There's No Place Like Home

I enjoy this thread. And I'm starting to look at houses = i may even be able to identify even more closely with it. Although i'll probably do it without getting a job, not sure how having a mortgage to play will affect my poker mindset though....

Originally Posted by Jason

I hope to get married in 2012, which will mean some big expenses related to a ring, wedding, and honeymoon.

congratulations. I never really understand why a ring should be a BIG expense - what are her views on this? malleable? Like, i'm not sure what sort of numbers you're talking here - but vs her being debt-free, or having another big mortgage chunk paid, or.....

Originally Posted by Jason

I made a large extra $20k payment in April 2009. I made a nice $3.6k extra payment in June. A modest extra $2k was paid in July and finally $2.4k extra was paid in September. That's $28,000 extra thrown at the mortgage in 2010.

awesome, nh sir.

Originally Posted by Jason

At the START of 2010, my mortgage was $103,690.97 and at the end of 2010, my mortgage was sitting at $72,504.56. If I could keep my original goal for 2010 ongoing into 2011 of $1200 extra per month, it would get knocked down to $53,658.71 by year's end.

which is getting into super-easy to pay off territory, every payment is dominated by equity-payments vs interest payments = you'll be freehold in no time. Especially if you can throw two incomes at it for some time in 2012. Awesome.

Originally Posted by daven

I never really understand why a ring should be a BIG expense - what are her views on this? malleable? Like, i'm not sure what sort of numbers you're talking here - but vs her being debt-free, or having another big mortgage chunk paid, or.....

Ya, I hear ya ... she and I differ on this particular issue. She feels like she will wear the ring forever and it symbolizes our love and she'd rather have a nice ring than a nice wedding or honeymoon. I, on the other hand, would rather spend more money on the wedding or honeymoon because those are experiences and memories. But, I'm sure we'll manage either way ... we'll just have to work a little harder. I challenged her and me to make an extra 5k extra each this year than we would have normally made. As Dave would say, we need to be 'Gazelle' intense

Originally Posted by daven

which is getting into super-easy to pay off territory, every payment is dominated by equity-payments vs interest payments = you'll be freehold in no time. Especially if you can throw two incomes at it for some time in 2012. Awesome.

That's a good point. When my mortgage first started, 82 cents of every dollar I paid of my regular payments went straight to the bank's pocket in the form of interest. Now, only 51 cents of every dollar goes to the bank, so my regular payments are having a more profound effect and don't feel as meaningless. If I could manage $1200 extra per month every month, the house would be paid off July 2014. ABOVE that, I'd have to find $14k extra to make it by 12/31/2013 or $35k to make it by 12/31/2012.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make any extra payments on my house so far as I expected. On the plus side, I did just get my usually annual merit increase at my day job. This time it was 3%, so every bit helps. I'm still saving up to buy an engagement ring and I think I just about have what I'll need. I'm not actually going to buy the ring when I propose, so if she takes a few weeks or so to find exactly what she wants, that'll give me more time to keep saving up more.

I told my girlfriend at the beginning of the year that I wanted to challenge both of us to make $5k extra EACH this year above and beyond our normal day jobs. I'm using poker and she's allowed to use overtime at her job because she normally doesn't take any or use any or she can also get a second job. We've both passed the 1k mark and, although I haven't explicitly told her and I think she may have already figured it out, I plan on using that $10k that we will hopefully succeed in raising towards the wedding. Either her or I or both will have to raise enough extra for ther honeymoon, which I imagine could also be upwards of $10k. Heh, love is expensive

My girlfriend is very close to getting out of debt, which started around at LEAST $15k, probably much more on credit cards, student loans, and who knows what else? The ETA for her to be out of debt at the moment is August and I've been challenging her to do it sooner if she can. Once she takes care of that and hopefully stays with the plan, I feel like she could raise the Honeymoon money on her own. Then, by next year, after we've spent all the money, paid in cash, on a ring, wedding, and honeymoon, we should have a combined $120k income per year (not counting poker or her overtime) with no debt EXCEPT the mortgage, which will be sitting around $67k by then. Needless to say, I hope it SHOULDN'T take long to knock it out. That's the plan ...

So, most of this year, along with this thread, will be focused:

- Me raising $5k
- Her raising $5k
- Her getting out of debt and raising 6 months of expenses as an emergency fund
- Her, me, us raising honeymoon money

But, if I can have the kind of poker year I want to have and if my girlfriend takes care of her business, I may be in a position to throw a little bit of money at the house this year. I'll have to wait and see, though.

At the end of last month, from poker, I had raised $1,478.06 which is 30% of the goal. She has raised $1,091.31 which is 22%. She has $7k of debt left which are all student loans.

Here's a graph:


It's pretty smooth. No variance. And I'm proud it's closing in on ONE MILLION dollars Between my raise and playing poker, it crossed my mind to chart my day job salary over the years. The result is the graph above. As much as I like poker and love the extra income, it's hard to ignore that graph. So, for anyone else thinking about quitting your day job, maybe do the same exercise and see what you come up with. 'No downswings' is an excellent job perk