DINKs Update: Saving Goal Met

Hi All,

Just wanted to update our readers with some progress on one of our personal goals. If you’ve been following the blog for a while you’ll know we are shopping for a place in Portland, Oregon. Well, we sat down and added up our accounts last night.

After some of our pending cash transfers go through, we have met our savings goal of $40,000 for the house down payment. It’s terrific to finally have the capital to make the purchase happen. The best part is that we’ve been able to do it without dipping into our emergency fund. We still have to raise a couple of grand to cover closing costs, but the saving portion of this project is mostly done.

The incredible part for us is that we only started putting away for this goal in August. This means that we managed to reach $40k in only seven months with two of those being when Miel was unemployed. Had we not had a short stint of unemployment, we did have the cash on hand to complete the goal in November but elected to keep it as an extra reserve while looking for employment. Either way it was a pretty short period of time to save that kind of money.

So where did it come from? Largely it was Miel’s hefty salary working in Afghanistan. Second to that it was blog funds for about $5k of it, and a bit from cash throw off from dividend yielding stocks. James also got a bit of a bump in salary at his university job to help cover expenses. We were also living on a relatively frugal budget with not much going out in terms of expenses.

We are happy to have reached this point in the process and are now looking for a property that meets our criteria. We had found one that we liked a lot, but we weren’t willing to pay more for it just because the seller had bought at the peak of the market. Now is the time to find deals on the market, so we are willing to wait it out. We want to make the best decision that will allow our investment to build wealth for us. If anything, the market is likely to soften further, so we are taking the patient route with money in the bank for now.

Best,

James&Miel