Money Articles and Blogs

Here are some more articles/blogs about money I thought I'd share:

Death to the Mortgage
They are paying down their whole mortgage. I hope to someday be there too!


St. Patrick’s Day – Make Your Own “Luck of the Irish”
I've been talking about luck a lot on this blog, and here is a great post on how to improve your luck regarding your finances.


Want To Be a Successful Investor? Start By Recalibrating Your Brain
This article talks about risk tolerance. Right now I want to concentrate on paying down the 2nd mortgage, but it's something I'll have to think about soon!


Living Below Your Means Is Like Saving for Retirement Twice
This article is about the importance of living below your means and saving for retirement. The more you save the better.


Should you pay debt before saving?
I've been a little reluctant on taking money out of savings to pay down debt, and this article weighs the pros and cons of paying off debt vs. increasing your savings.

How to save money on food at the grocery store
Save money on groceries so you can use the savings to reach your wealth goals!

A Cinco De Mayo Feista?

I had one of "um duh" moments the other day.  I was thinking about needing about $15,000 to pay off the second mortgage.  Then I thought about the approximately $12,500 I have in savings (some of that we got back from our canceled Japan vacation) and the approximately $2,500 more we should be getting back from the canceled vacation within the next couple weeks and then I realized if I really wanted to I could actually pay off the mortgage!  But of course if I did that, I'd be left with NO emergency fund, and also the property taxes are due next month and some of the savings was being saved specifically to pay the taxes. I would also have to take early redemption penalties on some CDs.  However, I make between 1 and 1.25% on the CDs and the mortgage is over 8%.  One of the CDs has about $1,000 in it and it made a grand total of 96 cents last month.  Right now we're paying about $4 a day in interest just for the privilege of having that second mortgage.  So it sounds like a no-brainer, let's just pay it off! But like I said, I’m still waiting for $2,500 to come back from our canceled vacation, I don't feel comfortable going with no emergency cash and I need some money to pay taxes. However, I think I can build up a small emergency fund and make enough money for the taxes in the next month.  I think four more paychecks should be enough, so I think I'm going to shoot for May 5th as the pay off day!  A few months ago I thought I’d be lucky to pay it off in two years, last month I was hoping for the end of 2011, and now it’s less than a month away and I'm very excited!  I just hope I don’t regret running our emergency fund that low.  I don’t think I’ve had less than $5,000 in savings in at least 3 years and it kind of makes me nervous.

Hit a milestone today!

I finally have something good to share today! Just checked zillow.com and the house value actually went UP! It's not a huge jump, but it's now at $189,500, so it is up $2,000 since I checked it a couple weeks ago.

In other happy news, I hit a milestone today - the total owed on the two mortgages combined is now less than $200,000! The balance is $199,667.50, so we are just about $10,000 away from break even! I put some of the refunded Japan money towards it, so that was why it made such a big jump since last week.

So hopefully I can continue to pay down that mortgage uninterrupted and the house value continues to raise. Then our overall financial picture will be looking a lot better!