Follow the faq on here.

Here's what I was saying about the emergency fund:

In a few years, you're going to find yourself with a lot more expenses than you have now. A typical household expense is around $5k per month. The recommendation is to have an emergency fund with somewhere between 3 and 6 months of expenses. So that would be $15k to $30K. Plus, you'll be ahead if you start saving for your replacement car now.

The point of financial independence is that you never have to worry about whether you have cash on hand to pay for life's unexpected events, such as job loss, broken cars, new roofs on houses, and so on.

A worthwhile goal is to never take a loan out ever again except for the home you're living in.

All of that money should be in a high yield savings account, not the stock market.

But, it's stil important to contribute to your retirement fund, but make sure you're both contributing enough to meet your retirement goals but also not so much that you aren't able to live your life today. A good mindset is that every dollar you put in your roth is locked away until you're 67. Now that dollar is likely to have grown to be around $30 by retirement, so it's important to put it away (waiting 10 years cuts the growth in half). If you can afford to max the Roth every year do that. But when starting out be mindful of over investing.

You shouldn't worry about a brokerage account until you've got enough emergency fund and savings built up. Money you put in a brokerage should be thought of as money you're not necessarily going to be able to take out without losing money, depending on what the market situation is at the moment. For instance, many people have less value in the stock market today than they did 6 months ago due to the market taking a nose dive. So it's best for things you might want to do someday but you don't know when but it is likely to be a few years down the road and you can delay if necessary depending on the market.

You should start by looking at the section of the faq here which describes what order to spend money. Hopefully the helpful blog will post a link since I'm mobile.

That faq will tell you that the first stage is to build up a largish savings account. I'd recommend looking at what your expenses are going to be once you get put off college and start building that up.

Normally I'd tell people not to worry about a Roth until you have that built up, but you're in a unique case.

I'd suggest visiting bogleheads.org and click on the getting started link. That is a community site 100% about index investing. A companion sub is r/bogleheads

As far as what to invest in, you should have a total us market fund, a Total International market fund, and a bond fund.

Your investmentswill be divided up in this way:

First start with the percentage of bonds. 0% is fine at your age. When you get to be 30ish you should start adding some. Let's just say it's 10% so I have a number for the example.

You buy a good low cost bond fund in the amount you want. So if you invested 1000 and wanted 10% you'd buy $100 worth of your chosen bond fund.

The remaining 90% or 900 you'd split between the us and international funds. 60/40 is a fairly commonly recommended split. So you'd buy whatever 60% of $900 is of your US fund and the rest you'd buy the international fund.

As far as what funds, if you're at fidelity, you'd want to buy fzrox or fskax for the us fund, fnilx or fziax for the international fund, and probably something like fxnax for the bond portion.

Doesn't matter which of these you pick, as long as they're in a fidelity roth. The performance between them is so close that it doesn't matter, and because it's a Roth if you need to sell them to move to somewhere else later it doesn't matter.

There is an easier way though. If you bit a fidelity freedom INDEX fund, with a year close to when you'll turn 67, fidelity will automatically buy the equivalent of the funds above and will automatically adjust the ratios to match the most common recommendations of financial advisors for someone your age. You basically buy the fund and keep buying until you retire. Note they have index and non index versions of the funds, you want the index one as they have fewer fees and should perform just as well.

Edit: one final note. There are both minimum and maximum income limits for the Roth. Please double check you're within them.

No need for the second appraisal, but the first one is a good idea. If you both want to save money, many real estate agents will also do a similar valuation for less money.

The point here is that at the point you divorce your house will be worth a certain amount and you'll owe a certain amount. The difference will be the equity. That amount needs to be split between you, 50/50 is usually the right ratio unless there is a serious reason not to. A good example of this type of reason would be for one of you to have depleted your life savings to make the down payment while the other one didn't contribute anything.

Once you're divorced, the house and equity isn't yours anymore. She's making all the payments, so she should get all the equity. Unless you have to repo it from her due to lack of her keeping up on the payments. So forget about a second appraisal. By getting divorced and letting her have the house you need to give up on any future benefits from it so don't tie any payments to the value of the house.

Instead any payment from her to you needs to be compensation for you tying up your available credit and taking on the risk that she will end up trashing your credit. Think of what a single missed payment will mean to your credit score. The fact that she can't afford the payment after a refinance indicates that this might be too much house for her, and she runs a high risk of default. I'd think somewhere in the range of $0 for the first few months, then add a figure such that she's paying about 1/4 what she's saving by not refinancing for the next year, than 1/2 then 3/4 then 1, then 1.25 and so on. (So if her payment would go up by $400 by refinancing, it would be $100 for the first year, $200 for the second, and so on).

You might also want to consider some sort of escrow account that is structured in a way that neither of you could withdraw money from it and which has a couple months of house payment in it. She'd make her payments to this account and The autopay on the loan would come from this account. You could monitor it to make sure a payment is not missed and if it is, it gives you a month or two to fix before a payment is missed.

One thing she needs to be aware of is that I don't know anyone who expects interest rates to go down in the near future. The fed continues to raise them fairly aggressively to try to get inflation under control. No one knows for sure but it wouldn't surprise me if the rates don't get lower than they are right now for at least a couple if not a few years.

When I divorced, I never could get a refinance on the unique property we had bought together that I had kept.

Although it is ideal that you refinance or sell, it certainly is common in a divorce for this to happen.

My advice is for you to determine your shared net worth and figure out how to divide that equally as of the sate of the divorce. If there is $50K equity in the house and she's going to end up with the house, then you need to send up with something worth $25K.

Or said differently: after the divorce, the net worth you both take from the marriage should be identical. If she's taking $25K of equity in the house, you should take $25K in equity in something else (car, cash, etc.)

From the point the divorce is final she should be 100% responsible for the house.

The other critical point is that for anything which isn't a clean break such as the house, you need to have in your divorce decree language that lets you take unilateral steps to prevent a default on the underlying loan. That is, if she stops paying, you can assume payments, and if you have to do this there should be serious penalties. There also should be language which permits you to either require immediate refinance or immediate sale if she stops paying. You'll want a lawyer to check out the language which gets used here.

What you're trying to do is to create a situation where you're being completely fair, yet protect yourself down the road.

I also understand the desire to get paid for having the mortgage on your credit report. If you want to add a term in there where you get paid $x per month for as long as your name is on the mortgage that doesn't seem unreasonable. I would avoid one time payments, as if she keeps that for 20 some odd years you'll want to be paid for 20 years. I might consider indexing it up over time, so that it becomes more and more advantageous for her to refinance. IE $100/month for the first year and increasing 10% per year thereafter. Not suggesting you use these figures, just using those as examples.