Wealth Goals Introduction

Hello,

I have decided to get a little more organized with my financial goals, and thought blogging would be a fun way to do so.

Here is a little about myself.  Despite the fact that I have a bachelor's degree, I have not been able to find a great job.  I suppose just majoring in something basic like Psychology could be part of the problem.  I've held odd jobs here and there over the past 10 years, but nothing I really could consider a career.  I am married to a man who has a business degree, and actually has what you would consider a career.  He - I'll call him Joe (name has been changed to keep this anonymous) - makes decent money at his job, so I feel I'm the dead weight.  The problem with him is he loves to spend money.  I'm the frugal one.  Because he makes most of the money, I feel guilty if I try to tell him he can't buy anything.

A few months ago he wanted to try to refinance our house.  Unfortunately, we bought our house at the worst possible time - Fall of 2007 - right before the house values and interest rates both plummeted. So we bought our house for $243,000 3 years ago.  We still have $210,000 left to pay on it and we are paying close to 6% interest on approximately $186,000 of it and almost 9% interest on $23,000 of it (we opted to take a second mortgage instead of paying PMI). We were hoping to get a new interest rate in the 4% range, but they couldn't give it to us because after they did an appraisal, they determined our house is only worth $200,000.  So we now officially owe more on our house than it's worth.  It is depressing that we spent $43,000 for nothing.  So my first financial goal is to pay down the mortgage until we are at the break even point.