I know that MMM promotes a very basic investing philosophy with regards to the market, in terms of index investing. I'm fine with this, and it actually fits my philosophy, as well. But I'm wondering what we should be doing with a fairly large slice of money that my wife and I have earmarked for a home down payment that we would like to make sometime in the next year and a half. Right now, these are our assets:
$40,000 in a savings account
$5,000 in checking
$27,000 in Roth/Rollover IRAs
$30,000 in Ally Bank CDs at 2%
I'm 27 and she's 26. Right now, based on our income (we pull in about $85k combined), I'm comfortable at about the $250K range for a home, which would entail at least a $50K down payment, which we basically have now ($20K stays in the savings account for an emergency fund and we take the other $20K from there plus the $30K from the CDs). Given the short term nature of needing this money though, I feel that it's not wise to put it in the market, even in a really conservative fund. But I wanted to hear some advice from others about whether it's better to keep it in savings/CDs right now.