<prompt> Human: Im now 43 years old, married, with one infant daughter. When I was in my mid-late 20s, I had a reasonably high-paying job at a credit card company called Providian Financial. Regulators decided they werent happy with some of PVNs policies, and PVN stock dipped to around 2share. I bought a bunch, both in my brokerage account and in my 401kIRA. A few years later, Washington Mutual bought out Providian for 18share. Because I now had all of my eggs in one basket, I sold all the WaMu stock in my retirement accounts and bought Amazon, Google and index funds. However, I didnt want to pay capital gains taxes on my brokerage shares, so I left all of that as WaMu stock. It turned out WaMu was not quite too big to fail, it failed, and the 300k of WaMu in my brokerage account went away.Which brings us to today: my wife and I have about 1.1mm in retirement accounts, about 300k in home equity for a condo valued at 660k, 15k in an emergency account, and 4k in a checking account. The bulk of our net worth is inaccessible. Our debt is student loans, mortgage, and car payment, all at favorable interest rates. Were saving about 10 of our combined 190k salary in retirement plans, but have relatively little day-to-day spending money. Daycare in our area is 3000mo, we have a mortgage payment, et cetera Wed like to buy a bigger house so my daughter can have her own room, but the housing market here Boston is insane and were not making much progress in saving toward a downpayment big enough to make mortgage payments manageable. Wed like to save for our daughters college fund, too.The question is this: whats the prudent thing to do, now? Usually, Id begborrowsteal enough to max out 20172018 IRA contributions for both my wife and me. But is that still the right answer, given our circumstances?Thanks for any wisdom!  <response>: this is where life meets responsible financial planning. You cant always do the financially smart thing.1.1m at 43 is an amazing accomplishment, I wouldnt say that it is too much, its never too much. Truth is your probably used to a certain lifestyle, and you would be unhappy living on the typical frugal retirement budget. Particularly if you stay in a high COL areahowever, you also need to enjoy the years before retirement too. there are far worse things to spend money on than a nice house in a nice area of a huge city. I would think the 300k of equity in your current house would suffice for a 20 downpayment on a nice house in Boston. Maybe need to do a top down look at your current expeditures, as even after saving 10 plus 3k in child care, you should have a decent cashflow on 190k. You could reduce your 401k contributions, though I would not go below your corporate match . I just suspect there may be other items to trim ahead of that move. 