Buying a house / condo by 30!!

[Justin W]

So I'm 25 now, and I have a very serious girlfriend who, in the next year or two, may become my fiancee, and I want to make sure that we're both taken care of. My income is about $35.5K per year. (She makes about 42K per year, but she's in a lot of debt and a lot of her disposable income goes towards paying that off - she should be done paying off her debt in 3-4 years). It's just as well though, since I want to take care of this myself.

So I'm lucky enough to have a generous grandmother who scrimped and saved for 88 years and gave me (and all of my cousins and siblings!) $10K to invest on a house / condo. She also said that she might be able to help a bit more when it comes time to buy. She left this intentionally vague, both for me to be flexible, and also so some of her more greed-headed grandchildren don't go nuts.

Anyway, I'm trying to figure out how to make this money grow so I can buy a condo in my city (Jersey City) - there's a lot of redevelopment happening in my parts of town (Downtown, Journal Square, Newport Pavonia) and a lot of bad neighborhoods as well (Greenville, Westside, The Heights). I'm not really interested in becoming a landlord, nor am I interested in making a fortune - I just want to take care of myself and my future family.

You can get some really fantastic two bedroom condos for between $300K and $500K and when you go above that you can get something really quite posh. I know this is probably astoundingly overpriced to most of you, but that's the NYC metro area, and it's the market I'm in.

Right now I've got that $10K in a CD and it'll mature at the beginning of August for an extra $250 (big friggin whoop). I know I can be doing better with this money. I've got pretty good credit I think (the most I ever did was miss a credit card payment once, and occasionally overdrew on my checking account when I was in college). I'm thinking that a mutual fund might be a good idea? I'm open to any and all suggestions at this point.