Thank you so much for all your responses! To answer your questions…yes, we DO have an emergency fund saved up (certainly not 12 months, though! We just paid for our wedding and that ate a lot. LOL!) and we do not want children.

We will definately check your suggested neighborhoods…although I fear some of your suggestions are way out of our price range(We want to top put at 220k so that we can still continue to save aggressively) Is there anywhere North or East of Central San Diego that is in the low-end range but a good investment?

In regards to the condo vs. house question…children are not in our future and we work and travel a lot. My husband does numbers for a living…so he is not what you would call “handy”.

That said, do you still think that waiting to buy a house is the right thing to do? I worry that a house is too much work and…just too much space for a young couple and their dog….

I am interested your opinions, because we are getting this advice (wait and buy a house) from a few people—but I still think if we could get into a “easy to care for” condo at a low short sale price right now– we’d enjoy a great tax benefit that would be “easier” on us as a couple than “stretching” our budget to get into a house.

Is the advice about buying a home because condos are hard to resell and therefore a bad investment or is it because owning a house is, in your opinion, an “ideal”?

Thank you so much for your input…we are truly open to ideas and wish to make a sound investment for our future together.