Saving for a House

Ever since the beginning of 2009, My fiance and I have been aggressively saving money in a joint savings account in hopes of having enough for a down payment for spring/summer 2010.

Initially, we started with a small amount of $240 each bi-weekly on the Friday we got paid. After a few deposits with this amount, we realized that we needed to pick it up if we were ever going to reach our goal of $40,000 in such a short amount of time. Slowly we increased our  amounts as we started to deposit $260 bi-weekly and then $300.

Fast forward all the way to the present and we decided to start depositing $400 each bi-weekly! On an average month, we are saving a combined total of $1,600 which we are extremely proud about.

We do not have automatic withdrawals from our chequing accounts into our savings account. We really enjoy the whole process of depositing the money ourselves either by direct transfers or through an ATM machine as it motivates and encourages us to save even more. Motivation is key as it is easy to get discouraged from saving since a down payment for a house is usually one of the largest sums of money you will have to come up with in your lifetime.

Currently, we have a combined total of just over $8,000 in our joint savings account but believe that this will increase more rapidly due to our larger deposit amounts. However, we do not know how much more we can increase our payments since we are reaching our limit of disposable income. To reach our goal, we will be required to save an additional $900 a month!!  This will not be, in any way, an easy task but hopefully my fiance and I can come through and figure out a way.

What are some of the ways you save money to reach a financial goal?