Financial talks with my fiance are making me nervous.

I've been trying to take the advice of every financial guru of the past fifty years and start having some serious chats about money with my fiancé. In some ways, it feels a bit superfluous since we have a pretty good handle on where we both stand and fairly similar outlooks and goals. I knew the details of his monthly budget before we even started officially dating, and I did his taxes, helped him file his FAFSA, and walked him through setting up an online savings account last year. I think I've been similarly transparent about my finances.

So there haven't been any big surprises. He doesn't have much in savings, extended unemployment stinks like that, but he's frugal, and thanks to his generous parents he'll finish school without any loans. He had a brief fling with building credit card debt in his early twenties, paid it off as quickly as possible once he came to his senses, and now he's just as debt averse as I am, perhaps more so. If anything, he's more conservative with his money than I am. He's come to gradually accept that it's probably ok for me to use a credit card and pay it off every month, but he prefers cash for everything. He's also very leery of the stock market and investment risk; I suspect that when we get married and combine finances, we'll need to structure our retirement savings so that accounts with his name on them contain the most stable parts of our joint portfolio.

We're pretty much in line on our big goals as well. One to two children, a house that we pay off as quickly as possible, building savings, having pets, helping family if needed, we're checking the same metaphorical boxes on our priority lists. I was somewhat amused to learn that The Boy wants a literal house with white picket fence, although he did helpfully offer to build the fence himself once we get the house.

So why am I feelings so stressed? If life goes according to plan, I'll probably be in school for the next six years, then a year or two of post-doc work, then if I'm both extremely lucky and extremely talented, maybe, just maybe, I might be able to find a tenure track position. Ideally, we'd like to be in a position to buy a house once we're settled more or less permanently. That gives us several years to save.

However, how the heck do kids fit into this plan? A professor once advised me that the last year of grad school is generally a pretty good time to have a child if you are at the point where you are focused on writing up your research and not so active in running experiments, but I don't know whether I can make that work. The Boy is considering being a stay at home dad for a couple of years at some point, but that doesn't sound too feasible when I'll be making $20,000 a year after my fellowship eligibility runs out. A bit of googling revealed that daycare for an infant costs around $250 a week where I'll be living for graduate school, and The Boy, upon hearing this concluded that daycare is expensive and suggested we "get a very nice nanny" instead before he did the math and realized that $250/40 is less than the federal minimum wage.

It's moments like these that I'm more than a little envious of men. On one of my grad school visits I met a male professor who has been at his university for twenty years, and his daughters are two and four. Women can't compartmentalize their lives like that, building decades long records of professional success before scaling back to start families, at least not in a field where you're thirty before you're even out of training and not with being a biological parent at least. (That's important to the Boy, far less so for me.) The "leaky pipeline" of women in science is making more and more sense. (And please don't get me started on the male grad student at another university who was part of a panel discussion and when asked about the family friendliness of the institution, helpfully opined that he has a four month old and it hasn't affected his ability to work twelve hour days six days a week in the slightest.)

At the same university I met a female professor in her mid thirties who is somehow balancing tenure track, a preschooler, a newborn, and a husband who is also tenure track so clearly it can be done. How, I'm not quite sure, but I have to keep telling myself it can be done.

Still not buying a house.

When left to my own devices on a long, lonely, much too quiet Saturday night, I start house hunting. I'm not sure what the origin of this house lust is. I've never dreamt of making some huge profit on a home, just buying it, paying it off as quickly as possible, and then having it to live in until I die. It's a harmless enough fantasy at the moment; I know far too well I probably won't be in any position to buy for at least a decade, but if daydreaming about houses keeps me putting my spare cash into savings instead of buying junk, it's a net positive.

Interestingly, the prices of houses I daydream about buying keep getting smaller. A year ago I contemplated a tiny house for $75,000, not so much because I wanted it as because I wanted to know what it would cost to live in my parent's neighborhood. Last I checked, the charming brick place in the town where I'm stationed is still for sale by owner for $60,000. The latest fantasy is an 840 square foot cabin on 1.37 wooded acres near my old hometown for a mere $35,000.

This is probably the least practical house as well. It's a cute little barn red A-frame built in 1975. It'd serve well enough for me, a dog, and perhaps a couple of cats, but not so much if I ever end up with someone else. The house has electricity and public water, but, even though I occasionally entertain Mother Earth News-fueled daydreams of dropping out and living off the land, I suspect I'd quickly tire of chopping wood to keep the place warm in the winter after the novelty of sowing my transcendental wild oats wore off. Plus, well, even if I can "afford" it now, in a couple of years it'd be a financial disaster. Paying for a house I couldn't live in while making a grad student stipend would probably break the budget.

Never mind all that and the fact that I probably couldn't get a mortgage in today's economy, I still decided to play with some online calculators. (What can I say? My roommate was spending the weekend with her boyfriend, I was alone with the dog, and we don't have television. How else would a 22 year old fill an idle Saturday night?) So now I know that if I were a proper grown up, with more credit records and an employment history stretching back somewhat longer than August, I could probably buy an entire house with a 15 year fixed rate mortgage for substantially less each month than my roommate will be putting toward student loans on a 20 year repayment schedule.

Temptation abounds.

I've signed a lease on a sensible little rental house, the place with the big deck that costs $650 a month. My roommate will be handling all of the annoying little details of getting the utilities turned on since I'm back in Houston for round two of TFA boot camp, a seminar on long term planning for math and science teachers. I'm happy to rent that house. I am. Really.

But during the past week I kept driving by a charming historic two story brick house with a fantastic porch. From the outside, at least, it has tremendous appeal, and there's a sign in the front yard that reads, "For Sale By Owner: $60,000". I managed not to give in to the urge to knock on the door and present myself as a possible buyer, but it took a bit of willpower.

There are a million good reasons not to even think of buying a house right now. I could well decide to go off to grad school or move to a school district closer to my family at the end of my two year commitment. The housing market in this town isn't booming so finding a buyer or renter later could become a huge hassle. Technically, I'm unemployed until next week when I sign my contract for the year. The house might need a lot of work, and I don't have time, energy, and money to devote to a fixer upper at this point in my life. A 20% down payment would leave me with an uncomfortably small emergency fund. I'm also just not mature enough for that kind of a commitment.

Besides, you simply don't buy your dream house two months after graduating from university. Life just doesn't work that way, and if it somehow did, I'd probably worry myself to death wondering what tragedy would befall me to balance out my good fortune. There will still be great houses a few years from now when I'll likely have more money and a better sense of where I'm going in life, right?

An utterly impractical thought...

I am not going to buy a house right now. I don't even want to. It's not really affordable when you factor in repairs, scholarship rules explicitly forbid it, and my goals involve moving in the near future. Still, I page through the real estate ads and wonder what I'll be able to afford when I do buy. It can't hurt to consider what income would be necessary for the lifestyle to which I aspire.

I looked up the price of a house down the street from my parents. It's a tiny two bedroom one bath with only 728 square feet of living space, and it isn't a fabulous place despite a decent sized lot. It wouldn't be suitable for a big family, but it could be great for a single person and a dog or two. The list price is $75,000. My parents think that's ridiculously high, and they may well be right. However, if I drained almost all of my savings, I could make a 20% down payment. Even with a 7% interest rate, the payments on a thirty year mortgage would be slightly less than I pay in rent right now. Barring another real estate boom in the next few years, buying a home in my area on a single teacher's salary a few years from now seems pretty feasible. That may not be what I decide to do with my life, but it's nifty to know that I could.