Basic info: married couple, early-mid 30's, soon-to-be-2 kids, single income of $86k, assets (retirement+savings) = $110k, debt = 1 $24k auto loan.
This year's focus is on getting our emergency fund up to $20,000, which we should easily be able to do by the end of the year. We're undecided on what we should do next. Our car loan, while certainly ill-advised by Mustachian standards, is pretty low-interest: 1.5ish, I believe. We're already making somewhat accelerated payments on it, of $500/mo. So, once we've met our EF goal, should we just work on knocking out that loan, even though it's low-interest? Or should we start working on a down payment, and just continue to pay off the car loan at our current pace? We have NOTHING saved to buy a house, and are renting now. We aren't in a hurry to buy - in fact, we hate where we're currently living and are hoping to get the heck out of Dodge within the next few years, so we don't actually want to buy here at all. But of course we'd like to buy something eventually, hopefully before interest rates skyrocket again.
What would you do? (I realize that one option would be to sell the $24k car, but neither of us is especially willing to do that. We love this car - VW Jetta Sportwagon TDI - and it suits us very well. It's the first new car we've ever owned, and we will drive it forever.) We could split the difference and work on both goals concurrently, but my preference is to focus on one at a time.
Thanks for your input!