Thank you. So what I got from all of this is to not focus on both a house and retirement. One or the other.

Now I need to research the house + sell for retirement approach. If that is feasible, that would save us a lot of stress moving every few years. That alone might be worth the trade off of a few years of retirement. Gotta think about it more.

One more thing I was thinking of while changing my 401k contribution - if I put everything in my 401k, I won't be able to pull anything out until 59.5. In that situation wouldn't I want to have some in non-tax-advantaged investments if I wanted to retire early? Unless I just retire at 59.5+. Which might be the case due to income anyway.

>If you don't have a healthy emergency fund, make this your top priority.

The emergency fund was recently depleted. It was around 10k but I had some huge medical bills recently.

> If you do own them, maintenance will come from your emergency fund.

I have it set so maintenance for appliances would come from the long term. Emergency is more like health or really big emergencies like we hit an expensive car and gotta pay for it. If my fridge breaks and we don't have enough in "Long Term" then I'm not really worried enough to touch my emergency fund for it. We can get a mini fridge or something. But that's why I have it split into two. Otherwise, if I'm spending emergency money on appliance repairs or something, I would just have $600 into "Emergency" and it would accomplish the same thing.

The Long Term is a catch all kinda thing for major purchases. Like moving expenses came out of long term. It's really just a savings for big things I expect to come eventually. This was recently high too but moving was very expensive.

I do think the $300/mo in emergency right now is a bit low, but I can just move some long term into it or even the ~20k I have saved up for a house into it if something does happen that fast. For now I'll probably just do $0 in long term and $600 in emergency because we just moved and there really is nothing we have for a long term purchase.

>It sounds like you have a lot of savings goals, so it may feel like your money is spread thin

Yeah I think this hit the nail. I want to save up enough for an emergency. I want to save enough to be able to move out when our lease ends. I want to save up enough to get a house. I want to save up to retire early. Can't do it all on this income unfortunately.

Definitely fine with not getting a house though. The house was just because we hate moving. That's really it. Moving is expensive and tiring.

This might be a completely separate discussion but would it be possible to focus on the house, buy in ~10 years, and then when we are ready to retire, sell the house to rent instead?

Will play around with the budget a bit but I think the main goal is to just get better jobs at this point. I don't think our standard of living will get more expensive but the most I can see us doing right now is 40k per year. Thank you for your input.

Should I instead just up my 401k contribution instead of the 50/wk into the index fund?

I guess if those are the options I'd rather do retirement over a house, so that would be upping my 401k contribution by 700/mo? (50/wk from index fund -> 401k and 500/mo from house -> 401k). That would be ~17% to ~22.7%.

So a little less than double up our retirement savings?