My current lease will run out in April 2008. Now and then I am tempt to just go ahead and make an offer on a house, but the fact is:

1. I am not sure if Califonia’s house market is really a bubble, but I have all the reasons to believe that the price will continue to go down in the next year.

2. I don’t have enough cash for the down payment. I know I can put less than 20% down, but I’d rather not. In about a year, my goal is to save up about 40K, and hopefully at that time the house price is down enough that we can find a decent house for about 200K.

3. Our rental lease will be ended in the end of March or April. If we decided to move out before then, in theory we can be asked to pay for the rent until then anyway.

Based on these above, my goal is to

1. save up $40K in cash by March 31, 2008.
2. Stop applying for credit cards, no matter how attractive they seems to be. This way I can get my credit score as high as it could.
3. Continue observing the house market in northern California.