<prompt> Human: My wife and I have about 65,000 saved up toward eventually buying a house. 29k in various stocks, 30k in savings, and 6k in rainy day buffer not counting our retirements. Every time I get a tiny interest payment on the 30k, I wonder what better I should be doing with it. We could buy a house any time in the next 6 - 30 months, so I do not want to tie it up long term. I was thinking about buying shares of SP 500 or some other large index. Does any have any better suggestions?  <response>: The SP could lose 50 of its value tomorrow and not recover for years. You do not want to have money you need in 6-30 months in the stock market.Now, if say you only need 30k for a downpayment and anything over that is just extra, then you could invest whats over that. At the time you buy the house, you can then decide whether or not to sell any shares depending on their current value. That way if the market crashed, you could just leave the shares alone until they recover in several years. 