<prompt> Human: My wife and I have finally sat down and set up our budget. Currently, all our accounts are with a bank. Our main goal is to save money to buy a house, and have budgeted 500 a month to put towards that. Right now, its just sitting in a savings account at our bank making .02 interest, and we discussed with our banker today opening up a CD of some sort with .45 interest. I just was looking around at some credit union rates for share certificates and MMAs with interest ranging from .14 up to .8. Obviously, Im more interested in the .8 share certificates.So, rpf my question is this: should I look into credit unionsshare certificates further? What have your experiences with credit unions been? What are the downsides of credit unions?  <response>: You can put it in a US Barclays savings account which gets 1 interest. That way you get a better interest rate and still have access to the money for when its needed. 