Just wanted to clarify a few things for the people "concerned" about finances.
First of all, I'm a she. I'm the spouse of an 0-5 ranked military officer with 22 years of active duty service. He will be retiring in about 2.5 years. Income is solid and guaranteed now and beyond. He cannot be laid off or lose his job.. He is guaranteed a military retirement at this point.
His retirement pension will begin immediately upon separation and he expects to receive significant VA disability pay as well. Our NET on just those things after he separates will be around $7-9k per month, with annual COL raises. He will have a second career as well, and expects to make around $150k at that job. I don't work now but likely will in the future once my kids are done with school.
Our plan is to use his pension for housing expenses and we are willing and able to use up to $6k per month towards that, which will be right around 40% of our gross monthly pay. As mentioned we have no other debt.
We have other investments in addition to the cash we have in savings. Those are long term investments though. Don't worry about us "losing" money on our cash savings. It's at least in a high yield account at this point. At our current savings rate, we will have around $120k when we are ready to buy. We'd like to keep $75k on hand as liquid savings going forward (to hedge against job loss at that second job) so we will have about $45k to use towards the home purchase. It would be foolish to throw all our cash towards a down payment.
RIGHT NOW, our income is around $175K, of which $48k is tax free income. We pay $3300 monthly in rent. We pocket $4000 after monthly expenses and investments. We can certainly spend more on our housing payment, even at this point. We live pretty frugally overall and don't see a situation where we are suddenly spending more per month than we do now.
We plan to stay in Irvine forever. We will buy a home with the assumption that we will never move again. We will be around 45 when we finally buy so are not concerned with the house as an investment, and don't really care about having equity in it early on.
We can certainly keep renting long term. We have a sweet deal going with our landlord, but the fact is the house we are in won't work for us long term. We have 2 disabled teens who will likely live with us well into adulthood and we need more space for that eventuality. They can't share a twin sized bunkbed forever. A larger rental would easily be $4500 month. Why not spend a bit more and just buy at that point?