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Showing posts from December, 2014

Alone and Happy

I'm supposed to be on my way to the big city right now with Bean to meet up with my mom's family for xmas dinner, but I got a call today saying that my Gramma is sick, and we are postponing to maybe next weekend. She is the reason why we get together so we meet at a restaurant near her condo. Since everyone has to drive in, and one of my cousins is also sick, and another cousin spent christmas with her baby son at Sick Kids Hospital, we will wait to get together. I spent the morning organizing all my photo files from 2014, which I will transfer over to two separate external hard drives. I also cleaned up my desktop on my laptop. I'm trying to catch up on Feedly, but am almost three weeks behind again on blogs. Maybe I need to go through and delete a bunch, but I don't really want to. I get a lot of ideas reading other people's blogs, but I rarely come here to flesh them out. I have been meaning to write about my solo home-buying adventure for weeks, but I'm

Unbury.me

Thanks to this post on The Simple Dollar , I learned about a site called unbury.me , which gave me something to think about regarding my debt repayments. I plugged in my minimum amounts: 1) Mortgage - $862/month at 2.94% (paid bi-weekly, but there was no place to show the two months of the year where I pay $1291 - I guess I could have used $933 as the average); 2) Car - $250/month at 1.9%; 3) Student Loans - $144/month at 4% (I guessed, since there are actually four loans with different percentages - the most common one is Prime + 1.5%). The result told me that I should continue making these minimum payments until March 2021, when the car will be paid off, and that $250 can then go onto my student loan payment. In October 2024 the student loans will be gone, and the combined $250 + $144 goes onto the mortgage, paying it off by October 2030. This is pretty cool because I have decided I want the mortgage paid off in 15 years so that I can think about early retirement. October

Money Monday - 3 days late

Happy Thursday! The plumbers returned last week to check the leak on the brand-new hot-water tank, and said it was perfectly fine. They think the leak is coming from the bathtub upstairs. So I didn't need to have the old tank replaced, and I didn't need to sign the five-year contract for the new one. Too late. The bathtub does not leak when we take daily showers; it only happens when we take baths. I thought maybe we were filling it up too high and the overflow drain had a leak. We had a jacuzzi tub in the last rental house and were spoiled with a big bath. On the weekend I took a bath and was careful not to fill it up too high. When I checked the basement afterwards it was like a downpour, running across the floor to the drain. Worse than I had seen it before, but before I had not checked immediately after the bath and it may have dried up some. Still, I felt it was lucky that I had spent a few hours in the basement earlier organizing, and nothing got wet. A family mem