That's just crazy talk!

So my dreams have been crushed once again… I have always been that type of person who has big dreams and high hopes for the future. I basically have my life planned out for myself already. I always said that I wanted a house by the time I was 22, wanted to be married by the time I was 23, wanted to start having kids by the time I was 26, etc, etc. (You get the point). Well, I’m 23 and I do NOT own my own house yet, I’m NOT married. I’m not even engaged yet. WTF… It has been 6 years in May and I’m not even engaged yet! WTF is up with that? Anyways, that is the least of my worries right now. First I want to get the house and that is not going my way right now. Phil and I had a talk a couple weeks ago about talking to lenders and starting to look for a house. The talk went very well so of course I get all excited and start doing my research and all that jazz right away! Two or three weeks go by and we finally have our first meeting with a lender. The meeting itself went pretty good. He said we are pre-approved and we can basically start looking for a house. He showed us two different loans that he thought would work for us. On one loan we would need a 3.5% down payment and the other we wouldn’t need any down payment. Phil liked the loan with the 3.5% down payment because otherwise we would be tacking another $6,000 to our loan if we didn’t have a down payment. That’s completely fine with me. After the meeting though we got into a huge, huge fight and long story short, he crushed my hopes of buying a house soon. He wanted to have 10% down payment plus extra money for a cushion in case something happened. I wanted no down payment and a house NOW. After two hours of arguing we finally came to a compromise. I would save my half of the down payment (which would be about $2,500 for a $150,000 house) and then we would start looking for a house. He of course has his half of the down payment plus a lot more so we are just waiting on me. I told him that once I get my half, we will start to look and he CANNOT go back on his word. He is very fussy about having a security blanket to fall back on and I obviously won’t have that. Once I have my half we will start looking and he cannot go back on his word just because I don’t have a security blanket in my savings. So the question is how long will it take me to save that much money? I have $550 saved already. Only $2,000 more to go! I would LOVE to get my half as soon as possible because I would want to buy a house before our lease is up in November and also before the free $8,000 from the government goes away in December. (That would be a pretty nice security blanket in case something happened.) Anyways, I just felt like bitching a little.