Hello all! I stumbled across this website today while browsing the internet to figure out if/how my wife and I want to sell a car and get a cheaper one. After looking around the website for a while and absorbing some of the advice, I decided to register and seek help from you all on house savings strategy.
To be brief (which I am not good at), my wife and I want to buy a larger home in three years for our growing family. From our brief internet house browsing we have discovered that we are going to be buying a home that will cost about $300k. We currently have two car payments, a mortgage, and some student loan debt. We are fortunate that my father is going to pay off our student loan debt, so we will pay him back but save the 4k or so in interest. We currently have about $20k saved and just sitting in our savings account. My question is, would be we better suited to pay off one of the cars which will cost us just over $13k to do, or invest it somewhere for three years? That car payment is $330 a month for another 43 months and we will save about $500 in interest by doing that, which I know is not a lot. With that option we would sell that car and buy a more fuel efficient car, and hopefully save $2-3k in getting a cheaper car. My concern with investing it is the obvious one that we would pull it out in three years which doesn't seem long enough to me to ride out any up and down in the market. Any advice on what to do with this $20k would be greatly appreciated. Our goal is to have $75k saved in three years for a 20% down payment and a little extra.