conversation: User (thecatsfireplace): "My husband and I are hoping to sell our house here soon. We'll net between $10-15K (it's a very small town...think less than 3,000 people). We are undecided if we should put the money we get from selling the house toward our new house or if we should put it toward our car and get rid of that monthly payment. Our monthly payment right now for the car is $350. The way we see it is $10K on a house loan isn't very much spread out over 30 years (we're looking for our forever home and will refinance eventually to hopefully a 15 year mortgage) but 10K on a car is a lot only spread out over another 5 years, so we'd have more monthly that we could put towards other things. Any thoughts and ideas would help!  "
  Self: "If you're trying to buy a home, you will generally get an optimal mortgage with 20% down.  It's not clear from this post whether you have that or not."
  User (thecatsfireplace): "We wouldn't have 20% saved to put down. I know that is ideal but we are being forced to move (we both got jobs 3 hours away from where we are now to be closer to family and we need to move in the next month or two) and if we rented, it would be just as much as our mortgage and we wouldn't be able to save any money for a down payment. Unless we're looking at it from the wrong point of view? "
  Self: "Well, you need cash to buy a house, a lot of it.  So using your cash probably isn't the best idea if you are trying to buy shortly.\n\nIf you are asking whether renting vs buying is better, that requires a lot more math than you have in this post."
  User (thecatsfireplace): "Fair enough. Cash should go toward the house then? I can add numbers if I need to in my post. "
  