daycare around here costs $800/mo, plus doctors and clothes and diapers and such, so assume we'll do Craigslist and hand-me downs and call that $200/mo, plus say $200/mo for college savings, so we'll start putting $1200/mo into a "kid" savings account now. Cars: hmm, ok, we are not really huge car people, would like to keep costs down, but we're going to need to replace them eventually, so once we pay off the loan, let's just put that money into a "next car" fund. Etc. etc. etc. Then your current "lifestyle" budget is whatever is left. That way, you are saving up a significant chunk of cash so you are prepared for those future expenses when they happen (house downpayment, maternity leave, etc.), and at the same time you are making sure your budget and lifestyle are at a level you can afford even after you add those new expenses.
And of course if that plan doesn't get you to your goals, you can always cut more out of your current lifestyle spending to get you there faster. Or you can start over from scratch and re-think what's most important and when you really want it by -- almost no one gets this exactly right on the first try. Maybe you decide that, ok, I'll work 20 years instead of 15 if it allows me to afford a house and two kids and travel; or maybe you'll decide that you want kids but it's not worth saving for their college if it requires postponing your retirement another 5 years. The key is to recognize that it is all one big tradeoff, that every dollar you are spending now is a dollar you won't have to spend next year or in 10 years or in 50 years.