My husband and I have separate everything. We want to buy a house at some point.
I have two checking accounts and two savings accounts as an individual.
My husband has two checking accounts and one savings as an individual.
We have an orange savings account together.
I pay all the bills except for: our cell phone bill, his car payment, his car insurance, and his student loans.
He then gives me $300 every two weeks for his contribution to the household expenses such as rent, day care, food, cable, electric and renter's insurance.
I pay my car payment, car insurance, student loans, dell credit, old navy credit, and target credit.
We do not have any major credit cards and never did.
We are afloat with no bad debt.
We have no substantial savings in the savings accounts that we have, but we are trying to build that up and hope to buy a house in two years or so.
My questions are:
Should we have a joint checking account?
How can we save more money?
What is a down payment that is reasonable for a small 3 bedroom house in Maryland? I don't think that we can save more than $5,000 in two years though.
What else should we doing to reach our goal?
Thank you! :)
Answers & Comments
Verified answer
You are well on your way, but I generally discourage the separate accounts routine. One household, one account for expenses, that's how I see it. Maintain a household savings account and small individual accounts if you wish. There should be a consensus on your goal. Do you want an FHA loan (for first time home buyers). If so go to a bank and get a pre-qual on an FHA loan. Determine how much house you can afford and save 3-5% of that plus closing costs. $5,000 will be cutting it too close I fear, and might not be enough. Get aggressive about saving, and double or triple that number to have a good shot at buying a house you want AND can afford. If you both concentrate and do your share of cutting back and coupon clipping, two years is a lot of time to put away money.